- support more engines (UCI standard), now running very bad and slow, with bad result (communication CIR-engine)
- search over all installed (native) e-books (in CIE like as CIR)
- print selected games (not only one)
- faster running CIE :-)
- solve problem with B12 monograph (not functional links/buttons "Monographs B12" and "test zour skills" from title screen)

to be continued ...

Dear Mr. Dufek,

CIE 5.x supports UCI standard, although the communication with the engine can still be improved.

As to searching publications in CIE, when browsing for publications to search, you can filter the view and display only CIR publications.

There are 2 possible problems with B12:

1. You have older version of CIE
2. The initial main HTML posted with B12 had problems on some computers. If you have appropriate version of CIE, please contact Ms. Bijelic in order to receive a fixed HTML.

Also, please specify which features of CIE you consider to be performance bottlenecks? Or perhaphs your observation was reffering to the performance in general?

Best regards,
Aljosa V. Obuljen

Thank you for answer.

- CIE is very slowly especially when use UCI engines - response UCI engine is in the interval 1-3 seconds between moves (Ruffian)
- thank zou for tip, i will contact CI for updated HTML file for new B12 (cireader.exe version 5.1.0.57)
- it's possible change size chessboard? On 21" monitor with 1280x1024 it's chessboard 18cmx18cm - this is very big for me (now i looked, when CIE is windowed, then is chessboard smaller, but this is not optimal)
- in CIR when use right click on a game - there was list refence game, using this function in CIE i must use right click -> reference number -> select refence game, then click on button "search", then select game - this is to long - this is why i use CIR in 95% time my work

Regarding communication with chess engines: these engines are typically written as console applications. Establishing reliable communication with them has not been an easy task, and performance issues are noteable, especially because of synchronization issues. Also, data transfer between CIE/CIR and the engine is considerably slower because these engines are built in such way to provide output on the screen and to receive input from the keyboard. We'll see what we can do to improve all of this.

Chessboard size cannot be changed currently, but I see why this is an issue. It will find its place on our to-do list :).

CIE supports splitting publications into smaller pieces and this is one feature which caused some minor issues, one of which you described. Namely, CIE cannot know where the game might be, as you might have "shredded" the original publication into smaller pieces. However, we have implemented an automatic search among native CI publications, if they are found. For example, if a game contains a reference to game 5/88, CIE will first try to find any CI package which contains Informant 88, and automatically select this publication as the one which should be searched, whereas if no native CI publications containing CI 88 have been found, CIE will search among any installed publication that are searchable. I agree with you that this was more comfortable in CIR, but some features in CIE implied some lacks.

We are taking all the suggestions and reported issues into account and are trying to make things as easy as possible, which was the primary goal while we were developing Expert. As development continues, we are improving it more and more, although it sometimes seems too slow for some customers.

With regards,
Aljosa Obuljen