SCID vs PC

They are quite similar, but I'm not sure I'd go as far "nearly identical."  Just stylistic differences.  I know a lot of people have a soft spot for that Fritz set, so I thought I would do it next.

Here's a test.  The above position is from a game between two well-known players. After loading your favorite database, how quickly does your favorite GUI find this game among all of the games in the database?

Here's a suggestion for a future font, if possible.   It's called the Hastings font:  http://www.partae.com/fonts/general/general.html

There is currently nothing similar to it in Scid, and the Hasting font was a popular font in many old chess books and magazines.

(I myself prefer the simpler fonts.  If it's too wild or distracting, I can't seem to concentrate on the position as well.  With the fonts I have now, 90% of the time I will probably be using Merida1, USCF, or Fritz.)

I can do the Hastings font, easily.  I also have a bigger version of USCF 99% done.  Had some car problems to deal with today and may have to continue with them tomorrow, so I don't know if I will get around to them, but I will try.  Also, actual work and chess sometimes happens around here.  :)

Here's a quick preview I just threw together.  I just made the biggest size to make sure it would look ok.  I think it looks great.  Will make the other sizes and distribute when I can tomorrow.

I took a little license with the black rooks.  I hate the way they look without alteration, so I changed the base.  Normally the base has two fat white stripes, which makes the black rook look way too much like the white rook.  I took one of them out and reshaped and moved the other one and it looks a ton better to my eye.  Hopefully it doesn't bother anyone.

Nevermind, had a few minutes.  Download Hastings piece text here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jtl1ssmobkibqww/Scid-Hastings.txt

Ha!  This looks just like some of my old chess books!

Fun!

Actually, now that I look at it, I need to darken my light squares just a tad more, so there is a little bit more of a contrast between the white pieces and the light squares.

Here's a modification of the Alpha piece set.  The one that comes with scidvspc is pretty awful.  This one might go a little overboard, but it has outlines for white and black pieces and a shadow.  It is also much bigger and cleaner.

Warning!  I called this set "Alpha" because I wanted to ditch the set that shipped with it that was called Alpha.  You will either have to dump the Alpha set that is in your scid.gui file and replace it with this or rename Alpha to Alpha2 or similar in all the right places.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8cifox15giaap4/Scid-Alpha.txt

credit for this set rendering really belongs to whomever made it for chessx.  I just modified the formatting to work with scidvspc.

So, when I select "Digital Clocks" in the FICS options, the clock just disappears.  I unselect it and the normal, goofy looking clocks come back.  Am I doing something wrong here?  I'd really like to use the digital clock option, if possible.

Must be a bug / glitch.  I have the same problem. 

I don't use Scid much to play on FICS (I'm too used to WinBoard for that task) but the graphic below is what I see.  Below, the digital clocks option is unchecked and yet when I check it, the clocks disappear.  (As a programmer, I'm sure that toggle switch is just just backwards.)

Note that there is a small digital clock in the middle of the analog clock but it's really too small to be much use.

My wish list has an option for a LARGE digital only clock.

Here's another graphic showing DunnoItAll's new Alpha2 font.  (Note:  If the pieces were any larger, they would be TOO big.)

DunnoItAll: could you explain the process of creating new scid piece sets?  I think we need to put the base64 encoding of a PNG file in the scid file, but what should the PNG file look like?

Yea, I'd be interested in hearing your method too.

Here's my first attempt, and I'm probably not doing it correctly or efficiently. 

What I did was I took some of the base64 piece image data from the scid.gui file and then I DEcoded it.  I found a website to decode it for me.  (The website allowed me to paste that string in and then save the decoded image as a file on my hard drive.) 

So then I opened this file up with Paint Shop Pro, to see what it looked like.  It was a small graphic of the pieces in this order wp, wn, wb, wr, wq, wk, bp, bn, bb, br, bq, bk.  (w = white and b = black).

So then I found some photos of pieces online and I basically resized them to match the graphic.  I pasted them into the graphic, directly over the original pieces.  When I was finished I then saved it as a gif file and then created a base 64 string from this gif file.  I then pasted this string into the scid.gui file and viola!  

But that was a lot of work and this was only for one size!  Also, the edges are fuzzy and I think the pieces would look better with an outline or a shadow.  But for a very first attempt, I guess it's okay.

Sure.  To find that out I just took one of the piece sets from scid and decoded it.  Here's what they look like:

You make one for each size from height 25 to height 80 (width is 12x height since there are 12 pieces).  Background is transparent.  I use inkscape to make them.  I already have a crapton of SVG pieces from other projects, so I just arrange them in a row, make sure the background color is 100% transparent (that was the part that made them look so much more crisp--didn't even know you could do that), and then export it to each file size.  Inkscape anti-aliases the pieces onto transparency very nicely.

I've been using http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp to encode to base64 (with a setting of 60 characters per line because that's what the others in the file used--honestly don't know if that matters).

For the Alpha2 set, I just used the set from ChessX, which was already antialiased on to a transparent background, but the pieces were in two rows and in a different order.  I just used Gimp to move them around and scale the image to the right sizes.

And for the record, I would never use the above font when working with Scid.  It's distracting to me.  I just wanted to see what the above pieces would look like as a font.  As I recall, an old Chessmaster program I had years ago had a font similar to the one above.  I was sort of trying to duplicate it. 

I much prefer the simpler, 2D images.

there is a problem (like "error can't open database") when opening complex tag PGN's on Scid vs PC, anyone experienced the problem too ?

Habsburg is the set that ICC used to create their "Smooth" set in the newest Blitzin.  Extremely similar to Merida, but a few key differences.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0dqyes5maw8uf49/Scid-Habsburg.txt

I've never had a problem opening PGNs, but then again, the ones I open probably aren't considered complex.

Can you post a single PGN game as an example of the type of PGN that Scid vs PC has problems with?  Maybe there's an easy work-around.