14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project announced the availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Chess 3.10 application for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.
GNOME Chess 3.10 Beta 1 introduces a new pause game option, fixes figurine algebraic notation that displayed the wrong figures, only one game is now stored at a time in autosave history, users will now be prompted to save the game before opening a new one, and the fullscreen icon will change to an un-fullscreen icon when in fullscreen view.
This first Beta release of GNOME Chess 3.10 also fixes viewing of arbitrary turns with the history combo box, and a warning message will be displayed at the end the game, when a CECP engine claims GNOME Chess allowed an illegal move or an engine makes an illegal move, instead of hanging forever.
The Claim Draw works again in this development version of GNOME Chess, as the developers fixed the fifty-move rule detection and two bugs related to threefold repetition detection. Also, if a draw can't be detected, an explanatory dialog will be displayed.
Moreover, the Preferences dialog has been revamped, as the development team removed the "Show History" option, reordered some preferences, and added transient for the main window.
The engines.conf file has been renamed to chess-engines.conf, and it is installed into $sysconfdir instead of $(datadir)/gnome-chess. Other chess engines were also improved in this first Beta release, support for adding arguments to be appended to the UCI go command has been added, and format for passing UCI options to engines has been greatly simplified.
Last but not least, GNOME Chess 3.10 Beta 1 updates the following translations: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Galician, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmal, Slovenian, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. For more details, please check the official raw changelog.
Download GNOME Chess 3.10 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.