Shane's Chess Information Database is a powerful Chess Toolkit, with
which one can create huge databases, run chess engines, and play
casual games against the computer or online with the Free Internet Chess
Server. It was originally written by Shane Hudson , and has received strong
contribution from Pascal Georges and others.
Scid vs. PC began with bug-fixes
for the computer-versus-player features of Scid (hence the name), but has
evolved into a solid alternative with many new features and interfaces. The
project is authored by
Stevenaaus and numerous contributors
(thanks).
See
changes for a comprehensive changelog, or the
gallery for some screenshots..
New and Improved features
Computer Tournaments.
Rewritten Gamelist, with the Database Switcher incorporated.
Improved Computer Game , FICs and Annotation features.
Large Board sizes.
Clickable Variation Arrows, and Paste Variation feature.
Improved Undo and Redo.
Tri-coloured Tree Bar-graphs alongside statistics.
PGN Window can display small chess pieces.
Player Information window has useful new buttons.
Ratings Graph can show multiple players.
Book tuning Remove Move feature.
Move Search feature (eg h3 Bh5 g4 Bxg4).
Separate board sections are hideable via right-click.
Redone Buttons and Toolbar icons.
Clickable Tablebase moves.
Any number of Chess Engines may run at one time. Engine 1 can be docked into the Status Bar. Engine Logs are easily viewable.
The Chessboard/Pieces options have been totally overhauled, and custom Pieces/Tiles are suported. (NB - most piece-sets require the TkImg package to work).
Setup Start Board has many fixes and improvements.
The Help index is now meaningful to new users, with links to the game's main features.
Many more bug-fixes and interface refinements.
Missing Features
Mainline SCID has a powerful filter sorting capability, but it is overly complicated, and perhaps not stable.
Scid vs. PC requires Wish (Tcl/Tk) 8.5 or later (though 8.5.10 has nasty bugs and should be avoided), and a C++ compiler .
Example packages required include "tcl, tk, tcl-devel, tk-devel" and
"gcc-c++ , libstdc++"; but of course will vary with your distribution.
Extra chess pieces (such as Berlin) are now enabled by default for Wish 8.6, but 8.5 requires installing TkImg. Sound support requires Snack.
If your distro does not provide these packages ("tkimg", "tcl-snack"), you can install from source using these links (both of which have fixes applied). TkImg,
Snack.
Then, installing from source:
tar -xzf scid_vs_pc-4.14.tgz
cd scid_vs_pc-4.14
./configure
sudo make install
scid
It is also possible to install Scid vs. PC into /usr, instead of the normal /usr/local.
This allows for parallel installation with mainline Scid, and is done by: ./configure BINDIR=/usr/bin/ SHAREDIR=/usr/share/scid/
Debian / Mint / Ubuntu users may be interested in this
link.
Windows
Windows installation simply requires downloading the
executable, and following the prompts.
The configuration files, including the chess engine list, are stored
in the Scid-vs-PC\bin\config directory, and may be copied over from
old versions to make upgrading easier. If the app is installed in "Program Files" On Windows 7, the config files are mirrored in
C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Scid vs PC
People with Visual Studio 11 should now be able to compile the project fairly easily (see Makefile.vc for more details).
Mac OS X
The
ScidvsMac-4.14 app should include everything you need. Simply drag and drop the App into /Applications (or similar).
Users upgrading may have to remove (or edit) $HOME/.scidvspc/config/engines.dat
to properly configure the chess engines.
OS X has a poor implementation of Tcl, and docked mode has minor bugs (some windows work better after being moved around, keyboard shortcuts are very hit and miss).
To compile from source - once you have XCode installed - please read ScidvsMac-HowTo.rtfd in the source tarball.
OS X's Cocoa port of Wish is broken, with little chance of repair. Scid vs PC ships with a custom 32bit Carbon build of Wish.
Exciting to have some usability fixes for the Tree Mask. Hopefully this feature will start to get some real use.
December 2013
4.11 is out, with large board sizes, and a fix for the annoying filter/tree issue.
April 2013
Finally have a docked windows feature. It's a damn complicated thing, but i am fond of it.
Scid vs PC 4.9 is coming :)
March 2012
Big effort by Gregor to write Drag and Drop support for
Scidb and ScidvsPC. Thanks. FICS is looking great too.
September 29, 2011
Jiri Pavlovsky has made a windows installer. It's a nice piece of software :)
Big thank-you. And we now have undo and redo features.
July 8, 2011
Thanks to Gilles for the web page restructure and OSX testing. Gregor Cramer
http://scidb.sf.net has contributed a PGN figurine feature.
April 19, 2011
A belated thanks to Lee from Sourceforge for
this article.
December 10, 2010
Sicd vs. PC 4.2 includes support for Scid's si4 db format.
July 3, 2010
For the tenth release I've adopted verison number 4.0 . It includes a new Computer Tournament feature (thanks to some UCI snippets from Fulvio) and the Gamelist Widget is finally up-to-speed for large databases.
April 19, 2010
Release 3.6.26.9 includes a Fics accept/decline offers widget.
December 20, 2009
Thanks to Dorothy for making me a Mac DMG package with this release , 3.6.26.8.
August 16, 2009
With 3.6.26.6 I've fixed Phalanx's illegal castling. There is also changes to the Setup board and Toolbar configuration widgets.
July 17, 2009
3.6.26.5 - New Gamelist widget, and re-fashioned main buttons. Project's looking quite solid :->
June 23, 2009
The monkey on my back has really been having a good time. This release includes changes to the Gameinfo, Comment Editor, and Board Style widgets, some new chess pieces, colour schemes and tiles. Thanks to Michal and Alex for feedback.
June 4, 2009
Well, the html is up, and i've got a couple of
files in the downloads section. My project is fairly modest fork of Scid
... just rewriting Tk widgets when i get the urge.
This powerful feature is maturing. See the Docked Windows help item for more info.
Window focus automatically follows the mouse around, and also impacts which keyboard bindings are active. Most bindings are active when the mouse is over the main board.
In the event of Scid failing to start, restart the program with the -nodock option.
Windows undocked from within docking mode can have glitches.
Mainly: drag and drop game copies in the switcher don't work.
OS X support is not great.
Make sure to check out the new Theme Options, which affect how the Docked Windows (and Gamelist) look and feel.
The main Computer vs. Player feature is accessed from Play->Computer. Here
you'll find options to play against Phalanx (a flexible computer opponent whose
skill you can select), or any installed UCI engine.
Playing on the Internet
Playing on the Internet is done via the the
Play->Internet menu item. I recommend visiting the
Fics website to create a user
account, but it is also possible to play anonymously. To start a game,
press the Login as Guest button, then watch the available games as they are
announced in the console. Enter play [game number] to accept a
game challenge.
There is more information
about the Fics and Tactical Game features in the Scid Help menus.
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
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 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
OS X docked mode has some issues due to it's poor Tcl/Tk.
Focus Issues. Kde users can allow Tcl apps to properly raise themselves by
configuring desktop > window behavior > advanced > focus stealing prevention
set to "none"
Sometimes Scid vs. PC may have very loud/wrong colours.
This can be caused by the Window Manager exporting their color schemes,
and can normally be switched off somewhere in the window manager's colour
settings.
Importing huge PGN archives can
sometimes fail. The command line utility pgnscid is a more reliable way
to create large databases from pgn. Typing "pgnscid somefile.pgn" creates a new database
"somefile.si4".
Using the '+' operator and clicking on 'Find' in the gamelist widget can be very slow. The code needs to be moved from gamelist.tcl to tkscid.cpp.
Windows only:
Using "ALT+F"... etc key bindings to access the menus is badly broke. This is a Tcl/Tk issue.
Thanks to Shane Hudson and the authors of
Tcl/Tk.
To
Gregor Cramer for new features and technical support.
Sourceforge.net for their great hosting,
Jiri Pavlovsky for the
windows installer.
Thanks to Pascal Georges for his many technical contributions to mainline Scid, and also Fulvio, Gerd and the language translators.
To Gilles, Dorothy and Steve for OS X support, to Michal Rudolf for early encouragement, and
H.G.Muller for technical feedback.
Scid is a huge project, with an interesting history. Originally authored by
Shane Hudson from New Zealand, it combined the power of Tk's GUI and
the speed of C, to produce a free Chess Database application with
Opening Reports, Tree Analysis, and Tablebase support.
It gained quite some attention, as it was arguably the first project of it's
kind; but after writing over a hundred thousand lines of code, in 2004 development
stopped and Shane never contributed to Scid again.
Two new versions of Scid appeared around 2006. The first was ChessDB
authored by Dr. David Kirby. With some good documentation and
the ability to automatically download games from
several web portals, it became popular. But at the same time Pascal Georges from France
was making strong technical improvements to Scid. Frustrated with Scid's dormancy,
and because of disagreements with ChessDB's author, Pascal released his own tree, Scid-pg, which
included UCI support and numerous Player versus Computer features.
But subtley, and with some controversy, he began to adopt the name Scid as his own. Some
people objected, especially Dr. Kirby, with whom a flame war began, but
Pascal's efforts to gain ownership of the Sourceforge Scid project eventually succeeded.
Under Pascal, and with the help of numerous contributors, Scid again strode
forward. Pascal wrote a Tree Mask feature, and in 2009
he upgraded the database format to si4, all the time making speed and technical improvements
to the neglect of the interface. In 2010, Pascal ceased contributing at all, and shortly after
Scid 4.3 was released.
Since then, Scid has had widespread technical changes by Fulvio Benini, who is a long-standing contributor.
Currently there exist several Scid related projects.
Chessx was originally by Michal Rudolf (a longtime Scid contributor from Germany) and named Newscid. Now led by Jens Nissen, with a 1.0 release, it
is an attractive Chess GUI but with a small feature set and without si4 support.
Scid vs. PC was started in 2009 by Steven Atkinson from Australia. Forked from Scid-3.6.26, it began as an effort to tidy Shane's frenetic code base and improve the user interface, and has since matured into a capable Scid successor.
The Android app, Scid on the Go, supports the si4 database format, and is the only mobile Scid related project.
Another project nearing a 1.0 release is Scidb by Gregor Cramer from
Germany. It is an ambitious chess database program inspired by Scid, with heavy
utilization of C++ classes and customized Tk widgets. It also supports
Chessbase databases and many chess variants.
Sound devices can now be selected; mainly useful for Linux systems
Dont insert newlines into PGN copied to text buffer... Some web PGN browsers don't work with newlines following movenum. eg "10. Nxc3"
Save game history when Scid quits
Remove tree status bar. Same info avail in switcher and tree text widget.
Booktuning nextmove is now highlighted (same as Book), and padding has been tweaked a bit.
Move Maintenance menu from File to Tools menu
Remove the annoying " from myPlayerNames.
Bugfixes:
When saving PGN to file, disable translating pieces. (Export to PGN was already this way).
FICS Digital clocks didnt appear under some circumstances
Undo/redo refinement/fix for when buffer has been full
Fix import issue - Sometimes first tag is lost (If UTF byte order mark is present)
MSWindows - Board keyboard bindings are were getting lost after Variation window popup is dismissed.
Some tooltip refinements, including removing tooltips with board update (mask tooltips were erroneously persistent).
Tablebase window: Results Board was not getting packed (is now below Results Frame). Change the damn awful red, update help, give tbWin the widest paned window.
With wish8.6, we cant close undocked windows with a Close button. Fix
Some fixes for javascript and html game exports
Correctly handle plain text crosstables.
Scid vs. PC 4.11
Maximum board size is now twice as big
Gamelist context menu (right-click). Less button crowding
Annotation improvements: Depth based annotation, and cut-off features
Dock a few extra windows (graphs, tablebase)
Computer tournament stability/speed fix
Locked Analysis Engines now show the locked position (not the working line)
, and bug-fix the engine lock, which didnt work properly
Add a low CPU priority check box to Engine Configuration window
(especially important for MS Windows - where engines can kill GUI)
Engine configuration window now repsonds to keystrokes to quickly find any engine
Display "(altered)" in statusbar is game has been changed
Fullscreen menu item (Options->Windows->Fullscreen)
FICS tweaks, including over-riding takeback/abort request dialogs when game ends
Remove some wasted space around FICS, main button bar, and other widgets
New Greek translation
Read custom chess pieces from /.scidvspc/pieces
Docked tabs/menu refinements
OS X - Clicking on URLs will open the link in a browser
Add a command console to the start-up window
Bug-fix: Fix main board rendering anomoly in docked mode with MS Windows
Bug-fix: When tree is open, gamelist filter operations didn't work properly
Bug-fix: Search in variations never matched positions at end-of-line
Bug-fix: Opening Table favourites werent working properly
In Export PGN dialog, add an option for "Space after Move Numbers"
Keyboard short-cuts changes. Control-L (etc) no longer open/close, but open/raise
Tweak Comment Editor and Player Info buttons
Scid vs. PC 4.10
When sorting databases, don't reset filter and remember current game/gamestate
Game history menu
Implement (and bugfix) SCID's more comprehensive NAG framework
Change a couple of field orders in the gamelist, remember field widths, and remove the icon context menus from the switcher (middle click now toggles show/hide the database icons)
FICS: Allow use of alternative URLs (used during FICS outage) and other minor tweaks
Window focus improvements (mainly for MS Windows and OS X)
Computer Tournament: add 'Engine Scores as comments' option, and make some minor global/:: var changes
Add Book Tuning to dockable windows
Automatically flip board (if applicable) in game browser and analysis miniboards
When diffing twin games, ignore newlines in the comments, which make diffing impossible
Add undo points for user generated addNag events
Bookmarks: add a few key bindings (delete/up/down), and shuffle the gamelist bookmark button up one row
Drag and drop hardening
Windows 7 bugfix: PGN export and Progress bars weren't working in undocked mode
Translation framework updates. Overhaul Dutch translation, and remove (broken) Russian one
Convert braces '{', '}' to '(',')' when exporting PGN comments (against PGN standard). Also tweak various PGN help topics
Scid vs. PC 4.9.2
OS X changes, including docked mode fixes
Scid vs. PC 4.9.1
Fix promotion bug in non-docked mode
Small pictures allign top/bottom in game info
Clickable crosstable columns
Make an undo point with Setup Board, and disable undo for Trial mode
Add Tournament lookup to Player Info window
PGN import window was not getting mapped
Scid vs. PC 4.9
Window Docking feature
- Different windows are docked/restored than Scid. Five layout slots with three custom layouts. Bug-fixes. F11 for fullscreen. Tcl-8.6.0 may have issues. Selectable Ttk themes (also for Gamelist)
General
Move search feature (eg 'h6 Bxh6')
UCI: replace 'position fen ...' with 'position startpos moves ...' for general analysis
Better Twin Games Checker - highlights missing comments and variations in duplicate games
Windows has a MSVC makefile (Makefile.vc) and includes Stockfish 2.31 (JA legacy build)
Fix windows stack problem (hopefully)
Text Find widgets in help, crosstable, engine logs
Game Save dialog remembers any custom tags you add to a game, making them easy to recall
Restore drawing arrows and marks from the main board (also used by FICS premove)
Arrow length/widths configurable via comment editor
PGN Figurines now display in bold, and a different font, if applicable (from Gregor)
Some new board textures (from Ed Collins)
Automatically save "bitmaps" directory when exporting to HTML
Player info window shows Photos in a scrollable canvas insead of stuck in top right corner
Delete key deletes moves in game/variation after the current move
Score Graphs are now bargraphs instead of lines
Bind statusbar->middle button to 'switch base'
FICS context menu, game offers now show more information, and premove
FICS: deiconify/raise window when game starts (nodock mode only)
FICS: stop clock when we make a move (even though we may not have acknowledgemnt from FICS about move)
FICS: 'upload' command for uploading local games to FICS examine mode
Allow the Name editor to glob '*' for Site, Event and Round fields (but not for 'All Games', too dangerous when used by mistake)
The material board can display *all* taken pieces
Gamelist button rows can be hidden by right-clicking the list, and it has a game save icon
Right click V+ button adds the second variation
Windows analysis engines no longer run at low priority
When annotating the score on blunders, show the main score first, var second (eg: +1.00 / +2.50)
Add programmers reference to the help contents/online doc
Bind space-bar to engine start/stop
Update twic2scid.py script
Remember if .board is flipped for each open base
Bugfixes
Make the database switcher icons/frames get smaller if they are cramped (so we can see them all)
Half fix UCI game (sergame.tcl) time issues
Corrospondence Chess now works
Tree Mask bugfix: Checks couldnt be added to mask
Fix Tree 'Fill cache with game/base' feature
Try to handle shortened FENs with Paste FEN
Crosstable: 'Set Filter' now includes deleted games if +deleted
Crosstable: handle games with a year-only date differently for crosstable purposes (Instead of +/-3 months, match any other games in the calender year
FICS: Stop clocks after a takeback request from opponent
FICS: Games with move lengths greater than 1:00:00 would break parse
Add missing FICSLogin translation
New windows Phalanx build. It works better under win7, but has analysis polling issues
OS X: pad out flag buttons in Header search
base_open_failure was erroneously closing wrong base
Windows Preview HTML for Reports is fixed
Scid vs. PC 4.8
Drag and Drop file open(s) on Windows and Unix
Custom background images (jpegs, gifs and pngs)
Random sort pgn feature
Crosstable now have +/-/= subtotals
(and Player Stats format changed from +/=/- to +/-/=)
General PGN search has ignore case option
Board Search gets it's combobox updated when DBs are opened and closed
Save game before PGN Import
Save game: enable the use of 'prev game tags' for existing games. This allows easy addition of the same tags to consecutive existing games
Remove the 'Scid: ' prefix from several window titles
Update some translations
Show Linux version/distro in the startup window
Add a patch to make toolbar buttons raise only (instead of toggle open/shut)
Add a patch for Chess960 support (from Ben Hague). Unfinished
Analysis
UCI: properly handle UCI buttons. Previously they were invoked at every engine restart
Right clicking 'Add Var' button adds Engine Score comment only
Replace ponder on/off with hard/easy for xboard engines
Super quick engine infos can happen before Scid's PV is inited properly. So we have to default to PV = 1
Allow xboard engines to use lowercase 'b' for bishop promotion (eg a7b8b)
Don't send an erroneous 'isready' (with 'uci') to quiet analysis engines
Right clicking the widget allows to disable line wrapping
Don't add a line to analysis history if moves are null
Tree
Move ECO stats to the end of line
Several Mask refinements - notably Searches are much more readable and previously clicking on searched lines didn't work
Fix up minor bugs about castling moves (OO, O-O, O-O-O)
Computer Tournament
Computer Tournament Book feature
Dont' kill tournament if engine crashes
Only pack the first 10 engine combos (which allows for big tournaments)
Fix up Xboard time/move command order. Xboard engines should behave much better
Various other tweaks
Gamelist
Show altered games in red
Control-wheelmouse scrolls up/down one page
Switcher now has text on two lines (if icons are shown)
FICS
Digital clocks now (optionally) on the main board
Better integration of FICS "examine" and "observe" features
FICS has it's own options menu
bind F9 to xtell instead of tell
Change the move.wav sound from tick-tock to a short click
OS X
Filter graph bugfix
Material Search properly shows the little buttons
Copy and Paste text from disabled OSX text widgets (engines, help, gameinfo)
Buttons 2 and 3 are swapped around
General Bugs
Work arounds for wish 8.5.12 and 8.5.8 issues
Analysis logs can badly break autoscroll, so use normal frames and scrollbars
Handle PGN parsing of unspecified promotions (b8 becomes b8=Q , for eg)
Scid vs. PC 4.7
Tree: Add coloured bargraphs representing win/draw/loss (and remove the old tree graph)
Tablebases: Make best tablebase moves clickable
Tablebases: tidy up config , main window and help items
FICs: Can now play and watch (observe) multiple games at the same time
FICS: Support loading old/interupted games for analysis (using 'smoves' command)
FICs: Add an Abort button. Other minor fixes
Serious Game overhaul (though still has minor issues) Add pause, resume features and mate, game drawn dialogs
Computer Tournament: Add 'first engine only' feature for testing a single engine against others
Enable material difference display for game browser and fics observerd games
Analysis: View engine logs from within Scid, and can also disable logging
Analysis no longer word wraps, and uses fixed font
Analysis: add a xboard/uci protocol column to the engine list
Include updates to SCID's spellchk.c, improving the ELO add-ratings feature
Update spelling.ssp file to Jan 2012, and include with windows
Player info: clicking FIDE ID opens relevant url
New feature: 'Search-Filter to Last Move'. All filter games will load at the last move (end of game)
Refine the Calculation of Variation (Stoyko Exercise) feature and Help
Toolbar has a 'book window' icon
Tweak PGN context menu: reorder the Strip/Delete move items
Gamelist: replace the Negate button with a Select button
Tree: Include a patch for embedding the Best Games into the Tree window
Analysis: Revert Lock engine changes. Previously, lock engine would also start Trial Mode
Bugfixes
Importing PGN, check that Promotion Moves are long enough (otherwise can segfault)
Document CCRL pgn round name problem, and handle errors better when Name limits hit
FICS: remove non-ascii chars from commands if using timeseal
Gamelist: To display unusual characters, convert to unicode before displaying games
Sync html bitmaps with SCID
Book: Only do the second book move lookup if we have too. (slight performance boost)
EPD: Quick fix for epd analysis annotation bug
Hungarian, Swedish and Potugese Spanish were broken if Piece translation enabled (which was default). Fixed
Fix up Tacgame score-isn't-updated bug
Scid vs. PC 4.6
Undo and Redo features (partly from SCID)
Microsoft Windows has a proper installer
Always loads games at the correct game ply when using the tree and searches
Ratings graph can show multiple players (and there's a minimum ELO feature)
Computer Tournament: Improvements for both Xboard and UCI engines, and implement the 50 move draw rule
Auto-promote feature for FICs
Book tuning 'Remove move' feature
Autoraise button raises all windows
Annotation improvements, and it is now possible to score All moves while only annotating Blunders
Known aliases Biographical data is shown in the player information window
The player info widget has buttons enabling quick player renames and look-up
'Read-Only' context menu to the Database Switcher, and Read-Only bases are greyed out
Fix bug in the opening/theory table
Remember game position when stripping comments and variations from PGN
Change analysis colors for MultiPV to black/grey instead of blue/black
New 'Search in (other) Database' feature to the board search (from SCID)
Variation/Mainline arrows can have custom colours
Crosstable can (optionally) show 3 points for a win
Fix sc_remote (which allows games to be opened in an already running Scid vs PC)
Phalanx tacgame bug-fixes (play brainy, and stop after the correct amount of time)
Tweak the best games widget (make fields line-up)
When handling Import PGN errors, show the game numbers as well as the line in file
Catch a nasty wish8.5.10 bug with the gamelist (Wish-8.5.10 should be avoided)
Remove the broken integer field validation and replace it with something that allows backspace to work
Bind Control-Tab to 'switch to next base', and Control-(quoteleft) to 'switch to clipbase'
Fix a couple of corner cases concerning dates and searches
Analysis widget : small speed improvements , icon changes and bug-fixes
Add a help item for Maintenance 'Check Games' feature
Swap around the 'Next Move' and 'Event' game-information lines
New documentation about making Polyglot books
Make the player Report config widget a bit easier to use
Catch a nasty wish8.5.10 bug with the gamelist (Wish-8.5.10 should be avoided)
New OSX HowTo
Crosstable bugfix: the 'show white first' feature didn't work for two match rounds
Update 'Tips'
Clarify Scid's maximum number of games
Update Spanish and Polish translations
Update FICs , PGN and Menu language translations
Scid vs. PC 4.5
PGN Window:
PGN chess font support (but font installation on Windows isn't great)
Computer Tournament:
Per-game time control
Clock widgets for remaining time
Manual adjudication buttons, and a Restart button
General:
Game List remembers it's view when switching between bases
Game Browser has new buttons and functionality
Tournament Finder is more readable
Restore PGN scrollbar (pgn option)
Phalanx now reads enpassant and 50 move field from FEN (thanks Bernhard Prümmer)
FICs console fg and bg colours are now configurable
Name Editor tidy up and documentation review
Player Info: add a 'Refine Filter' result group
Typing 'OO' castles (previously only 'OK','OQ')
Mask Search widget fixes
Annotation: Dont add nags when annotating score. Don't repeat previous nag if annotating all moves
Crosstable shows current game in green
Use translations for Game List column titles (if available)
Add a 'Game Delete' menu
Improve ./configure and Makefile, and CC FLAGS are propagated to all targets
Game Save autocomplete now uses mouse instead of clumsy keyboard bindings
Restrict Game List sort to valid columns, and add a 'confirm sort' widget for bases > 200000 games
MS Windows tweaks:
Windows Crosstable transparency glitch is fixed
Fix wheelmouse support in a few places
Add a 'make-scidgui.bat' hack for assembling a new 'scid.gui' from subversion
Computer Tournament buttons padding fixed
OSX:
Make an OSX app with a working ;> version of Tcl (thanks Gilles)
Many OSX wheelmouse and graphical fixes
Bug fixes:
Null move fixes including - analysis engines can append variations
Tree training feature fixes
Show Progressbar for loading bases with a dot (.) in their name
If Scid crashes, Game List could be left with zero size
PGN middle-click move preview feature fixed for variations
PGN text tabstops are now dynamic to allow for correct column allignment in column mode
Remember position of custom ecoFile if loaded
Change the second book slot to avoid conflict with Annotation feature
Catch unmatched braces in gamelist values
Fix 'Paste FEN' castling sanity check
Browser previously highlighted Next move instead of Current move
Fix scid.eco unicode bug
Remove 'newlines' from Mask Search results
When addAnalysisVariation fails due to bad moves, don't move back N moves
Theory table incorrectly started from start position
Scid vs. PC 4.4.1
Fix nasty flicker bug when board is flipped
Fix fics bug that graph sometimes doesn't stop when new game starts
Add Burnett chess pieces
Scid vs. PC 4.4
Implement SCID's interruptable tree processing
Implement SCID's custom flags
Gamelist is much faster for big databases
Add widgets to the gamelist for manipulating flags and browsing first/last/next/previous games
Opening Book and Book Tuning overhaul - allow two books to be opened with side-by-side sorting, and various interface improvements
Overhaul Annotate widget - allow choice of scores/variation/both and remember annotation options
Crosstable sort by Country feature
Update Fics to allow for different Port/IP Address (using SCID code)
Graph changes - remember widget settings, change colours+dot size, fix up half-move bug and a title misallignment, add 2010 decade
Fix up the global grab for progressWindow (opening databases)
Add "Half moves" (moves since capture or pawn move) to setup board
ECO Browser changes - add "update" and "up" buttons, when clicking on "Start ECO" open browser at top level, make statistics more readable
Add the "Last Move Color" to the main board colours widget
Restructure "Tools" menu
Icons - remove the large gameinfo and togglemenu buttons, add a "comment editor" icon to the toolbar and tidy up various icons
Busy cursor when sorting database via Gamelist column click
For OSX (esp. single button mice) - bind to context menu for main window and pgn window
Make the 'paste variation' feature work a bit better at var/game end
Make variation popup remember it's location instead of being centered
Add "Read-only" button to maintenance window
A nice PGN/htext performance tweak that smooths out large game edits
When using "-fast", perform fast database opens also. Otherwise, update the progressbar to show "Calculating name frequencies"(todo?)
Bug-fixes
Ubuntu 11 have put libX11.so somewhere stupid. Update configure script
Paste FEN bug involving fen validation
Fix promotion bug involving busy CPU and missed grab
Fix off-screen window placement on windows
On Macs, dont place the window at top of screen, as it's then stuck under the main menubar
Make the game save dialog center and resize properly
Fix up file loading (and bookmarks) of DBs with dots (.) in their name
Statusbar shows correct value after Crosstable update
Scid vs. PC 4.3
Clickable Variation arrows
Paste Variation feature
Database Switcher has been moved to the Gamelist Widget (and has some new icons)
Gamelist can now perform logical ANDs in the search widget using "+", and include the date
Gamelist now has remove-above and remove-below buttons
FICs improvements, including a ping feature to indicate network health (*nix only), and player communications are saved as PGN comments
New Toolbar buttons: "Load First Game" , "Load Last Game"
Bookmark Widget has been overhauled
Analysis Engine's move history doesn't get spammed by "Mate in 1" (for eg) messages
An engine can now be run in the Statusbar
Allow engines to be reordered
Simplify the Bestgames Widget : Remove the PGN pane, nice-ify the widget, and enable graph and best widgets to remember size
Several interface speed-ups from Fulvio
Other SCID C++ changes from Gerd and Fulvio, including "Don't decode games when copying games"
Some Tree Search optimisations from SCID
Sort by number of Variations and Comments from Gerd
Help Widget has a search entrybox
Help Widget font size (and Pgn Window) can be easily increased by control+wheelmouse
When pasting FEN directly, do a castling sanity check
Bugfix: When user starts scidvspc for the first time, clipbase is left closed
Browser widget has a nicer button bar, and windows wheel-mouse bindings
Overhaul the Edit Menus
Numerous GUI fixes
Revert PlayerInfo to old format, but add a "Won Drawn Lost" header
Tweak crosstable knock-out format
Scid vs. PC 4.2
New si4 database support
Include tree and mask improvements from Scid (excepting Fulvio's delayed tree code, which has issues)
Overhaul right-click menu and allow toolbar / menubar / statusbar to be hidden
Allow tournament games to start from current position
Easier 64 bit compilation
Include Scid's correspondence feature
Make analysis widget info properly hideable, and tweak buttons
Tweak game save forms
A couple of Mac fixes, including the broken gamelist widget (bad!)
Restructure game info widget - Player names are more prominent, Length field added, Colors made consistent
Reincluded Merida2 pieces
Remove Repertoire editor (same functionality via Tree Masks)
New Finder rename fucntion
PGN indentation fix (especially for comments)
Work around for batch annotation bug (still under dev by Joost)
Header search widget tidy
New icon
Scid vs. PC 4.1
Quite a few FICs tweaks, including new help pages and D.O.S. attack fixes
Numerous Gamelist improvements (see below)
Tree widget improvements: next move is highlighted, main filter is now independant of Tree filter, wheel mouse bindings
Tactics feature fixed up: Renamed "Puzzle" , and Problem Solutions can now be browsed in-game
Analysis window "add variation" now *appends* variations if at var end
Comment Editor has undo and redo bindings
Main board grid colour can be changed
Setup board can rotate and flip the board
Clicking on moves in the gameinfo area shows Comment Editor
Better window raising/focusing
Kill analysis window after batch annotations
New marble tile theme and colour themes
Some menu re-ordering
Recent Files menu is basename only
Remove Control+V game paste binding .... too dangerous
Further refinements of Switcher widget and Icons
ttk comboboxes are no longer grey
Analysis widget scrolling will pause to allow backwards review
Splash widget changes, and remove pop-up for missing Bases and Book directories
Rewritten Help items
Gamelist improvements -
Field order rearranged
Columns now sort in both directions, with arrow depicting direction
Deleting items works better
Can be sorted by ELO
Draws sorted alongside no-result
Delete and Compact buttons disable better
Bugfixes -
Twinchecker PGN text diff-ing was sometimes broken
Phalanx observes tournament feature time control
Fix "Show Suggested Move" feature
Fix occasionaly issue with erroneously selecting squares, then being unable to reselect them
Ignore crafty's resignations which caused X-window flash events
No context menu if dragging a piece
RobboLito (and others ?) had uppercase piece promotion which occasionally broke
"Show Suggested Move" was broken
Gamelist sometimes left off the last or first item
Widget tidies -
Analysis engine config widget
Maintenance tweaks
Game save widget made better
Parent Date widget
Delete twins
Database Switcher changes, including new icons
Finder now has three columns (and other changes)
Player finder + Tournament Finder sub-widgets alligned
Statistics window restructured
Scid vs. PC 4.0
Computer Chess tournament feature
The Gamelist widget has been rewritten to work with huge databases. Other new features include a case insensitive search, deleted items are greyed out, and there's a "Compact" button to empty trash with
Add a background colour option that applies to many text widgets, including gameinfo, pgn window and help window
Restructured the analysis widgets, putting toolbar on top, tiny board at bottom, tweaking toolbar icons and reparenting analysis died error dialog
Update the book and book-tuning windows (untested, from SCID)
Add a new logo, and some wm title tweaks
Board Screenshot feature (Control+F12)
Bind mouse wheel to move progression (and widget resize) for the little browser windows
