GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 685367
glChess engines don't play
Last modified: 2013-05-01 21:22:01 UTC
On my newly-installed Arch Linux system, glChess is not displaying the output of any of the chess engine backends. If I start a game against the computer (regardless of which side I make it), or even try to pit the computer against itself, my cpu usage skyrockets but no moves get made by the computer player, and it acts as though two humans are playing. Furthermore, when the game ends, or I quit the program, the chess engines aren't killed, and they start eating RAM and (eventually) swap space. Additional info: I've got the following chess engines installed: gnuchess 6.0.2-1 fruit 2.1-1 phalanx 22-3 sjeng 11.2-3 Steps to reproduce: Start a new game in glChess, setting one or both the players to a computer. Game starts, but no moves are made by the computer player although the CPU usage increases dramatically. Quitting or ending the game doesn't stop engines, which have to be manually killed.
This is what I mean about CPU/memory usage when the engines aren't killed by glChess: http://ompldr.org/vZnFnNQ
For Glchess version 2.x it was possible to tweak phalanx engine to be very weak: http://odo.lv/Recipes/Glchess_en Though now, Glchess 3.x does not work with phalanx anymore (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685732 )
The CPU/memory issue is fixed in Git master. To troubleshoot the computer not playing - can you set the environment variable G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all, launch glchess from the terminal, make a move, and post the terminal output? You should see something that indicates what the engine is doing (similar to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665610#c15 ). For now, let's use the gnuchess engine for this.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.