There is a small, new feature I would like to specially introduce to everyone here. This feature is used to extract and display logs of engines for tournament games. To use that, from the list of tournament games, right-click to popup menu and select "View engine-log of game n".
Like many people in this forum, I have to find and study engine logs whenever strange things happen. That may happen in high frequency. However, finding and extracting those logs are quite boring, not easy and sometimes really hard jobs. BSG (as well as other chess GUIs) may write down all engines' logs into one file or multi-files (depending on settings). Imagine, after a while, running concurrently multi games, multi tournaments, logs become amazing huge. If it is multi-files mode, the number of files becomes large and very hard to find the right one from them. If it is one-file-log mode, it is more than a nightmare when the file size becomes too large, the log of one game may interpose with logs of other games. Sometimes a game (a pair of engines) logged multi times into a file. Find and extract the right log becomes a hard job and almost impossible when the concurrency number is large. I usually give up (from finding logs). Instead, I remove all logs, then re-run the tournament in 1 concurrency. All just for extracting the right logs I want. However, it takes much more time and sometimes it cannot reproduce the problem.
This feature is designed to help in that situation. It auto picks up the right file, read, parse and extract all log data (for a given game). Then the log is displayed colorfully thus users can quickly find out the important information. Furthermore, users may filter the log by sides, input/output. Of course, users can copy the log anytime they want.
In the bellow illustration image, BSG searched over 300 k lines of logs to extract 4814 lines. Those lines are actually from 3 logs of an engine-pair (they played 3 times). I want to study the last log input for the white, BSG showed me only 107 lines.
The feature has saved me already a lot of time/effort and made me be very happy. Hope it becomes useful to other people.
Notes:
- It can work with old logs (from previous-versions of BSG) but it may miss some lines
- To avoid log files become too large (take time to read/parse) you may frequently delete the old ones. It is easy now: when creating a tournament, there are some delete buttons next to log path boxes to delete them
The feature is the first time implemented and still has room to improve (e.g., I planned to add preview board). I hope to hear more feedbacks/suggestions from you