Elements of the ULTIMATE Chess GUI?

[sovaz1997]

Looks like the MonetDB daemon is available only for UNIX. Could there be some problems with the support of this database on Windows?https://www.monetdb.org/Documentation/G ... stallation

[sovaz1997]

For the ending, there are other solutions - the Nalimov tables, the Syzygy tables. I don't think that the database is suitable for this.

Oh... no positional search?
That's a very big limitation for the ULTIMATE Chess GUI...

What do you mean by positional search?

[Dann Corbit]

Looks like the MonetDB daemon is available only for UNIX. Could there be some problems with the support of this database on Windows?https://www.monetdb.org/Documentation/G ... stallation

I run it on windows
there are MSI files for all the parts of the system

[Spill_The_Tea]

Added an organized summary with a few other elements of my own.

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- CROSS PLATFORM COMPATIBLE
- OPEN SOURCE
- LIGHTWEIGHT (on hardware resources)
- ATTRACTIVE INTERFACE
	Board Usage
		- Allow dragging of pieces and point and click
		- Highlight previous move
		- Show all possible moves of clicked piece (toggle on/off)
		- Arrows (and variation)

- CUSTOMIZEABLE
	SUPPORT PLUGINS (Ability to include additional custom scripts e.g. python scripts)
	Ability to Turn Off Default Features and save Custom Display Settings
	
- CHESS ENGINES
	- Winboard and UCI compatibility
	- Clearly display UCI options for engines with a LOT of options
	- WINE Compatible (i.e. can use windows chess engine binaries through wine) 

- ENGINE MATCHES : 
	MATCH TYPES : Round Robin, Gauntlet,  Swiss, Knockout Tournaments
	ADJUDICATION: Syzygy Dependent, and/or User Defined Resign/Draw options
	OPENING BOOK SUPPORT
	TIME CONTROLS :
		- Allow Time Odds
		- Allow Control of HH:MM:SS:ms , Increment , and movestogo
		- Allow Pausing (Immediately, or after running games finish) of Tournament
	VISUALS:
		- "Beautiful Crosstables"
		- Display Engine logos
		- Display Updated Rating List (i.e. using BayesELO or Ordo)
			BayesElo : https://www.remi-coulom.fr/Bayesian-Elo/
			Ordo : https://github.com/michiguel/Ordo
		- Display Chart of Evaluation score of Competing Engines
		- Highlight first Point in PV where computers disagree (using color)
		- Ability to view multiple Boards / evals of concurrent Engine matches (perhaps in tabs)

- SUPPORT OPENING BOOKS : 
	BOOK FORMATS : polyglot (.bin), Chessbase (.ctg)
	FEATURES : Convert Between Book Types (including to/from pgn or epd database)
	- Integrate Polyglot (esp. for Book Creation features)

- GAME DATABASE FEATURES :
	- Search by Position, Result, Names,
	- Integrate Pgn-Extract
	- EPD Database management features would also be helpful
	
	
- READ/WRITE (FILE TYPES) :
	-PGN
	-EPD
	-BIN
	-CTG (https://github.com/sshivaji/ctgreader)
	-SI4 (scid database files)
	

- CHESS BOARD & PIECES (allow easy import of additional)
	PIECES : USE SVG FILES
	BOARDS : Use entire chess board images, not individual dark/light square tiles
		Rationale : Better Looking Boards do not use identical dark or light squares (e.g. wood boards)

- TRAINING MODULES
	- OPENING STUDY / THEORY (Variation Trees)
	- GUESS THE MOVE (e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/fredm/ )
	- ENDGAMES (i.e. Practice specific endgames with slightly different positions)

- ADDITIONAL FEATURES
	- Ability to run TLCV broadcasts ( https://github.com/kmar/livius )
	- Chess960 Support ( esp. castling, random position generation )
	- DGT Board Support ( https://github.com/niklasf/python-asyncdgt )
	
- THINGS THAT ARE ANNOYING TO AVOID
	- don't lag and don't cause losses on time, like Arena does
	- don't force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does
	- exit gracefully, killing the engine processes (problems with Arena again)
	

[sovaz1997]

Thanks for the organized list!

By the way, a new GUI for tournaments will be available soon. I do not know the author. Also, I do not know what the distribution policy will be. It would be interesting to see him here, to find out more about GUI. It looks very interesting.

[hgm]

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- THINGS THAT ARE ANNOYING TO AVOID
	- don't lag and don't cause losses on time, like Arena does
	- don't force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does
	- exit gracefully, killing the engine processes (problems with Arena again)
	

This is pure and malicious libel. WinBoard doesn't force the user to work on text files or type engine paths at all. GUIs like Shredder and Fritz do that.

[Dann Corbit]

So winboard.INI has been done away with? Providing the same information on the command line does not count. Don't get me wrong. I think winboard is fabulous and I use it a lot. And configurations are broadly improved. But his complaint makes sense to me unless I have missed new developments (not unlikely).

[hgm]

So winboard.INI has been done away with? Providing the same information on the command line does not count. Don't get me wrong. I think winboard is fabulous and I use it a lot. And configurations are broadly improved. But his complaint makes sense to me unless I have missed new developments (not unlikely).

Of course winboard.ini has not done away with. You cannot have persistent settings without saving them on disk. Any GUI that is not totally amnesic has such a file, and hackers will always be able to modify it behind the GUIs back (with a good chance to wreck things).

The point is that it for legitimate use one should never ever touch such files, and preferably not even be aware they exist.

In WinBoard this is not a 'new' development; it has been true for at least 5 years that all settings relevant for what I consider 'normal' use are controlled through the GUI menus. (An example of something that I would consider to go beyond normal use would be to configure WinBoard so that default variant becomes mini-Shogi rather than Chess, and that it would use a special USI mini-Shogi adapter instead of Polyglot. This still requires preparation of a dedicated winboard.ini file for system settings by the one creating the software package.)

[Spill_The_Tea]

Code: Select all

- THINGS THAT ARE ANNOYING TO AVOID
	- don't lag and don't cause losses on time, like Arena does
	- don't force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does
	- exit gracefully, killing the engine processes (problems with Arena again)
	

This is pure and malicious libel. WinBoard doesn't force the user to work on text files or type engine paths at all. GUIs like Shredder and Fritz do that.

Honey,
Most of that list, was taken from a summary you made on page 6 of this thread found here:
http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.p ... 50#p736348

Which includes the comment verbatim about winboard. It is not my personal opinion, but someone in this thread did find it mildly pesky. Because the nature of this thread is to ask for elements of a more perfect gui, it is also asking on how to improve from existing guis. If anything, be proud that winboard is actually mentioned. It means people are using it because there are many that are not.

The reason I do not use winboard, is because I am on macOS, and while I could use it through wine, I find it easier to pursue alternatives. But this is also the same reason I avoid Tarrasch and Arena. Which says nothing about the quality of either gui, but rather their portability.

[hgm]

No, that is completely insane. One should not be 'proud to be mentioned' if newspapers print you are a child molester.

It was already pointed out by me in the thread you refer to that WinBoard doesn't "force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does". I am not accusing you of making it up (just of careless reading), but no matter who made it up, it still is malicious libel, you propagate it, and its nature should be revealed to all no matter where it appears.

If someone finds things that do not occur in real life 'mildly pesky', he just qualifies as an idiot, and there is no reason to address the non-existent problem.

BTW, WinBoard is available for Mac, as XBoard. It is even released as an OSX App.