Valters Baumanis - 2022-12-08

I will reveal that the eleventh iteration of the interface is rewritten on top of .NET technology, which will give many advantages, first of all portability - it will open up the possibility to move to fully 64bit (the interface can already run 64 bit engines but the GUI itself runs on 32bit). Additionally, it ought to ensure that it will work for years, perhaps decades to come on all the latest Windows systems among many other advantages.
As much as I would like for it to remain exactly as it was I currently have to consider moving to either donationware, freemium or long trial shareware model to finish this version, as the reason why I stopped releasing new versions past 2016 was that my socioeconomic situation changed, and I could no longer invest extreme amounts of my time for no monetary benefit, I estimate that I have put thousands of hours in developing this software over the years, and a large share of that work was work that I did purely so that it would work and be usable for other people, such as ensuring support for different versions of Windows, proper installation files, help files, suggestions, even limited tech support, documentation, making sure the licensing and copyright requirements are met, improving functionality and ease of use etc.
As a compromise to enable to continue developing this application that I use myself on almost daily basis, and which has been, according to my estimates, downloaded over the years by up to a hundred thousand or more people, the new version will include at the very least a donation option, in case of donationware it will still be fully open source, but for obvious reasons if I move to freemium or shareware I will have to make it at least partly closed source and a dedicated website would be created in this case, though Crafty chess Interface 10 will always be free and freely available.
The new version will include loads of bug fixes, improved stability, a lot of new functionality, and tools to assist in teaching chess over local or remote session so that it could also be useful for people who earn by teaching chess.
The 3D will be much improved, you will be able to physically (in animated fashion) move pieces to trigger premove while it's your opponent's move. The GUI will be redesigned and cleaned, but the general layout will remain the same. There will be additional translations such as French, potentially German and Indonesian among other possible. I am also investigating possibilities to add online play, perhaps as a third party interface for chess sites that allow third party interfaces.

 

Last edit: Valters Baumanis 2022-12-08