Banksia GUI released

[phhnguyen]

I used the recent Winter v0.8 release as an opportunity to test a couple GUIs, including Banksia. I am for the most part quite happy and feel this will likely be one of my main chess applications (together with Cutechess, XBoard and Scid) moving forward. That being said, two points:

When I ran a tournament and set base hash and threads to respective values, some of the engines seemed to ignore these values so I ended up restarting the tournament with the settings for all the engines individually fixed to the correct values. Is there something I did incorrectly, or was that just a bug?

Thanks a lot for the report.

If it happens again, please help us by checking the engine log to see if BSG setup engines correctly (send correct options, features to engines). The log can set up from New tournament dialog.

The other point is I was wondering where I can access or save the PGN(s) of the games from the tournament? I can replay the games in a small window in the application, but I can't figure out how to save those games to PGN. The application seems well thought out and intuitive mostly, so I imagine I am misunderstanding something obvious.

The other point is I was wondering where I can access or save the PGN(s) of the games from the tournament? I can replay the games in a small window in the application, but I can't figure out how to save those games to PGN. The application seems well thought out and intuitive mostly, so I imagine I am misunderstanding something obvious.

---> New tournament ---> Logs ---> Games (set path)

Thank Sergio for the help! Yes, you set up PGN as a log from New tournament dialog.

[MCDermont]

i will still remember you on the casteling problem
its still there , the move is stored in the bin book but no engine will use the stored move

greetings

please dont forgot it

[phhnguyen]

Not sure if this is a bug, but I am looking into it. Running Version 26 on two systems and when I now try to play a local network game the GUI has been crashing on the remote system.

UPDATE: At 1st I thought this might be a Firewall issue, so I uninstalled my ESET anti-virus and firewall software and ran another test. However the problem still exist. Everything worked fine untill I upgraded to version 26.

Thanks a lot for the report. The bug (added when I have tried to support chess960 for games on LAN) has been fixed for the next report.

[phhnguyen]

i will still remember you on the casteling problem
its still there , the move is stored in the bin book but no engine will use the stored move

greetings

please dont forgot it

Thanks a lot for reminding me

BTW, it is very hard to forget anythings here since all posts are clear and written down in one topic! Just wait for me a bit since sometimes busy and/or get hard issues.

[zenpawn]

It seems that Banksia does not recognize Winboard engines as being capable of playing chess960.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

You are right. Actually even I have coded BSG to understand WB engine's chess variants, I did not test them with that chess variant since I was struggling to find them (Winboard engines supporting chess 960). Can you/someones suggest some of them? I prefer ones for macOS but Windows OK.

Don't know of any macOS ones, but here are a few FRC Winboard engines:

ExChess https://sites.google.com/site/experimentalchessprogram/
Schooner https://sites.google.com/site/schoonerchess/home
SlowChess Blitz http://www.3dkingdoms.com/chess/slow.htm (both UCI and Winboard)

Thanks a lot for the links. Interestingly, two of those three engines can work with UCI protocol too thus they don't have any problem with BSG

I knew that was the case for one of them and indicated it in parentheses, but you can still test with them by manually setting the protocol to Winboard rather than "Auto detect".

[phhnguyen]

I tried the new book conversion option.
Not all lines are there, even not all main lines are there.
I tried it with the bin book gm2600 that comes with Scid.

As you can see in the tree window, from the pgn file from the converted bin book. Only the moves dxc4, and Bf5 are there.

Thanks a lot for the report.

I am struggling to reproduce the problem. I do as the following steps:

1) Convert

For a quick test, I set the depth to 8 only, then convert from gm2600.bin (347 KB) to g2600.pgn (114 KB):



2) Verify
I open gm2600.bin to view (by BSG) and use a simple text editor to open g2600.pgn. For each line in the book tree, I simply search (text search) on the text editor.

Almost all lines can be found on the g2600.pgn (except the last two lines - they are shorter than 8 depth.



Can you help to check manually like the above steps? Thanks again.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.27 beta released

* Fixed bugs: 

• LichessBot: added increment time to time left (longer timeleft than real one)

• Winboard engines: couldn't use books for vs Human

• LAN games crashed

* Some small improvements/adjustments
* New features: support chess960 for LichessBot and Winboard engines

[silitho]

BanksiaGUI v0.27 does not start on macOS, it crashes. When I open it in the terminal, I get the following error message:

Code: Select all

...
/BanksiaGui.app/Contents/MacOS/BanksiaGui ; exit;
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "cocoa" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: cocoa.

Abort trap: 6
logout
...

@phhnguyen: can you please provide the download of the previous version on your website?

[phhnguyen]

BanksiaGUI v0.27 does not start on macOS, it crashes. When I open it in the terminal, I get the following error message:

Code: Select all

...
/BanksiaGui.app/Contents/MacOS/BanksiaGui ; exit;
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "cocoa" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: cocoa.

Abort trap: 6
logout
...

@phhnguyen: can you please provide the download of the previous version on your website?

Oops, sorry! I have just upgraded my Qt (IDE) for macOS. Can you redownload and try? Thanks

[silitho]

It works now. Thanks for the quick fix. I just noticed that some things have changed and I have to continue working on the translation .