This development version of GNOME Chess also adds support for the Octochess engine

Aug 18, 2013 16:36 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Project announced the availability for download and testing of the fifth development release towards the GNOME Chess 3.10 application for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.

First of all, with this version, the development team recommends installing the HoiChess engine by default, instead of Phalanx or GNUChess (or really anything else), in order to make the GNOME Chess game actually winnable for human beings.

GNOME Chess 3.9.5 adds supports for the Octochess engine, introduces easier Easy/Normal settings for many engines, instructs CECP engines to add randomness to play, suggest longer game duration, adds keyboard shortcuts for next and previous move, adds missing tooltips to various new toolbar items, and updates the About dialog copyright notice.

Moreover, this development release of GNOME Chess also moves "opposing player" to the top in the Preferences dialog, makes the difficulty and side selection more insensitive in human vs. human games, improves alignment of file letters in 3D mode, makes the bottom-right corner white in 3D mode, and adds sentence capitalization to the preferences options.

Among the bugs fixed in GNOME Chess 3.9.5, we can mention an AI hang when using Undo against most CECP engines, a crash when the new game dialog is deleted, the keyboard shortcuts for New/Open/Save/Undo/Fullscreen, the board numbering issue when Black is on bottom, and the face-to-face board orientation has been removed.

Last but not least, GNOME Chess 3.9.5 requires Vala 21.0 or higher, and it updates the following translations: Czech, Galacian, Greek, Lithuanian, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. More details can be found in the official raw changelog.

Download GNOME Chess 3.9.5 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.