[Knights-general] Project Status

[Troy C. J. <t_c...@ch...>]

Hello All,

I just wanted everyone to know that I am still here, and that Knights
development is still rolling. But, since it has been about 2 months since my
last update, I wanted to let everyone know what's been happening.

First, the reason this version of Knights is so overdue is the fact that I
needed to add support for multiple, simultaneous matches. Allow me to
backtrack a moment:

I never had any experience with the internet chess servers until I released
Knight 0.4.6. I knew that lots of people played on them, and I knew that I'd
need support for them in Knights, but I'd never actually logged on to one. So
I spent two weeks playing on FICS as research. I learned about what features
and commands it offered, what other chess interfaces implemented, etc.

Almost everything was easy to add to Knights ( I had played several games
using Knights ), except one: multiple, simultaneous matches. FICS and other
chess servers allow you to play several games at once, or to play a game and
observe someone else playing at the same time. But when I first sat down to
write Knights, it never occurred to me that someone would need to have more
than one game at a time. Chalk it up to me being short sighted.

So anyway, that's why you haven't seen a new version of Knights yet. I've
finished most of the rewrite, but there is still more to go. If I had to take
an educated guess, I'd say to expect version 0.4.9 around Thanksgiving.

In addition to the multiple matches, I have made other changes for the new
version. What follows is the changelog for Knights 0.4.9:

- Changed version number to 0.4.9
* Added option to disable the splash screen
* Added configuration for internet servers
- The new game menu now dynamically enables or disables game types based on
your
  configuration. So, if you don't have any chess engines configured, you
 can't play a vs. PC or PC vs PC game. Likewise for internet play and server
 configuration.
* Added the Console... which handles sending and receiving messages via chess
  server, and any other online transactions that don't occur Over the Board.
* Added "High Quality" mode, which displays a much smoother chessboard with
  very little pixelation... even at the smallest board sizes. However, there
  is a noticeable speed tradeoff.
* Added a 2Meg cache which greatly offsets much of the speed loss in High
  Quality mode ( At least on my 600 it does ). Still not as fast as regular,
  which should be fine for lower-end machines.
- Knights now displays an error message when you try playing with a bad book
  engine configuration.
- Fixed bug where Knights couldn't read a move from a .pgn file if it was the
  last token on the line.
* Knights will now read themes from three locations... The system-wide themes
  directory ( usually /usr/share/apps/knights/themes ), the user specific
theme
  directory ( ~/.kde/share/apps/knights ), and the media directory so you can
  run Knights without installing it ( ../media )
* Added the 'Ponder' option to the Opponent menu.
* Added the 'Show Last Move' option to the Settings menu.
* Added 'Pause/Resume' functions to the Game menu.
* Separated themes into two - a board theme and a chessman theme.
- Removed the Green Marble theme from the Knights distro.
* Created the ThemePack distro. All themes ( except default ) will go here.
- Fixed the 'Reverse Orientation' option... it now displays correctly.
* Extended Knights' document handling to act like you would expect it: It
  remembers URLs ( to resave, or save a loaded game ), and prompts whenever
  an unsaved game is about to be destroyed.
* Expanded .pgn support to include multiple games per file and propper
  parsing of comments.
* Added application/pgn mimetype

I know there are some features I'm forgetting, but that should give you a
taste of things to come.
--
Troy Corbin Jr.
tc...@us...
http://knights.sourceforge.net