Have you read the overview? If not, please do so first!

 

These are a few significant new features of the 2024 release.

  • Create an animated GIF of a game in the game browser.
  • Piece tracking, i.e. showing the route of a piece, was added to the game browser.
  • Sorting and deleting games in PGN files is now easy in the PGN file browser.
  • The position preview in the PGN file browser has now an auto-play mode and piece tracking.
  • Improved relation between game browser and setalyser. Ctrl-W is a new global short-cut for opening a new setalyser; if the current window is a game browser, then its current position is used in the new setalyser. If a setalyser is the current window, then Ctrl-N opens a game browser with the game from the setalyser.
  • In the game browser one can swap White's and Black's pieces as well as left und right.
  • Ctrl-V is a new short-key for faster FEN setup in the setalyser.
  • The PGN file selection dialog shows much more files and there is a new text field for filtering.
  • Screenshots are now also possible in the winning zone tool.
  • The Four Directions button is gone. Instead, there are now eight directions.
  • The most changes are new search options in the PGN file browser; new endgame searches, new material searches, new incident searches were added, as well as new conditions for pawn configurations and a completely new search for properties of the very first move (almost all inspired by my work on endgames and studies).
  • Finally, the FEN data interface has been extended: in the game browser and the setalyser you can copy all FENs of the game to the system clipboard. From there they can be used (Ctrl-V), e.g. to find positions from this game in a whole PGN file (see PGN file browser).

 

Here are a few notable changes from the 2023 release.

  • The search menu in the PGN file viewer has again be extended a lot. Search options for comments, NAGs and maneuvers have been added, and other search options have been extended (e.g., the search for FENs or the search for pawn configurations).
  • The PGN file viewer has also received a completely new menu, namely for FENs. This menu's option allows you to retrieve game positions as FENs for use in other windows. An example is given in the documentation.
  • The Game browser also has some new features.
    • The board is shown with coordinates.
    • Numbers can be added to squares on the board to show corresponding squares.
    • A screnshot of the board can be saved by a mouse click.
    • A running window can be specified to always be displayed at the top of the screen (see "Always on top of the screen" in the Settings menu).
  • Another new feature of the game browser concerns the setting of the text creation type, i.e. the way the game notation is displayed (see also in the Settings menu). Previously, the notation was displayed without line breaks, which is now the option "Compact".  The new default mode is the option "New lines at variations", which is much easier to read. A third option is used to implement the puzzle mode, which is another new feature (see the documentation).
  • There are also some changes of the Setalyser. Coordinates are shown on the board and a How-to menu helps with castling and en passant issues. But most of the changes will hopefully remain hidden, as they affect the smooth transition between set-up and game mode.

 

In case you are used to an older version of the Chess Suite, you might be interested in the following list of noteworthy changes which were made for the 2022 release.

  • You can now specify for some dialogs that they will be opened at the same point on the screen the next time. This allows you to open combinations of windows again and again in the same constellation.
  • Game browser and Setalyser support now One-Click-Moves. If there is only one move to a square, then it suffices to click once on that square to make the move. E.g., in the start position a click to e4 executes the move e2-e4. Moreover, if there is only one square a piece is allowed to move to, then a click on that piece executes the move. A special case happens with promotion: If the only legal move for a pawn is a promotion move, then a click on the pawn will promote it to a queen (if an underpromotion is wanted, then moving the pawn to the promotion square will open the usual dialog for selecting the promotion piece).
  • Modern NNUE engines often offer the possibility of calculating the probabilities of a win, a draw and a loss (see option UCI_ShowWDL in the engine's configuration). These values will now be displayed by the game browser and Setalyser, resp.
  • Due to my extensive occupation with endgames in recent years, many features are now also available for games whose starting position is not the usual one (i.e. for game fragments). This includes the variant trees, the merging of games and also the PGN Comparer. This means, among other things, that the games from the thematic engine competitions can also be used in these parts of the Chess Suite.
  • Would you like to communicate directly with your engine? There is now a menu item UCI console (experimental) in the Engines menu (this menu appears with several windows including the start dialog). The UCI console allows you to send UCI commands to your engine and see what the engine responds. Sounds like a pure developer tool, but basically allows any chess variant to be played with an engine like Fairy-Stockfish.
  • The best improvements are often the ones that don't need to be explained and that nobody notices. Such improvements have been seen in abundance over the past year. I mention only one point: Future versions of the Chess Suite will be able to read all stored files (comparison results, bulk results, winning zones etc.) that are written with release 2022. But if you have stored files with a previous release, you have to recreate them once.