Suggestion

[Fermin Serrano]

When right clicking over the pv, the last of the line position is showed in the board, but it will return fast to normal, it would be nice if at the same time of right click, the epd final position string would be copied into the clipboard. I like to have the position in hand when tunning my engine.

thanks,

[H.G.Muller]

Hmm, interesting idea. At first glance I don't see any down-side. I would probably make it subject to an option setting, so that people that for some reason do not like this can disable the feature.

Another method could be to make it subject to holding down a key, (say Crtl), when you release the mouse button. Wouldn't that be even better?

I guess I would always make it such that the position currently in the display would be the one that is copied, so that the user has the opportunity to scroll through the PV before making the copy, rather than always getting the position at the end.

[Fermin Serrano]

Hmm, interesting idea. At first glance I don't see any down-side. I would probably make it subject to an option setting, so that people that for some reason do not like this can disable the feature.

Another method could be to make it subject to holding down a key, (say Crtl), when you release the mouse button. Wouldn't that be even better?

I guess I would always make it such that the position currently in the display would be the one that is copied, so that the user has the opportunity to scroll through the PV before making the copy, rather than always getting the position at the end.

Any method looks ok to me. The main purpose is to have the ability to 'catch' a variant to analyze it with your engine with time and tune it.
A drawback I see now is that when my engine is playing a game and I right click in a pv, sometimes if the pv is replace very fast I can see the pretenden positiod in detail, sametimes even it only shows it for a second or less, so no time to do anything usefull with the feature. I also suggest then, that when right click, that winboard does not "return" to another position while right click is not released.

Regards,

[H.G.Muller]

Well, the feature is not intended for blitz games. I made it such that an engine move is equivalent to releasing the button, so that you won't miss the fact that the engine has moved, and continue examining the PV while your time is already ticking away. It would also be hard to change that, as in the current implementation the PV is treated as an extenstion of the game. So there is no room to add engine moves as long as you are walking through the PV, because they would have to be added in what is now the middle of the extended game.

If you want to study the PV at leasure, it would be best to do in in analysis mode. There you can walk through the PV for as long as you want without the engine ever moving. And furthermore, you would automatically be advanced to the position in the PV where you release the mouse button, so that analysis would continue from there. No reason to copy and paste anything.

[Fermin Serrano]

Well, the feature is not intended for blitz games. I made it such that an engine move is equivalent to releasing the button, so that you won't miss the fact that the engine has moved, and continue examining the PV while your time is already ticking away. It would also be hard to change that, as in the current implementation the PV is treated as an extenstion of the game. So there is no room to add engine moves as long as you are walking through the PV, because they would have to be added in what is now the middle of the extended game.

If you want to study the PV at leasure, it would be best to do in in analysis mode. There you can walk through the PV for as long as you want without the engine ever moving. And furthermore, you would automatically be advanced to the position in the PV where you release the mouse button, so that analysis would continue from there. No reason to copy and paste anything.

Thinking about it you have reason, althought copy fen when right click would be nice to catch interesting position on the fly without need to restart engine in analysis mode. I like to catch positions when seeing my engine playing a tournament (I would like to write them in a epd file and analyze all them when I am tournament finish).

[H.G.Muller]

Well, copying the position to clipboard is easy, and will not interfere with anything. For not letting the machine move cut short the PV walk, the only way I see would be to actually suspend the game (i.e. backlog the incoming engine move without processing it, and stopping its clock without starting the opponent clock). The game could then be resumed when you release the mouse button, by letting WB check after having terminated the PV walk whether there was a back-logged move, and if so, process it. This should be feasible (but tricky).

I guess even when the PV walk is cut short by an engine move wee should have the current PV position be copied to clipboard. You can always not use it, if the engine move interfered with what you really wanted to do.

[H.G.Muller]

I uploaded a new trial version ( http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.5TM.exe ). This should have a persistent option -autoCopyPV true|false which would copy the displayed position when you terminate PV walking to the clipboard.

[Fermin Serrano]

Thanks H.G.

I downloaded and test it with some positions. It is really a great feature because it let to catch interesting position and to test engine eval when it sounds to me that "eval-game" is been not acurate for any reason.

Fermin