Myracle GUI

[Nordlandia]

I miss the manual adjudiation feature from cutechess. At any time during a ongoing game, one may declare win or draw.

[mar]

I miss the manual adjudiation feature from cutechess. At any time during a ongoing game, one may declare win or draw.

manual adjudication is a feature that I consider cheating - no manual adjudication is planned
(setting up adjudication rules properly feels like a cleaner way)

how about the GUI stutter with 20x repaints you reported - does the problem still persist?

[mar]

May I offer a few more suggestions?

Let’s start with the *Active Game Overview*: displaying the currently calculated move as an arrow on the board would enhance the whole view even further.

It would also be great to have the option to manually stop a game within a tournament and enter the result yourself.

Another question: is it possible to add new engines after a tournament has finished? At the moment, it seems you can only replace existing ones.

and how about one suggestion per one person per week?
I understand everybody thinks he has lots of awesome ideas, but maybe they're not so amazing the other day?
some people are very persistent or even offended if a feature/idea doesn't make it - but it's impossible to please everyone
and that's not even my intent.

it costs time to even read through all this and people keep asking for mostly useless features (like engine logos - these days most new logos are worthless AI slop anyway) - and we do this in our spare time for free!


arrows in game overview: no, not even planned

manual adjudication/manual result editing: cheating, not planned; also manual pgn edits are not supported,
the pgn is considered as a tape and is linked from tour results directly (offset, size, checksum) to save space. if you manually
edit the tour pgn, you break the tour state. don't do that until after the tour when you copy the pgn elsewhere

advanced tour editing (adding/removing engines) - this is quite complicated, maybe in some future version. Qapla has excellent advanced tour editing capabilities btw

I’ve played many tournaments using Banksia in the past — it’s a pity that the project is no longer maintained.

did Krzysztof make some demands?

seriously, people keep asking for too much nonsense and it gets overwhelming, some trolls are rude and ungrateful,
so at some point you realize you have better things to do in your precious spare time and simply move on

[mar]

build 61 is up:
- remove thick checkbox frame
- 20 time contol sets instead of 10
- some fixes related to logging (log order consistency, wait for engine unload log to be properly flushed first)

[PHILOCHESS]

In my ongoing tournament I haven't had any problems with Quanticade Cronus 3.0 bmi2.

Thank you, Gabor.

Your comment was very helpful. Since Quanticade Cronus 3.0 BMI2 was running correctly in your tournament, it made me think that I had probably done something wrong, or that something had gone wrong when I imported the engines from Cute Chess.

Thanks to that, I was able to find the cause of the problem. I explain it in more detail below in my reply to Martin.

[Mark 1]

Hi...


Thank you for the detailed feedback and the clarifications.
I understand the technical background and the reasons why certain features aren’t intended — especially when it comes to maintaining the integrity of the tournament state.

My questions and suggestions weren’t meant as demands, but simply as ideas from a user’s perspective. Of course, I’m aware that you develop this project in your free time and that not every idea is practical or feasible.

If certain features aren’t planned, that’s completely fine. I just wanted to ask and maybe contribute something.

Thank you for the work on the GUI and for the time invested here. I really appreciate it.

Mark 1

[PHILOCHESS]

hi,

first, I'm glad you enjoy the GUI!

just did a quick test here and quanticade cronus 3.0 works without any problems here (tried the avx512 binary)

I'd check that the paths to the engine are setup correctly (working folder etc.), then perhaps if you use avx512 that your CPU supports
it,
if not I'd suggest to use the bmi2 build.

otherwise I'd ask You to provide more info, perhaps? I'm very much interested in any such issue + potential stability problems, thanks

Thank you very much for your reply.

I must confess that I am not an expert in chess engines or GUI configuration, so I am still learning some of these details. Your reply, together with Gabor’s note that Quanticade Cronus 3.0 BMI2 was working in his tournament, made me think that something was probably wrong on my side.

I checked the engine details in Myracle and found the cause of the problem. When I imported the engines from Cute Chess 1.4.0, the entry for Quanticade Cronus 3.0 was created, but the Command and Working folder fields were left empty.



After filling in those fields manually, Quanticade Cronus 3.0 started correctly in Myracle.

So it was not really a problem with the engine or with Myracle itself, but with the engine configuration. I am not sure why those fields were not carried over for this engine, while the other engines seemed to be set up correctly.

Thank you again for your help and for your work on Myracle. I am enjoying the GUI and learning a lot while testing it.

[mar]

I checked the engine details in Myracle and found the cause of the problem. When I imported the engines from Cute Chess 1.4.0, the entry for Quanticade Cronus 3.0 was created, but the Command and Working folder fields were left empty.

After filling in those fields manually, Quanticade Cronus 3.0 started correctly in Myracle.

So it was not really a problem with the engine or with Myracle itself, but with the engine configuration. I am not sure why those fields were not carried over for this engine, while the other engines seemed to be set up correctly.

this sounds like it could be some kind of bug on my part. could you perhaps share your engines.json with me? (it can be found in Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\cutechess\engines.json)

or at least the part that contains settings for Quanticade? you could use a PM here in the forum, for example. thanks

[mar]

My questions and suggestions weren’t meant as demands, but simply as ideas from a user’s perspective. Of course, I’m aware that you develop this project in your free time and that not every idea is practical or feasible.

If certain features aren’t planned, that’s completely fine. I just wanted to ask and maybe contribute something.

hi Mark,

sure, I still do appreciate the feedback and suggestions - and thank you all for that - and I still consider each suggestion.
just that I felt like there were a bit too many accumulated requests recently and the clarification wasn't really meant to discourage
anyone, just to make people understand what it implies

another thing is that each new feature, no matter how small, is a future potential maintenance burden

some features (like adding/removing engines or changing cycles) would be a great addition and I'd like to at least try in the future,
the problem is with the schedule, for example. the idea is that you want to carry the finished games from the previous tour.
but if you add or remove an engine, then the pairing is suddenly completely different (assuming round-robin),
I can still match the games, but like I said the tour back-references the pgn games, so I couldn't change the "Rounds" tag
to match the new schedule - and what now. I could probably run through the old pgn and create a temp one and rename
it later or something like that, and would also have to remember a sequence
of each addition/removal since the schedule itself is not saved but recreated each time to save space.

other tour types, such as swiss, requires a dynamic schedule that depends on previous round and would require some extra work too,
also replaying games in swiss would probably have to be disabled, because replaying a single game in a round would invalidate
all following rounds. it could be done, but there would have to be a real demand for swiss. a low priority at the moment

[Modern Times]

build 61 is up:
- remove thick checkbox frame
- 20 time contol sets instead of 10
- some fixes related to logging (log order consistency, wait for engine unload log to be properly flushed first)

Hi,

What is the best procedure to update from a prior version ?

many thanks.