Fritz 12: fritz 11 with another clothes

[fern]

The sheer fact that F12 is almost not announced in CB, only in the German section and without any comment about the engine, say it all. No new program, just some extra frills for the GUI.
Maybe Morsch, as has happened with many programmers, simply throwed the towel.

Fern

[Werner]

Hi Fern,
I am sorry - this is not correct:

The text in German says: Außerdem: verbesserte Engine

This means: delivered with a better engine

[fern]

Oh, well , that is great, BUT....
"a better engine" does not sound to you as a limited upgrade?
When they have delivered a really new version, they have wrote a lot about that. Just to say "better engine" and nothing else is somewhat suspicious...


Paranoid greetings
Fern

[Werner]

Hi Fern,
I only translated the German text and maybe it is really another Fritz 11 engine as we could read before.

We will test it next month and you can see the results on CEGT

[fern]

I will be there to see and ponder

greetings from the country of skepticisms
Fern

[yanquis1972]

SMK is also playing down the strength improvement of shredder 12 while playing up the GUI improvements. i suppose this is a good thing from a certain perspective. vas seems incredibly dedicated to producing the strongest chess playing program around but has shown little (admittedly some, slight) interest in designing user features. he's also demonstrated that for whatever reason, he's just better at what he does than anyone else, at least thus far. so if he dedicates 100% to the chess aspect, & the other guys continue trying to advance but focusing more & more on user interface, it's all good as far as i can tell.

chess interfaces are still basically stuck in 1996. this is what happens when u have programs made by nerds for nerds, i guess. but they could be made MUCH simpler while still retaining all their features & then some. (that said i havent tried the shredder GUI yet tho am eager to pick it up when the new one comes out).

[fern]

Me, too, am waiting shredder 12. And precisely for the gui. In matter of strength I have been surpassed since many years ago. I do like not only new working features, but also the funny aspect of them, the frills and bells. for me to play a program must be a massive experience. I am not so deprived of that so many things some freaks seems to lack happily.

Fern

[Mark]

Do you think the 6-man bitbases (~40GB or so) will be a free download with Shredder 12, or a separate purchase?

[fern]

I imagine that Stephan will ask something from Sh 12 purchasers and somewhat more from those getting just the database. Surely Stephan expended lot of time and/or money to get it, so I do not believe he will give it for free.

Fern

[Mark Mason]

The concern is that even if it is a new Fritz 12 engine, it will be single processor so will not compete with any of the top mp engines. We will then have to pay for the same GUI all over again when (and if) Deep Fritz 12 is ever released.

I would like to know who devises Chessbase marketing strategy as I believe they are alienating a large proportion of their potential customer base with this approach (as well as possibly fuelling the motivations of the software pirates).

Mark