Myracle GUI

[PHILOCHESS]

Hi Martin,

First, I would like to thank you for the effort you have put into creating Myracle GUI and for sharing it with the TalkChess community.

Before trying it, I read the manual carefully, and after that I decided to create my first engine tournament with Myracle. I am currently running an 8-engine double round-robin tournament: time control 1500+10, ponder off, 1 thread per engine, 512 MB hash, Syzygy tablebases disabled, no opening book, and 4 concurrent games.

So far, the tournament is running well. I have attached a screenshot of the tournament in progress.



I would also like to ask you about a small issue I found with Quanticade Cronus 3.0. This engine was originally included in my tournament line-up, but Myracle showed the message “failed to start engine Quanticade Cronus 3.0”. However, the same engine starts and runs correctly in Cute Chess 1.4.0.

Do you think this could be related to the way Myracle starts the engine, or is it more likely to be an issue with the engine itself? I would be glad to provide more details if needed.

Thank you again for your work. Myracle looks very promising, and I am enjoying testing it.

[mar]

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

[Gabor Szots]

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

[Mark 1]

Hello Martin....

thank you for implementing the position evaluation in the *Active Game Overview*. It really gives a quick and clear overview of the current games.

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.

I’ve played many tournaments using Banksia in the past — it’s a pity that the project is no longer maintained. All the more reason to be happy that your GUI really has a lot of potential. I don’t want to flatter you, but it’s genuinely fun to use, and above all, it runs very stably.

Mark 1

[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