Scatha 0.2.11 is ready, with several little improvements and bug fixes (and, without a doubt, several new bugs). A big thanks to Daniel Mehrmann, who was brave enough to use Scatha as his GUI during the tournament in Leiden, and thus gave Scatha its first serious real-world test. To my great relief, everything seems to have worked fine (except that the opening book turned out to suck quite badly, which wasn't really a big surprise). Thanks also to Gernot Weiser, who has been helpful with suggestions for new features and has pointed out some of the most obvious PGN reading bugs.
The main improvements this time are:
- PGN import has been made much more robust and usable. Scatha 0.2.10 could hardly read any PGN files except those created by itself or XBoard. Version 0.2.11 has been able to read most of the PGNs I have tested, although it still has problems with some of the countless not-quite-PGN files floating around. Games with comments and variations can be read, but the comments and variations cannot (yet) be seen or edited in Scatha. PGN import is also much faster than before.
- Cut and paste between Scatha and the clipboard has been further improved. This is actually rather neat: When you encounter a PGN game list on this forum or elsewhere on the net and want to have a quick look at the game, you just highlight the game notation (including the PGN headers), choose "Edit" > "Copy", switch to Scatha, and choose "Edit" > "Paste" (the standard keyboard shortcuts of Command+C and Command+V also work, of course). The game will instantly appear on the board in Scatha. In exactly the same way, you can copy FEN strings and paste them onto the board. Scatha looks at the contents of the clipboard and decides whether the contents is a PGN game or a FEN string, and acts accordingly. I use these functions a lot.
- There is a new and rather useful item in the Preferences dialog: You can choose between hexagonal chess and normal chess as the default game. If you are not interested in hexagonal chess, you can simply set this option to "normal chess", and Scatha will start up in normal chess mode rather than hexagonal chess mode from now on.
- Better engine vs engine functionality. It is now possible to choose the time control and adjust the engine settings from the dialog box which appears when you choose "Game" > "Computer vs Computer". There is also some rudimentary (but unstable) support for multi-game matches.
- In 0.2.10, after the UCI options for an engine was modified, the engine would refuse to ponder until the GUI was restarted. Fixed in 0.2.11. Thanks to Daniel Mehrmann for reporting this bug.
- The About box looks better than before, with a spiffy new Lisp logo.
Tord
