AlexChess wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:11 amPS: Could you tell me other crosstable generators from PGN for Windows or Mac?
I knew there was LGTBL.exe by George Lyapko, which generated a cross table in HTML.
But cross-table generators are really very trivial programs. They can be created from scratch in less than an hour, and changed to a different format for presentation in minutes. (If you could still find the source code.)
One thing you probably won't like about WinBoard is that it doesn't present a cross table at all. This was a conscious design decision: since the WinBoard tournament manager was designed for concurrent play, where you would have several WinBoard instances playing games simultaneously for a given tournament on an equal basis, it did not seem logical to burden any of those instances with making a table for the entire tournament. It seemed better to rely on an external tool that would generate it directly from the PGN file where all the playing WinBoard instances would save the tournament games on.
AlexChess wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 11:09 amIf you need, I'm available as beta tester. I have some ideas on features to add to Arena Chess or Xboard / Winboard.
Ideas for improvement are always welcome. Unlike Arena, WinBoard/XBoard is open source, so it would actually be possible to implement improvements there. I suppose the same holds for SCIDvsPC, but this has its own developer, and I don't know anything about it. I never used it myself.
As for cross tables, however, it seems better to delegate that task to a separate tool that would work independently from any particular GUI. Almost every GUI running a tournament would write all the tournament games to a given file, as soon as they are played. It would be nice to have a program that monitors this file, and every time a new game is added to it, recalculates the cross table, and displays the result.
AlexChess wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 11:09 amIf you need, I'm available as beta tester. I have some ideas on features to add to Arena Chess or Xboard / Winboard.
Ideas for improvement are always welcome. Unlike Arena, WinBoard/XBoard is open source, so it would actually be possible to implement improvements there. I suppose the same holds for SCIDvsPC, but this has its own developer, and I don't know anything about it. I never used it myself.
As for cross tables, however, it seems better to delegate that task to a separate tool that would work independently from any particular GUI. Almost every GUI running a tournament would write all the tournament games to a given file, as soon as they are played. It would be nice to have a program that monitors this file, and every time a new game is added to it, recalculates the cross table, and displays the result.
I have installed Winboard, but it hangs while selecting engines. It's only a Windows 10 ARM64 issue, I know
An interesting feature would be to let to continue games interrupted during engines tournaments restarting from the move before a crash (or stop) , and to add online 7-man Sygyzy tablebases support. Another improvement would be to enable the use of 2 different opening books especially tuned for white or black advantage.
AlexChess wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 11:09 amIf you need, I'm available as beta tester. I have some ideas on features to add to Arena Chess or Xboard / Winboard.
Ideas for improvement are always welcome. Unlike Arena, WinBoard/XBoard is open source, so it would actually be possible to implement improvements there. I suppose the same holds for SCIDvsPC, but this has its own developer, and I don't know anything about it. I never used it myself.
As for cross tables, however, it seems better to delegate that task to a separate tool that would work independently from any particular GUI. Almost every GUI running a tournament would write all the tournament games to a given file, as soon as they are played. It would be nice to have a program that monitors this file, and every time a new game is added to it, recalculates the cross table, and displays the result.
On Winboard 4.8 beta I got this error while loading Stockfish from Arena engines directory, and everytime I launch the exe. Same for Gnuchess :
Last edited by AlexChess on Mon Mar 22, 2021 2:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.
It looks like you don't have polyglot.exe on your machine. Which WinBoard version did you install? Both the 4.8.0 install and the WinBoard-AA beta package would come with an UCI adapter pre-installed.
hgm wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 2:10 pm
It looks like you don't have polyglot.exe on your machine. Which WinBoard version did you install? Both the 4.8.0 install and the WinBoard-AA beta package would come with an UCI adapter pre-installed.
OK I have downloaded Winboard 4.8.0 final installer.. Now I try and if it works on my system I import stronger engines for a tournament
hgm wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 2:10 pm
It looks like you don't have polyglot.exe on your machine. Which WinBoard version did you install? Both the 4.8.0 install and the WinBoard-AA beta package would come with an UCI adapter pre-installed.
Winboard 4.8.0 x64 has essential graphic but it is full of features and pretty stable. It works also on Windows 10 ARM64. Until now few engines do not work, but I must still check UCI parameters deeper. So I think that it would be useful to add also this open source pairing and crosstables generator https://johnridesa.bike/software/coronate/ I have searched on the web and it isn't easy to find updated x64 and completely free apps for both Windows and Mac... generally they are old: Windows 98, 32 bit or DOS , sharewares or limited to 30 players.
I now hacked a simple cross-table generator into a Windows GUI application. This application watches the PGN file that is dragged onto it for addition of new games (polling it every second). If the file has grown, it generates a new cross table for it, and displays that.
This is just intended as a proof of principle; the format of the window is not yet automatically adapted to the size of the table, and the table formatting will probably suck if there is more than a single game in every pairing. It should be trivial to improve the table format (and possibly make it dependent on settings that could be specified through an option menu?), if we know how we want that format to look (e.g. just displaying total points as a number or as a string of +=- for individual games, how to display half points, whether to sort on points or percentage, what to use as tie breaker, etc.).
This is exactly what I was looking for!
It works also on Windows 10 ARM64. This is an example from an incomplete BanksiaGui mac M1 tournament between native top che engines:
1, 0, = would be my preferred way to show individual results, but also percentage is interesting.
This is the same crosstable shown by BanksiaGui. ...I don't understand individual results like 14.0, 4.5, 3.5 etc.
Yeah, I used the % because at low resolution it looks a bit like 1/2. There is probably a unicode character for 1/2 that I could have used, but then this would probably be messed up when you try to copy-paste the table to another place.
The way I have written it now also works for cases of multiple games per pairing, as long as no engine has more than 9.5 points. It would print 3% for 3.5, etc. The Sonnenborn-Berger points it print are multiplied by 4, to avoid having to use fractions there.
I am thinking of making the table format customizable through an option menu. E.g. make it possible to also show the results of the individual games, by having a string of +=- in the table cells, like hgtbl.exe is doing. The sorting criteria could also be made an option. Currently it sorts by match points, with S-B as a tie breaker. For incomplete tournaments S-B is not ideal, though. In hgtbl.exe I sort first by score percentage, then by absolute points, then by resistance points (sum of opponent points), and finally S-B.
, sharewares or limited to 30 players.