Detailed description of Chess Assistant 8.1
Index
Main menu: Print
There are many ways to export information from Chess Assistant.
You can do this by direct printing (see Print flash demo), by placing all sorts of
information (from the game in PGN format to a bitmap of the board position) into the
Windows clipboard, by exporting a game or set of games into RTF format for editing in your
word processor, and, eventually, web pages with Javascripts. Each of these possibilities
contains a number of options to customize the results according to your needs:
- Printing: When printing games, you can control all of the
layout features such as the number of columns to print the games, and enable functions
such as use of extended formatting for complex variations. You can also customize the type
of header presentation used so that it could look like the ones used in magazines, books,
or the Informant, or you could create and save your own presentations. You can also print
ECO style tables to look exactly like those used in the encyclopedia.
- Clipboard: You can export just about anything into the
Windows clipboard to paste where you want. The possibilities include:
- The game in PGN (the whole game or its part from a specific point)
- The analysis of the engine (mainline, all lines, etc.)
- The position itself as an ASCII art board, as a bitmap, or as a bitmap including any
colored commentary.
- Other things such as the results of an engine test suite
- RTF Exporting: An RTF (Rich Text Format) can be read in
almost any Word Processor, and Chess Assistant allows you to export your games, ECO
tables, and your tournament crosstables so that you could edit them to your liking or
include them in a publication.
- Web Exporting: You can also export your games, ECO
tables, and tournament crosstables directly into a web page. If you are producing pages
with the games, you can opt for plain notation, or make Chess Assistant produce web pages
preserving all the game notation with resizable Javascript boards for your viewer’s
convenience, and practical drop-down menus to switch between games (avoiding excessively
large pages). The example may be found in the Web export flash demo.
Chess Assistant has a few special tools, which can’t be referred into any special
category. It's the Statistics function, Prepare for your opponent, and the new Ratings and
Norms.
Statistics allows you to see all the statistics of a dataset (a selection or the entire
base) such as openings, players, openings of players, white pieces, black pieces, rounds
of a tournament, etc.
If you want to preserve the results you can export them to a text file.
With the Prepare for your opponent function you enter the name of your opponent, the
color you are going to play, and the years to be included:
Chess Assistant will create a Classifier with all the results of a player according to
an opening, and color codes to identify quickly opening lines the player's been most
successful with or had greater problems with. Double click on the folder of a particular
opening line will call up the games for you to see.
With the new Ratings and Norms function, you can calculate a player’s rating change
from an event or over a period of time, and keep track of any Norms (for both men and
women’s titles) that have been completed or that are underway.
As the results are placed afterwards into an especially created Classifier, you can
edit them and include missing results or information at request.
Chess Assistant 8.1 has a number of conveniences to give you more satisfaction, or in
case of failure, to give you the means to make it as you want it. These are things like
using your own fonts, changing colors, changing piece sets, backgrounds, using sound
schemes, and finally using the DGT board.
If you own a DGT board, an electronic wooden auto-sensory board that you connect to
your computer, you will be pleased to find that Chess Assistant 8.1 supports its use in a
number of ways. You can obviously use it in your epic games against one of the engines,
and you can also play over Internet when playing on ICC. Plus you can also use it to enter
games into a database.
Although efforts are made to give you the most comfortable default settings, such as
fonts, colors, pieces and other, everyone has his\her own preferences, and sometimes those
preferences aren’t even included in the program. If you find you don’t like the set of
fonts used, you can easily import other types and then configure them (even key for key if
they are mapped differently). The same is true for the pieces and the board. You can
import other pieces and images for the board, or design your own that you can use and
share with others.
And if you are playing on ICC, then you can configure the message window style, as well
as the sounds used at all the moments.
19.1 New Test Mode
Game context menu: Modes->Test mode
Chess Assistant 8.1 includes a new test mode that is accessible from the context menu in
game view. This mode was developed with specific input from Maxim Blokh, the man
responsible for the exercises and presentation in CT-ART. With this mode, you can set up
exercises to be automatically presented as you go from game to game in a database. There
are a large number of criteria that can be selected for determining which moves constitute
a good exercise. This timesaving approach means that the user does not have to construct
each exercise by hand. Conditions can also be specified for determining when exercises
should be automatically presented (accessible through the Advanced... button).
19.2 Shortcut Key
Assignments
Main menu: Tools->Main menu shortcuts, View shortcuts, etc
A new tree-like view of the keyboard shortcuts shows you the keys assigned to all the menu
functions. This function allows new users of the program to more readily adapt to it, or
it allows experienced users to pick keystroke combinations that may be more intuitive for
them. Additionally, you can also change the shortcut keys for any context-menu selection
for a game. This would, for example, give you the option to change the keystroke
combinations that are used for copying and pasting game scores from the windows clipboard.
19.3 Customizing the View mode
Main menu: Tools->View options...
Selecting various piece sets is accessible through the "Advanced…" button
in the View options dialog. Here you can also modify the appearance of the chessboard's
background and define color of markers.
19.4 Tile Selected Windows
Main menu: Window->Tile selected
Since it is very easy to open many windows at once in Chess Assistant, we have provided
a tool for rearranging them. With the "Tile Selected" command, you can select
which windows you want to see, and they will be tiled in a number of user selectable
configurations.
19.5 Prepare for Opponent
Main menu: Advanced->Prepare for your opponent
This function is available since CA 6 but we have added many enhancements to it for
version 8.1. And while this function is normally used to point out weaknesses (and
strengths) of a player's repertoire, it can also be applied to your own games as well.
There is now an easier way to see good and bad moves and an option to show all variations
played by that individual in ECO and move-tree format. Clicking on a specific variation in
ECO-mode transports you to set of games from that variation. Folder views in ECO mode are
also provided for your convenience.
In the figure above, we have asked Chess Assistant 8.1 to analyze Judit Polgar's
repertoire. Here we see that she generally scores pretty well with the King's Indian when
playing black. However, the E74 variation seems to be problematic for her. Double-clicking
on E74 displays a dataset of her games from this variation.
You may as well consider another way of preparation for the opponent - the new Players
Encyclopedia mode.
19.6 Background Processing
Many search, database, and analysis functions now have a new progress indicator, and
can be sent to the background. When the background button is clicked, the program will
reside in the windows tray. An animated icon shows percent completion for the current
operation. Operations can be paused as well, if you wish to free the processor for other
calculations.
19.7 Scripting
Main menu: Tree->Scripts->Manager…
Chess Assistant 8.1 has a number of new scripting capabilities. Previous releases of the
program allowed the user to script various tree functions. Now you have the option to
script database operations too. This allows very time-intensive tasks to be deferred, via
the included built-in scheduler.
Index
|
