[Scidvspc-users] Todo list

[Steve A <ste...@gm...>]

I've just compiled a quick todo of the major things that people may
wish to look at.

Most of these will probably never get done :), but here they are.

I'll write them up properly on the webpage sometime soon. If anyone
can think of things that've been mentioned in the past, but forgotten
, pls let me know.

Steve

* Mainline SCID's new filter sort feature finally seems to be bug
free, but i am unsure about it's merit. It is a little confusing
having more than one notion of sort, and the changes are not trivial
(and probably detract from stability). What do we do when copying
temporarily sorted games to a new base ? All bases seem to be sorted
the same way ?? If anyone feels strongly about this feature and is a
good C++ coder, they are welcome to prepare a patch for testing.

* Openseal is an open source version of FICS Timeseal. It needs some
rewriting to work with Scid, though it is a small program.

* FICS could be adapted to work with the ICC. The work involves
analysing the differences in the strings used by the two programs.
(for example, for FICS  we have this line to ackowledge successful log-in
   if {[string match "*Starting FICS session*" $line]} {
The two servers do have many similarities i think, and examining
xboard's "backend.c" (or some other client) for "FICS" particularities

* Russian translation is broken afaics, and has been removed for the time being.

* The month i've updated the translations a little. (Thanks to Peter
for totally overhauling the Dutch one). The checklangs.tcl script is
in much better shape, but of course there are still lots of
translation "todos"

* The TCL sound package, Snack, needs a maintainer.

* There was a lot of work done to implement Fischer Chess (Chess 960),
but they never fixed all the bugs, and the web site
http://www.wtfai.me.uk/scid960.html is now gone. The latest code is in
ScidvsPC's source patches/chess960.patch

* The Tree code works reasonably well, but i have never found the time
to overhaul the Slow/Fast/Slow&Fast modes. These were (for a long
time) negelected when Fulvio wrote the interuptible tree code. Scid
now has the Modes removed, so doing this in ScidvsPC probably wouldnt
be terribly hard to do.

* There are two engine types - UCI and XBoard. Pascal's UCI code is in
some ways inferior to Shane's Xboard code.
Though this is mostly mitigated by the speed of modern processors,
it'd be nice to make use of the UCI ponder feature in analysis mode
(Comp mode already does so).

* I've never had a chance to verify/update the Novag Citrine drivers
and interface due to lack of hardware.

* Our Windows port needs a little overhaul to properly use Users home
directory to store all the various data.
I will get around to doing it one day though.

* A lot of people use chessbase books (.ctg). Scid can only read
polyglot opening books, but inlining this projects
work may not be too hard.  https://github.com/sshivaji/ctgexporter

* A quality, free, community database - though i don't really want to
go over what has been said before - so best
to trawl the mailing list archives to catch up on this one.