Scatha 0.2.6

[Tord Romstad]

Hi all,

I have now released version 0.2.6 of Scatha, my hexagonal chess program for Mac OS X. The engine is exactly the same as in Scatha 0.2.5, but there are a number of bug fixes and new features in the GUI:

1. Scatha is now compiled with a newer version of OpenMCL. The main benefit of this is that the GUI is now slightly less sensitive to the Mac OS version. I think that Scatha 0.2.6 will work in all versions of Mac OS X Tiger, though I have only tested it in 10.4.3. I would be pleasantly suprised if it turns out to work in 10.3.9 as well.

2. A bug which would occasionally cause the GUI to hang or crash when the user attempted to make a move has been fixed.

3. In previous versions, the computer's move would occasionally not be displayed on the chess board, even though it showed up correctly in the move list. The board would not be updated before the user resized the window. As far as I can tell, this must be the result of a bug in OpenMCL or Apple's Cocoa GUI toolkit. An ugly workaround has been implemented in Scatha 0.2.6, and seems to solve the problem.

4. It is finally possible to set up positions, but not in a very user-friendly way. By choosing "Game" > "Set up Position..." you get a dialog box where you can enter a FEN string.

5. "Game" > "Edit Game Tags" makes it possible to modify the values of the most important PGN tags.

6. It is now possible to load and save games in PGN format. The "Save Game" command has an annoying quirk. When you save a game to an existing file, you get a dialog box warning you that you are about to overwrite a file, and asks you if you really want to do this. In reality, the existing file is not replaced, but the game is added to the end of the file. The problem is that I haven't found out how to disable this warning. If some expert Mac OS X programmers could tell me how to disable
the replacement warning in the NSSavePanel class, I would be very grateful.

In the next version, I hope to implement pondering, engine configuration and engine vs engine matches. Wishes for other new features are welcome.

Scatha 0.2.6 is available for download here.

Tord