Banksia GUI released

[AlexChess]

Hi phhnguyen,

I've tried to convert tournament pgn files to .bsg, but apparently there isn't an internal function on Banksiagui to do that.

Here is an example for WHY could be useful to add tournament result persistence on Banksiagui:

I've done a roundrobin carousel on Arena between all the engines availables only on Windows 10:



then, without restarting all previous games, I have simply added all the engines by MikeB. Arena calculates all the changes and updates the rounds and results, so I can complete my tournament playing remaining games.



It's really not easy to do that with Banksiagui. To have the complete crosstable I could merge both pgn with an external editor, then use Results after having dropped pgn on Banksiagui, but the internal tournament data are lost if I should want to add, update or remove a single engine.

Kind regards, AlexChess

[phhnguyen]

It's really not easy to do that with Banksiagui. To have the complete crosstable I could merge both pgn with an external editor, then use Results after having dropped pgn on Banksiagui, but the internal tournament data are lost if I should want to add, update or remove a single engine.

What is "internal tournament data"? What data did you miss? How about the Result from that combined PGN files? Is it good? How come you can add "a single engine" to a PGN file? (It should be a game, not an engine).

[AlexChess]

It's really not easy to do that with Banksiagui. To have the complete crosstable I could merge both pgn with an external editor, then use Results after having dropped pgn on Banksiagui, but the internal tournament data are lost if I should want to add, update or remove a single engine.

What is "internal tournament data"? What data did you miss? How about the Result from that combined PGN files? Is it good? How come you can add "a single engine" to a PGN file? (It should be a game, not an engine).

I know sorry, it's even difficult to explain for me. When I complete a long tournament that last days on Banksiagui and a new engine is released (or updated) or I simply want to remove one engine too weak, I cannot keep actual results, I must restart all the games, also those already played. On Arena I don't start a new tournament every time, it is always the same with updated engines and results, recalculated automatically. Banksiagui saves 10 tournaments and you can suspend and continue them later, but without modification about the number of the engines involved.

Thank you,
sorry for asking these options, but it is because I like very much Banksiagui (also the option to play one of more selected games from a tournament before the others) and I'd like to use it instead of Arena Chess on Windows 10 and also on Linux ARM64 (Raspberry Pi4 and Ubuntu ARM64 (ARM-V8)

Best regards, AlexChess

[herO]

Hello,
Lichess bot feature still does not work even in version 40. Banksia does not challenge any bot. Lichess bot feature still work only in version 29. Could you please make a hotfix for it?

Thanks a lot for the bug report. I have been fixing and testing that function and will release the new version within one or a few days.

I also notice another issue with Lichess bot feature. When human player resigns game against a bot, then Banksia GUI does not kill engine process and engine still calculates next move. I'm not sure if this issue was fixed in later releases, because of bug with challenge feature. Could you please verify if newer version is able to kill engine process when human opponent resign game against a bot?

[phhnguyen]

It's really not easy to do that with Banksiagui. To have the complete crosstable I could merge both pgn with an external editor, then use Results after having dropped pgn on Banksiagui, but the internal tournament data are lost if I should want to add, update or remove a single engine.

What is "internal tournament data"? What data did you miss? How about the Result from that combined PGN files? Is it good? How come you can add "a single engine" to a PGN file? (It should be a game, not an engine).

I know sorry, it's even difficult to explain for me. When I complete a long tournament that last days on Banksiagui and a new engine is released (or updated) or I simply want to remove one engine too weak, I cannot keep actual results, I must restart all the games, also those already played. On Arena I don't start a new tournament every time, it is always the same with updated engines and results, recalculated automatically. Banksiagui saves 10 tournaments and you can suspend and continue them later, but without modification about the number of the engines involved.

Thank you,
sorry for asking these options, but it is because I like very much Banksiagui (also the option to play one of more selected games from a tournament before the others) and I'd like to use it instead of Arena Chess on Windows 10 and also on Linux ARM64 (Raspberry Pi4 and Ubuntu ARM64 (ARM-V8)

Best regards, AlexChess

Thanks for the explanation. I understand what you need. I will work with the tournament management of BSG within one or a few weeks and will try to add some new functions which may help you to manipulate the tournament engines.

[phhnguyen]

Hello,
Lichess bot feature still does not work even in version 40. Banksia does not challenge any bot. Lichess bot feature still work only in version 29. Could you please make a hotfix for it?

Thanks a lot for the bug report. I have been fixing and testing that function and will release the new version within one or a few days.

I also notice another issue with Lichess bot feature. When human player resigns game against a bot, then Banksia GUI does not kill engine process and engine still calculates next move. I'm not sure if this issue was fixed in later releases, because of bug with challenge feature. Could you please verify if newer version is able to kill engine process when human opponent resign game against a bot?

I have just looked at the code and it looks fine, the engines should be stopped right after the game finished (for any reason). Please report if you see that happens again with today's version. Thanks

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.41 beta released


Fixed bugs:

• Lichess bot: challenging function did not work well, the app may be frozen if it is showing some very fast games

• Database: incorrectly sort (by names, events)

Some small improvements/adjustments

New features: 

• Clocks: new mode to display clocks above and under the board (Fig. 1)

• Elo offset can be anchored to a player (Fig. 1)

• Rated: auto assign Elo from a tournament result to engines (Fig. 1)

• Quick open a game from a tournament (from the pop-up menu)

• Remember the active tab of the tournament result panel (Fig. 1)

• New special functions for GPU engines, a user: 1) can mark engines as GPUs 2) can set up serially CPU cores for GPU engines which may be different from ones for none-GPU ones 3) get clever tournament concurrency: it auto arranges to make sure no more than one GPU game can be played at a moment but still maximize concurrency (Fig. 2)

• Lichess bot: detect the online status of players in the challenge list, shuffle that list before use (Fig. 3)

Fig. 1 New feature: clocks above and under the board; Elo offset can anchor to a player; open game from the tournament list


Fig. 2 Tick for GPU engines, setup their CPU cores


Fig. 2 Challenge dialog box. Online players display in green

[huanhuan]

This issue has been fixed in versions 0.39 and 0.40, but I don't understand why it appears again in version 0.41
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and also, this feature 'Elo offset can be anchored to a player' doesn't work at Database
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[Modern Times]

• New special functions for GPU engines, a user: 1) can mark engines as GPUs 2) can set up serially CPU cores for GPU engines which may be different from ones for none-GPU ones 3) get clever tournament concurrency: it auto arranges to make sure no more than one GPU game can be played at a moment but still maximize concurrency (Fig. 2)

That is an amazing feature ! No other GUI has this to my knowledge. Presumably the tournament would get to a point where it is only the queued GPU matches that remain, so all the games from that point would be concurrency 1 ? At that point the rest of the machine is freed up for other things if you have spare CPU cores.

I think Winboard and Banksia GUIs are the only ones now that are in active development.

[ydebilloez]

Version 0.41 beta released

Thanks for the excellent program. I have noticed two issues in the set-up screen (linux). Those were already present in 0.39 I believe.

• When changing the name of an engine, by default a copy is created. The original needs to be removed manually afterwards. Adding a rename function and allowing a rename without duplicating seems a better option to me.

• When changing a UCI engine to a WB engine, the UCI configuration options remain. I have to manually remove them from the json file.

Keep up the excellent work.