These releasenotes gives informations about the new playing strength of spike, bug-fixes and two tools that are delivered with spike.
Playing Strength
Spike 0.8 adds about 30 Elo of playing strength compared to Spike 0.7. As allways we haven´t been able to test the exact advantage. It now has
Better handling of weak pawns
Better piece development in opening
Better handling of endgames with few pieces (no EGTB yet)
Some improvements in search that results in less nodes at same search depth
Improved king safety
New Command line options
All command line parameters dominates the config file settings. UCI options sent by the gui are again more relevant. Example if you switches the book of f by command line and switches it on by config file it is switched off. If now the UCI-GUI switches the book on it is switched on.
/book or /bibliothek:
No (No book is used)
Yes (The internal book is used)
[Filename] (The book from „Filename“ is used)
/Config [Filename] (The config file „Filename“ is used. Else the config file „Spike.conf“ will be used)
/Log [Filename] (The log file „Filename“ is used)
Config file
The config file has been a xml file. Some people got problems with the xml file format as you cannot edit it by double clicking. Double clicking typically invokes the browser that has not got an edit mode. Now the config file is still a xml file but has the extension „conf“. Spike provides a config file edit tool that can be downloaded seperately. When this tool is installed a double click on the „conf“ file will open the config file editor.
Spike still provides a XSLT Sheet hat will result in a nice view of the config file if viewed with the browser.
The config file edit tool can load and save different config files. They can be selected by command line options.
Bug Fixes
Hash fill rate is corrected for UCI
UCI Options are now allways sent to GUI
Division by zero bug in UCI has been fixed
Spike now shows its calculating information in Fritz GUI. (The calculation thread has lower priority now)
Bugs not fixed
It has been reported, that spike may destroy it´s own config-file. We haven´t found any problem here. Thus this bug may still be there.
Books
Spike now supports external books. It still has an internal book that is used if the book is switched on but no book file is specified or the book file cannot be found.
The book file has the extension „scb“ for „spike compressed book“. To build those books spike provides an additional tool for building books: „Spike Book Builder“.
Spike Book Builder
Spike Book Builder is a stand alone tool to create books from pgn. It has an own gui to browse through and modify move trees and to create books from these trees. This tool has beta state, thus not all features are implemented.