Pleased to announce an update to CheckerPlayer (version 1.3.0) with some handy new features and improvements.
- Game editor for easy corrections to game scores. This makes editing and correcting database games much easier as you can now edit the game as plain text.
- Ability to open multiple PDN files at once, so if you have a bunch of PDN files to load into the database, you can do them all in one go.
- Enhanced pasting of games from web pages. More on this below, as you can now paste entire web pages and CheckerPlayer will extract the games.
- Recover previous games. If you've had a long session and you want to go back to a game that you had in front of you earlier, you can now cycle through all of the viewed games in that session. You can also get a list of all the viewed games and retrieve a game from there.
- No more waiting for piece animations to finish. If you have animations switched on, you can make your move while the animation is still happening.
- "How to Move and Jump" help panel. For newcomers to CheckerPlayer, a simple help page showing how to drag the pieces.
- Minor improvements to the interface here and there.
- Database performance improvement. No more long delays when selecting all database games (blame Microsoft for that one, not me.)
This update (CheckerPlayer is a completely free product) is available via the Microsoft Store if you want to get it now, or it will eventually update automatically if you're not in a hurry.
Some more details below about the improvements to pasting games...
You've probably noticed that many of the games in this forum don't always paste cleanly into some Checkers programs, this is due to some games having text which falls outside of the PDN Standard. For example, missing game separators (which should ideally be an asterisk), essential tags that are missing, "RW" instead of 1-0, "draw" instead of 1/2-1/2 and so on. Although these can help readability on a web page, they do cause the odd hiccup when pasting them into programs.
The new CheckerPlayer update should help with PDN data that is formatted this way. One of CheckerPlayer's features allows you to copy a block of games from a web page and paste them into CheckerPlayer without needing to copy/paste them individually. The new update improves this functionality and CheckerPlayer is now more forgiving when copying non-standard games. For performance reasons, this algorithm applies to pasted games only. Games loaded from a PDN file are expected to be in the standard format (we hope).
It should be said that pasting games with major formatting issues can still cause problems for any Checkers program... there is a limit to what can be reasonably done. But hopefully CheckerPlayer will help you with games from the forum.
Example 1
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4397
These are games from the 2021 National. You can select the entire page with Ctrl-A (which includes any non-PDN text), copy it all with Ctrl-C and then in CheckerPlayer you can paste with Ctrl-V.
This puts all 216 games into the on-screen database and highlights an issue with a game where the tag for the White player is not closed properly: [White "Ron King
Running a Clean and Validate on the database shows two games with invalid moves in their scores:
[Black "Vadym Lapin"]
[White "Ron King"]
[Date "2021"]
[Event "2021 ACF National Rd.2"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
11-15 24-20 12-16 20-11 7-16 22-17 9-14 25-22 16-20 29-25 8-11 23-18 14-23 27-18 20-24 28-19 15-24 14-17 10-17 21-14 11-16 {unreadable} *
[Black "Mark Sokolovsky"]
[White "Phil Schwartzberg"]
[Date "2021"]
[Event "2021 National Majors Rd.4"]
[Result "1-0"]
10-15 21-17 6-10 17-13 2-6 23-19 11-16 26-23 16-20 25-21 8-11 22-17 11-16 29-25 9-14 25-22 7-11 31-26 3-8 23-18 14-23 27-18 20-27 32-23 15-24 28-1917-13 {the scoresheet says WW} *
Example 2
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4201
These are the 2019 World GAYP Qualifier Games
As before, you can select the entire page and copy and paste.
This will highlight an issue with an unclosed comment brace in one of the games: {H. Baxley - B. Case, 1946 ACA National, later WW)
...and will paste 205 games from the page. There are actually 206 games on the page but due to the issue with the malformed comment, only 205 could be processed. But at least you know where to look to correct the source data.
Running a Clean and Validate on the database shows one game with invalid moves:
[Black "Wilma Branch"]
[White "Lyubylana Turiy"]
[Date "2019"]
[Event "2019 GAYP Women's World Championship"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "0-1"]
11-15 24-19 15-24 28-19 8-11 22-18 11-15 18-11 7-16 25-22 9-14 22-18 4-8 18-9 5-14 26-22 8-11 22-18 3-7 18-9 6-13 23-18 16-23 13-17 21-14 10-17 {missing moves} *
Example 3
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4074
These are the 2018 Italy v. USA Match Games
Quite a mixed bag of formats here, for example the first 13 games have no PDN tags. However CheckerPlayer was able to paste all 232 games, and a Clean and Validate shows nine invalid games, some of these are clearly because the program was battling against a lot of text that couldn't be parsed accurately. But as I said, you can get better results by selecting blocks of games rather than the whole page.
For games that look like this on the web page:
A. Moiseyev vs S. Scarpetta, round 1, 2018 Italy v. USA Match
10-14 23-19 11-15 19x10 6x15 27-23 8-11 32-27 7-10 24-20 3-7 22-18 15x22 25x18 11-16 20x11 7x16 27-24 10-15 18x11 14-17 21x14 9x27 24-19 16x23 26x19 27-32 29-25 5-9 25-22 9-14 30-26 1-5 26-23 5-9 22-18 14-17 19-16 12x26 31x6 2x9 Draw
...CheckerPlayer is not able to format the player names, rounds etc. But the games themselves will paste successfully and you could update the details yourself (the new Edit Game function makes this easy). After pasting, CheckerPlayer will assess the game like this:
[Event "A. Moiseyev vs S. Scarpetta, round 1, 2018 Italy v. USA Match"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
1.10-14 23-19 2.11-15 19x10 3.6x15 27-23 4.8-11 32-27 5.7-10 24-20 6.3-7 22-18 7.15x22 25x18 8.11-16 20x11 9.7x16 27-24 10.10-15 18x11 11.14-17 21x14 12.9x18x27 24-19 13.16x23 26x19 14.27-32 29-25 15.5-9 25-22 16.9-14 30-26 17.1-5 26-23 18.5-9 22-18 19.14-17 19-16 20.12x19x26 31x22x13x6 21.2x9 *
Thanks and best wishes,
Steve.
