I think there are objective reasons for why this would be a very poor design. For one, if you would want to run a 4CPU tournament with 20 engines after having run a 1CPU tournament you would have to alter the setting forall 20 engines separately. There is no logical difference between the number of search threads and parameters like hash size or ponder on/off. Why would you want to set an option all engines have in common separately for each engine? Usually the amount of hash and number of cores you want the engine to use are dictated by your hardware, and not dependent on what engine you use.Peter Berger wrote:I looked for it in the Stockfish engine settings and nowhere else. I didn't think of it as something that could be expected to be a general GUI setting, and I still feel this way.
Well, user feedback is always appreciated. There are many things WinBoard can do that I never do myself. So it is often hard to know what works conveniently and what doesn't. Many features already existed before I got involved with WinBoard, so it seemed prudent to adopt an "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" policy, and only change things when there are complaints.Yes, this would have helped here.
Actually I'd still prefer to have this as a specific engine setting anyway, but it is not for me to design the program .
For WinBoard 4.9 the Common Settings dialog will be moved to the engine menu, though, as I think this would be the more logical place.
This confirms what I was already afraid of (and is why I haven't updated WinBoard's helpfile for years).Want to hear the truth? No one and I mean REALLY NO ONE reads and uses these indexed helpfiles these days , and this is true for any program less complex than Microsoft Word IMHO .
So yes, in case you decide to give up on this feature completely I bet it will take MONTHS before you even get a report about it .
I tried to reproduce this under Windows 8.1, but I could not. What exactly does 'crash' mean hear? You get the dreaded Windows popup "winboard.exe stopped working"? Or does WinBoard show a fatal-error popup by itself? You start switching between the engines before you did anything else (such as switching to analysis mode, or setting up a position), just selecting engines from the comboboxes in the startup dialog (and were these also Fruit and Stockfish)?PS: A real bug report from my second new WinBoard experience. If I start WinBoard in "Play against engine mode" under the Engine rider it displays the two used Engines at the bottom ( in my case Stockfish and Fruit 2.1) . If I switch between them 2 or 3 times by clicking on said entries WinBoard will definiteky crash ( reproducable behaviour under Windows 10)
Can you post here how your engine list looks? (By selecting "Edit Engine List" from the Engine menu, and copy-pasting the contents of the Edit box this pops up.) What the menu items do is search the displayed name in the engine list, and then parse the corresponding line as options. So the behavior could depend on how the Fruit 2.1 and Stockfish lines look there.