In this release, the focus was on stabilizing the application, reducing random crashes and improving the user experience.

Quite a few validations were added to handle loading of saved PGN game files.

Of-course, I am proud that gnome-chess doesn’t simply die when you try to start the game with a “Golbat” image!
I enhanced bad PGN load behavior for all the possible fields. For most of the invalid fields, gnome-chess recognizes while parsing the PGN file it displays a warning and takes a corrective action.

Also, if you try to load a PGN which had some invalid moves chess prompts a dialog informing the player of the same and starts a new game. Support for Fischer and Bronstein clock types was added in the 3.16 release. If you had an invalid clock type in the PGN file gnome-chess defaults to the simple clock after displaying a warning and starts the game (much better than crashing on an invalid clock type and being unable to play your saved game, right?).

Some players complained that they couldn’t play against the computer but they actually didn’t have a chess engine installed. So gnome-chess now prompts a warning dialog for this on start-up if you don’t have a chess engine installed.

I also fixed a strange bug when gnome-chess tried to kill some poor random process if it couldn’t launch the chess-engine, well the fix made me laugh!

Michael Catanzaro fixed an issue with several games to fix dragging the game window properly after clicking the game view amongst several other enhancements like build system improvements. Michael and I also pushed several enhancements to the chess-engine.

Johan Manuel added an “Alternate” option in “Play as” to play as the opposite color one played in the previous game.

The translators did a great job of consistently improving translations throughout the release.

Keep geeky and keep playing!