Fritz 16

Through Fritz 13, the engine was a product of Frans Morsch and Mathias Feist (Germany). Fritz 14 (updated Pandix engine) was by Gyula Horvath (Hungary). Fritz 15 and 16 were by Vasik Rajlich (Czech-American). You can think of Fritz 15 and 16 as updated or tweaked versions of Rybka.

I've been using Fritz 16 this week. My only issue so far has been that sometimes the kibitzer will blank out.

I prefer the interface of 16 over 15, it feels cleaner. I need to use it much more though before I could give a more detailed review but at the moment I don't really see THAT much of a difference from Fritz 15, so whether it is worth getting if you already have 15 is hard to call. If you have 15 maybe wait for a sale (I got it with the 25% launch discount). 

Fritz16 wants to replace files used by outlook.

why? is it safe? will outlook stop working properly? 

same for snagit

Probably dll files. (dynamic link libraries) Programs often use the same dll files. I think they must add to the current dll because this happens so often. 

I bought Fritz and I can't figure out how to do something as simple as saving a game in progress, and then later resuming it with the proper time remaining on the clock. When I reopen the game to resume, the clock is reset back. The remaining time for both sides doesn't seem to get recorded when you save the game. Or is there something I'm missing?

Well it's on my wish list for Christmas. I hope they get some of the bugs worked out.

As far as I could figure out, there was a limitation in Fritz 15, which was not in certain earlier versions of Fritz, and I am wondering if the limitation is still in Fritz 16.

The limitation is, if you play a game against an engine, while telling the Fritz engine, or another Engine with ELO as a settable option, to play at that settable ELO, then you can't throw on a Kibitzer.

(The cause of this is that in Fritz 15, the UCI engine parameter representing ELO to limit to, is kept out of user control as engine properties, and can only be set in "Rated Game" and "Friend Mode".  But those modes don't allow you to throw on a kibbitzer.   And actually, for that matter, certain other stuff, like "threatened squares" are not available in these modes.)

I was wondering the same thing when I got F16.

It's still there, you need to double-click on the Notation+Book pane's title bar to undock the pane, resize the pane with the mouse, then you'll see a couple of gray dividers with whitish dots in the middle - drag those around to restore the chat window. It seems like by default that window is "minimized", in other words "rolled up".

I just downloaded fritz 16. I like easy chess, but  want to know how can i simulate handicaps, so to have the feeling to play with different players. So to set some different profiles as  one opponent that is aggressive and do sacrifices, another one not good on tactics, one that do once in a while mistakes although plays good.

Then there was a feature some years ago, that I could make some tactics quizzes with my games, how is called? Hope it has not been removed

the training feature I just found is when I press full analysis, can select training and so creates puzzles with my blunders

If you want an engine with personalities, you might try installing the free Rodent III UCI engine into Fritz. No guarantees that it will work, but it should, in theory. You'll need to read the Rodent manual for configuring the engine.

http://www.pkoziol.cal24.pl/rodent/rodent.htm

That's awesome, I'll definitely be making use of that!

guys thanks for the help, before to go deep in my reply I have to add cannot find a way to simulate a fake thinking from the engine. I feel kinda umiliated to receive after 2-3 minutes thinking from my side, 3 second thinking moves from the engine, this is far to be human... I have a lot of intuitions while my opponent is thinking....and I guess every chess player take advantage of the thinking part of the opponent, is a relaxing factor, give me trust I am doing a good game... please fake move feature should be added, is such a simple feature to set a Thread.sleep(randomMillisecond) command in the code...

Let's go back to business, attached an image of the previous handicap and fun

@m-p-b

I went trough the steps but is really cryptic. Please look at the feature in the image: Playing Strenght, Blunder Range,  King's defense, King'Attack, Piece Trading, Center Control....

Unfortunately there is not comparison possible with the few engine parameters so esoteric you kindly showed me!? 

Developers should maintain that feature that was so cool in Fritz 13. They can gave us for free, because the code is already written!!!!

Fritz 16 is all about usability, smiles, human experience.. and they forget to add the most important human characterization feature??!

Too bad, I have already written them please if somebody want it do the same, developers can add this old feature in few hours. Changing randomly the parameters is really boring, and I risk to not understand what I want, and plus is not user friendly. Thank you anyway of course for your nice suggestion

@EscherehcsE

Looks as the way to go.

I downloaded/ installed in fritz, first of all cannot find a way to play against the engine itself.

Second I attached an image of the interface where you can chose the personalities from Engine Advanced

as you can see there is a file txt, that I can  tweak https://goo.gl/auK73J

but the problem is that this rodent.txt does not exist on my hard disk(maybe because I am not able to play against the engine, is not initialized?) and even worse I cannot browse to the specific directory where are all the personalities(looking forward to play against Steinitz), if I press load I get an extension *.cbparam that is really different from the one I am looking for.

I am trying hard to make it work but i am thinking to use a different GUI OPENSOURCE THAN FRITZ so that I can at least play with this fantastic engine, and then eventually import the PNG in fritz to analyze.

Do you have any clue to helping me? I was thinking to write to the dev of the engine to ask if is possible to integrate in fritz

EDIT: I installed Arena Opensource GUI and Rodent III works perfect. just would like to use it with Fritz

@Ivanosky

I was able to get Rodent III working on Fritz 8, so I assume (hope?) that it's also usable on Fritz 16.

I'm assuming that you unzipped the Rodent distribution? The Rodent.txt personality file is located in the same folder as the Rodent engine executable files, so it has to be there. The other personality files are located in the "personalities" folder.

You have to install the Rodent engine as a UCI engine.

When you specify the personality file, if the personality file is not in the same folder as the engine executable file, then you also have to specify the path to the personality file. And at this point, I must mention that there appears to be a minor bug with the Rodent engine: If there are any spaces in the path of the personality file, the Rodent engine will never see the personality file. To get around this bug, you can simply specify the relative path to the personality file, relative to the Rodent engine file. For example, if you want to specify the "amy" personality, you would type in the path ".\personalities\school\amy.txt" (without the quotes) in place of the "rodent.txt" file in the PersonalityFile box. (Note the period in front of the backslash in the path - This is not a mistake.)

I guess there are two ways to install the various Rodent engines/personalities. Probably the messier way would be to install a different instance of Rodent for each personality. The easier and less complicated way would be to only install one instance of Rodent, then install the needed personality file whenever you load the Rodent engine into Fritz.

@EscherehcsE

thank you very much for your help, now is working, although is a bit tricky to start the engine and simulate a real match, basically I am forcing the move every time to make the opponent move, or I press the arrow button on the Rodent Engine pane. I am currently playing against Amy and she look really strong to be one of the lower personalities, I tried to change from 4 processor to 1. I have a really powerful xps i7 8gen quadriprocessor(that hits 33 deep in few seconds) still I am losing and  her moves are tactically sounding. Anyway I am enjoying a lot both Fritz and Arena.  and thank you for your reply was super precise and easy to understand, you have been really kind!

Ah, something definitely still looks wrong. You shouldn't have to force every move for the engine, and also, Amy should only be searching a few plies deep. I'm not sure what's wrong with your Fritz GUI setup. With searches going to 33 plies, it's clear that it's using the default Rodent.txt personality file.

Maybe when you're loading the Rodent engine into the Fritz GUI, you're not specifying the Amy.txt personality file?

My problem with Fritz 16 is that after playing a few games with no problems on the so-called 'Easy Game' mode, it shifted the continuing rating board over too far to the side, so the estimated Elo number assigned to the quality of play was no longer visible.  There must be a way to shift this back, but I haven't been able to do that yet.

Also, the Elo evaluations seem way too high, so that when I beat Fritz at 'Club Player' level it assigns me a 2200 rating, yet in fact I'm down in the 800s in the real world.

TO ANSWER SOME QUESTIONS... (READ ABOVE FOR QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS MADE)

ANSWER #1) The old FUN MODE is gone, has been for a while.  Wasn't in Fritz 15 either.  Now they have FIREND MODE ... think of it as auto pilot.  It will try to match your rating, sort of like playing yourself, as you get better it does too.  It will estimate you rating as well... however, this can never be perfect, ratings are very misunderstood, ratings are NOT a measurement of your skill level, they ARE a measurement of your level of skill within a group of players.  Ratings are more of a placement in a curve and NOT a score.

ANSWER #2) Fritz 8 is 32-bit,..  Fritz 16 is most likely installed as 64-bit.  OLD 32-bit engines WILL NOT run on 64-bit installations.