HCE Feature Requests

[Celop]

Hi,

First congratulations for a great product, I enjoy using HCE Mac (Yosemite).

May I add a couple of suggestions that I think would further improve the product. I apologise if these have already been suggested, or I have missed the proper thread.

• Arrows. Ability to show the current best move, or ideally from top X PVs, as a set of arrows on the main board. This would be similar to that provided in Shredder GUI, Fritz GUI, etc.
A very good example is the implementation in the popular site http://analysis.sesse.net which display different grades of arrows. Another good example is Chess Tiger on iPad / IPhone using a similar arrow grade system.
I find this helps giving an immediate assessment of a position, when using an engine and when fast forwarding through games - rather than looking and having to interpret on ‘the fly’ the PV list.

• Game Profile, e.g. similar to Shredder GUI, Fritz, Smallfish (iPhone), etc.
I find this a really nice way to get a bird’s eye view of the main interest areas within a game, and to quickly home into these areas.
Maybe also (like Fritz) combine various engine parameters (depth, evaluation, etc), although not so important for me.


For me these two features would be great !
Another couple of nice to have suggestions:

Full screen mode, similar to other standard apps under Yosemite (although I presume you may be tied to what the QT framework provides here).
Hide Tool Bar: option to possibly hide the top toolbar.

If you can get the first two suggestions implemented, I will buy you a few rounds of German beer !

Cheers,
Mark

[Mark Uniacke]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Arrows and Game profile are features that will be in HCE v2.

Full screen mode is available in v1.8 I think, which I hope to release Monday.

Hiding the toolbar is something under consideration.

[gabeeg]

Possibly Monday release of 1.8, that is exciting! ...willing to leak the change list?

[Mark Uniacke]

See http://www.hiarcs.com/chess-explorer.htm

Not long to go, but it might slip into Tues/Wed as I have not had much spare time the last few days.

[mwhoyle]

Awesome. Looking forward to it, Mark.

[SFK3]

Hello forum members,

I can only agree to the praise for HCE and be also very curious about the 1.8 version (as well as for the 2.x ones with database enhancements).

For the database functions I really like to have a good duplicate check.

An example:
I have got the 60 mem. games of Fischer and another pgn (different source) for all of his games. When I "copy games in filter" the game against Sherwin at East Orange, it was considered as a new one.

Well, I guess HCE just checks some header data to distinguish duplicates?
(This was the only difference of both pgn, I saw)

A deep check move by move would have disclosed the duplicate, I can imagine. Sigma Chess had this kind of check, but unfortunately, if you have deleted the duplicates found even the "originals" vanished.
(Which was my experience using it - or did I operate Sigma wrong?! I don't know.)

So to have a detailed duplicate check and in case of "hits" something like
a "take or omit" confirmation like you have i.e. when importing Vcards into address book (I'm Mac User) would be a major step to reduce redundancies in the database and to maintain it on a high level.
In addition it supports higher database performance and avoids manual work arounds like many users do with Excel, text editing tools, exachess etc. with all their benefits, but also disadvantages of this method.

Thanks for taking it into consideration an enjoy XMas holidays

Uwe

[Patatov]

See http://www.hiarcs.com/chess-explorer.htm

Not long to go, but it might slip into Tues/Wed as I have not had much spare time the last few days.

Nice! Just saw this note in 1.8 features list: "Automatically switch to training mode when loading puzzles/test sets"

Does that mean we can run epd tests with HCE? where you load the DB and let the engine go through the entire test list to find the right move?

How do you run test sets?

Thanks!

Andre

[Mark Uniacke]

The puzzle/test set mod is for human players not engines.

Open the Tactics.pgn and you will automatically enter the mode.