Testers are welcome for the preliminary version. Volunteers should sign up, so that the testing can be coordinated. Please send a message to the author.

How a message can be sent:

  1. A membership in Sourceforge is required (open Account Registration ). The membership is free of charge and duties.
  2. Open Send an Email , log in with your member name, and send the message.

For additional wanted functionalities feature requests can be entered. These requests will partly be a basis of decision-making for further development.

How to enter feature requests:

  1. Open Tracker: Feature Requests 
  2. Click "Add new".

These request should consider that Scidb is a pure database application. That means the following functionalities are not destined for Scidb:

  • FICS connection
  • Correspondence/Email chess support
  • Automatic game analysis
  • Chess training
  • Playing against external chess programs
  • Other chess program specific tasks

For such functionalities another project is in planning stage: Jessy . In this way an overloading of the database application Scidb will be prevented. Jessy will have a connection to the Scidb bases.

Furthermore project help is welcome. The following tasks are open:

Tcl/Tk

  • Some of the icons do need rework.

  • Programming a 'Tip of the Day' dialog with appendant tips.

  • Writing the HTML online help pages.

  • Printing PDF documents and images (board dumps).

  • Programming an ECO browser.

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    C++

  • Windows porting. Although the development is platform independent, Windows does not provide the functions fopencookie() and open_memstream(). Unfortunately the effort will be high. The basis for this task is the library 'newlib' (only the stdio part). More programming effort for the porting shouldn't be neccessary.

  • HTML generation (see LaTeX generation).

  • The SVG library Anti-Grain (AGG) delivers dissatisfying results for line drawing. The lines are not anti-aliased, but they should be. This part of the library has to be modified/overworked. Apparently the author Maxim Shemanarev abondend the development of this library. A real alternative for this library is not exisiting. The use of Cairo would imply too many dependencies (besides Cairo is deemed to be relatively slow). Furthermore the drawing of gradients, implemented by the author, needs improvements (userSpaceOnUse/objectBoundingBox is not realized).

  • For the drawing of pie charts the function arc() (of the SVG library) is required. This function currently delivers anything but circular arcs, rework of the function is neccessary (requires much know-how!).

  • Reading of ChessBase databases is tested only for ChessBase version 9. ChessBase version 10 supports chess 960 games (in a rudimentary way). For that ChessBase must have extended the format (X-Fen/Shredder-Fen, castling). This has to be tested and to adapted. Currently the decoding of chess 960 games is not working.

  • Testing (and appropriate adaptions) of the internal chess program. Some of the move computations, especially in the opening phase, are still dissatisfying.

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