Hi Benoit, please allow me me to spend some words about the Scid format and his capabilities, I have excellent knowledge about this format, and about the development of chess database formats in general.
> Implementing 360 would require a complete revision of SCID format: No, it wouldn't, the Scid format is able to store Chess960 games, but not in an optimal way, because you have to store the starting position (FEN), and this is not memory friendly. Storing the Chess960 castling is not a problem, here there is no difference to the standard castling (when storing). Shortly: support of Chess960 is possible, but a more suitable database format would be desirable for this. The most effort is the overwork of the move generator, and some overwork of the GUI board, it's a lot of work, and requires a good knowledge of the code base, the castling rules of Chess960 are quite difficult to implement. Furthermore some words about the Wiki page http://sourceforge.net/p/scid/wiki/AboutScidFormat/: > [ShaneHudson] found how to store chess moves using only one byte, i.e. 8- bits. Not entirely correct, for diagonal queen moves the Scid format needs two bytes. > Modern computers have now a lot of memory and speed, so saving bits is a little out of fashion As a developer of a chess database application I cannot agree, it's still important to save bits (better: bytes). I did some real experiments with a two byte format, and the performance was worse compared to the (nearly) one byte format. The two byte format is not bad and more comfortable - I'm using a two byte format in C/CIF, here a one byte format is insufficient, C/CIF is also storing (nearly) any chess variant, and any board size - but a chess database needs high performance, even in space. > the 1-byte format makes chess960 and illegal moves difficult to store... I cannot agree, Scidb's format (quite close to Scid's format) don't has problems with storing Chess960 and illegal moves, but an illegal move needs in general more than one byte, especially if the move is also invalid (e.g. Nb1- b3). > ,,,and the tree search do not go into variations This is not a restriction by the one-byte format, the problem with the search into variations is the complexity in time. The search inside the main line will be accelerated with the use of prepared data (stored in index file), the search into variations is without any acceleration. Cheers, Gregor Cramer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=267308311&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Scid-users mailing list Scid-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scid-users
