This unstable release of GNOME Chess removes the fullscreen mode

Jan 26, 2014 09:39 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind the GNOME Chess project, an open source and free 2D/3D graphical chess game for the GNOME desktop environment, has announced recently that a new unstable release towards GNOME Chess 3.12 is available for download and testing with assorted bugfixes and new features.

GNOME 3.11.4 now depends on GTK+ 3.10, removes the fullscreen mode, uses symbolic icons in the bottom bar, adds a "linked" style to the navigation buttons, uses a symbolic light bulb in the Preferences dialog, removes the extra space between Black and White timers, and it no longer automatically pauses the game when the user views the menu or switches windows.

Moreover, GtkToolbar has been replaced with GtkMenuButton and GtkHeaderBar, the pause key has been transformed into an accelerator for the resume and pause actions, better error messages are now displayed when something wrong happens with the chess engine, and it will no longer show false error messages about engine crashes that did not happen.

Furthermore, GNOME 3.11.4 now displays a message if a human player is in check, warns the user when the chess engine fails to launch, fixes the color of the pieces in figurine algebraic notation, fixes some critical warnings that appear when a new game was started, and it will no longer try to kill the same engine process twice.

Last but not least, this development release of GNOME Chess fixes some minor file descriptor leaks in the ChessEngine, no longer leaves an orphaned chess engine if the application crashes, updates the project’s website in the About dialog, and updates several translations. More details can be found in the official raw changelog. Download GNOME Chess 3.11.4 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that this is a development version and it should not be installed on production machines, as it's intended for testing purposes only.