This is the only planned release candidate before 0.10 final. Lots of bugs fixed and the new seek dialog is more polished now. Please update your translations on https://translations.launchpad.net/pychess !
This is mostly a bugfix release,
but it also contains a few new features, like a brand new seek dialog and support for Diablo, Amy and Amundsen engines.
Last week PyChess won the first price in Les Trophées du Libre in categori: Hobby/ Recreational. A thanks go to everyone who has helped to move PyChess forward.
In the picture on the right you can see from left: Neverball that won the seccond price, DJL that won the third price and PyChess that won the golden copyleft.
PyChess in Les Trophées du Libre
A little while ago PyChess was nominated in the Les Trophées du Libre. We're looking forward to the event in about in month. :)
Staunton 0.10 Alpha 2 - 2009/2/12
This is mostly a bug fixing release, but it also contains a few new features, such as a 'Play Rematch' button, which appears after games are finished.
A special thanks to all the new people who have helped test the release.
More than a year after PyChess Philidor 0.8 went went into beta, we now present PyChess Staunton 0.10 Alpha!
The release is named after Howard Staunton, who is regarded as the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851. And while we are still using the old theme for the chess pieces, we hope to get a real Staunton theme before going final.
The release contains a lot of general improvements, but the two most important changes in this release are the possibility to play different variants of chess, as well as chat on the online chess community, FICS.
The five largest changes:
With support for chess variants, PyChess now allows you to play Fischer Random with your majors shuffled, to play Losers chess with being mated as your goal, or simply playing odds chess as an additional way of giving a player a handicap.
On-line play has been enhanced with chat support. Besides chatting with your opponent, the FICS community has several channels, in which you can discuss chess and varies of other topics.
The FICS support has also been improved with built-in Timeseal support. This helps to terminate lag, and is especially helpful in very fast games, like bullet chess.
If you prefer to play off-line, PyChess now lets you choose from eight different play-strengths. The built in PyChess engine has as well been extended 'in both extremes' now making many more human like mistakes in the easy mode, and playing at more than double strength in the hard mode.
UI-wise, PyChess takes use of a new pure-python docking widget, which lets you rearrange the sidepanels by wish.
The development of PyChess Staunton is steadily progressing. Two screenshots from the nightly built has been uploaded.
If there are anything, that keeps you from using PyChess, or which would make using it much more giving and fun, feel as always very free to post to the forums, mailing list or issue tracker.
Philidor 0.8.1 Released - 2008/3/27
While the work on Stauton is fastly progressing, a few bugs has been reported on the Philidor release. These should now be fixed.
Made PyChess start a game correctly when choosing Black.
Fixed window resize problems on start-up
Fixed icon lookup error on some systems
Added port 5000 as alternative for FICS
Fixed some button size problem with the industrial themes
Made PyChess identify itself on FICS, to support the statistics
Philidor Goes Gold! - 2008/2/19
PyChess Philidor 0.8 has been released. This happens after nearly a yearcoding, and a rewrite of large parts of the codebase for stability and features. If you haven't already beaten fruit, gnuchess, pychess-engine and your friend with PyChess, now is time to!
The most prominent new features include:
Online chess play on the FICS servers.
Ability to undo and pause chess games.
Support for UCI engines like Fruit, Glaurung and Shredder.
In these days, the development of PyChess Stauton 1.0 has just begun. We strive to makethis the greatest free chess client out there, so if you have opinions,don't let them go unheard on the mailing list!
PyChess Philidor 0.8 beta4 has been
released! This fixes many problems which have been reported at the PyChess issue tracker, and
includes translations in more than 23 languages.
If no more serious
bugs are found, this will be named final, but in order to ensure
everything is perfect please check it out and tell us what you think!
Major changes include:
Made new games start more smoothly
Made PyChess easier to beat on easy levels
Added Toga 2 to supported UCI engines
Made opening files from the commandline, or over http, work better
Made PyChess never resign, so that people have the fun of mating
I'm pleased to announce, that a new PyChess Philidor 0.8 beta has been made available.
It was headed as a Christmas release, and it contains the following changes:
Fixed a gtk/threading bug in loading files from command line
Fixed an IndexError when the count of installed engines shrunk
Fixed bugs in -, and improved logging
Cleaned up shortcut and accelerator keys
Made side panel hide properly in FICS games
Fixed typos in rarely touched code
Added better distinction between manually and automatically accepted seeks
Disabled sound availability test, as it produced false positives
Made load preview show the latest, rather than the earliest, position
Faster parsing of SAN moves and PGNs
Improved engine path handling
Made gstreamer optional
As
Tamás has found some pretty critical further issues, it might take one
or two more beta releases before we can declare it final.
Also,
the larger Philidor text-base isn't yet translated to near to number of
languages that Greco had, so if you feel like it, head to https://translations.launchpad.net/pychess and make some noise!
However, merry Christmas, or happy holiday season to your all!
PyChess on CNR - 2007 / 12 / 5
Whether or not it'll ever meet its goal of being one of the most used repositories out there, CNR will surely be able to boost knowledge about PyChess, especially if you head in their and give it a nice rating! PyChess at CNR.com.
We are already doing pretty fine on "Chess" and "Board games"
Oh, and by the way, you should look around here again some time near Christmas, as Beta 3 is just on the steps.
Philidor is now Beta 2 - 2007 / 11 / 21
Fics:
Auto answer private chat messages
Auto decline adjourn challenges
Fixed a race condition
The rating table should update after game ends
External engines:
Fixed a CECP crash on undo
Made sure engines are restested every time PyChess start
Built-in engine:
Better time control
Minor speedups
Fixed bug in quiescent search
Depth check in transposition table
Interface:
Made "Use Sound" check-button insensitive when gstreamer sees errors
PyChess Philidor beta! - 2007 / 10 / 30
After the by far longest PyChess development cycle, version Philidor beta, codenamed 0.8 beta, has been released!
The
long development time covers a close to total rewrite, the most
throughout testing for a PyChess release yet, and a massive new base of
features. Many of which users have been screaming since the first alpha
of PyChess.
The new features includes, but are not restricted to:
FICS online Internet play.
Undo and pause functions.
Support for UCI engines like Fruit, Glaurung and Shredder.
Ability to turn analysers on/off, and to decide which engines should be used.
An "Enter game" in pgn dialog.
New fast start greeting screen.
A 30x faster built in python engine.
Internationalized or figure pieces in notation .
Optional sounds.
A comments side panel that helps you explain the moves made.
Pychess now use Launchpad Rosetta for i18n
It
should be noted, however, that even though the FICS implementation is
generally very stable, it hasn't yet got support for chatting and
console communication. Thus it should be used with some care.
We encourage everyone to try out the release, and report the bugs (if any) you find.
And
remember: "The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; Several
very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human
life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it" - Benjamin Franklin,
1779
Thanks, Pychess team
PyChess 0.6 Final! - 2007 / 4 / 11
After a long beta phase we have decided to release PyChess 0.6 final version.
This fixes a few crashes, including the long requested crash which occurred seemingly randomly for many Debian/Ubuntu kernels.
Looking forward to get 0.8 beta out the door! Enjoy.
PyChess 0.6.0 beta - 2006 / 12 / 16
PyChess 0.6.0 beta is out! (I really need some creative people for finding version names. Numbers suck :D) Grab it before it is replaced!
PyChess 0.6 introduces new tabbed interface.
It implements more pgn features, like metadata and the possibility to open any game at any position.
It now has an animation system, and supports drag'n'drop.
Much work has been put into making pychess 0.6 must faster and much more stable.
Enjoy.
PyChess 0.4.1
The first bugfixing release of PyChess 0.4 has been released. This fixes all problems people have reported to 0.4 release.
After the latest release PyChess has been voted up to 9.22 on gnomefiles.org, which is the best score of all applications on the page! As of writing, it has got 50 votes, which is a third of nerolinux - the most downloaded application - so I guess it isn't that bad guys!
Pychess 0.4 is out!
We have now released the 0.4 version of PyChess!
This version brings a lot of new requested stuff:
You can now Load and Save games in both PGN format and EPD/FEN!
You can now see hints, tips and openings to help you make better move decisions.PyChess
now helps you evaluate the game, showing you a scoreplot of the game's development, helping you finding the breaking points in the game.PyChess
now supports all CECP engines, instead of only Crafty and GNU Chess. It also uses a better Linux way of handling the subprocesses, making sure they exit probably when PyChess exits or is killed.PyChess
0.4 Has a builtin pythonbased chessengine, letting you play chess out of the box. (Most people will still want other engines however)
PyChess 0.4 fixes a lot of bugs and should be even faster than 0.2
python-sqlite2 is added as a dependency.
Feel free to report any bugs you find. Packagers are also very welcome!
StatusSince
the release of version 0.2, pychess has got a fairly large amount of attention. There has been new people offering to join the project, and help doing things like ICS, Network, Eyecandy and PGN.Also
there has been talk about merging with glChess, sharing codebase with chessmonk etc.In
the last couple of days, I've been working on an Oracle class, that is supposed to be the backend for the analysiz panel, the hint/spy functions and the openingbook panel, of which I uploaded a screenshot today.
Version 0.2! (Noname)
I've released version 0.2 of Pychess. It is not 100% bug free, but perhaps 95% :). I'll close anything posted in the issue tracker, but I will now also look forward into some of the purposed features.
I thought of giving it some kind of cool name, like the big projects, but couldn't think of anything better than "the flying beaver", which google tells me is already taken, so I skipped it.
Feel very free to post bug reports and to join the project :D
New homepage!
I've created this page using google pages in about half an hour. The interface is a little slow, but still you really quickly get something out working.
It even works with my google/firefox spellchecking :D (luckily)
