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Features - Playing
- Sought graph and Sought list to get a game easily
- User interface to post seek ads and make match offers without having to
learn server commands and options
- Highly customizable board: vector pieces with antialias (more than ten
different piece sets available) or bitmap pieces (more than 40 piece sets
available with GraphicPack installed,
four new enhanced bitmap piece sets with semitransparent antialiased borders to look smoothed at any size), squares (solid color or bitmaps), name
and clocks colors and sizes and many other options.
Full screen mode
- Customizable popup windows displayed on opponent's requests (challenges,
draw offers, ...) and other events (partnership, game finished, ...).
- Customizable move input: drag-and-drop move or two-clicks move, with the
possibility of hiding the piece being dragged.
- Support for the DGT electronic board
- Multiple premoves and smartmoves
- Last move highlight, target square highlight while moving and source square
highlight
- Several types of customizable low-time alerts
- Highly customizable move sounds
- Move list display with mouse wheel support and automatic loading of the
previous moves in games resumed or observed not from the beginning
- Figurine algebraic notation in the move list and in the last move display
- Captured pieces display (stacked or listed)
- Automatic game saving in PGN format (customizable:
can save in a single file or in different files according to
date/opponent/game type), clock information for each move can be added to the
PGN format; bughouse games are saved in BPGN format
- ECO code and variation name display
- Graphical representation of material strength
- Lag statistics for both players (total lag, maximum and average lag per
move)
- Support for crazyhouse
- Support for bughouse (partner buttons, suggest in partner board,
wait-for-piece premoves)
- Support for atomic chess (explosion sound and animation)
- Support for all the other chess variants available on the FICS server
- Integrated legality checking for standard chess and variants
- Support for simul games
Integrated timeseal: it can be enabled in the Advanced-connection-options Dialog
Move announcements: a folder containinig DGT-compatible move announcement sounds is required (not provided with BabasChess, but it can be freely downloaded from the DGT web site)
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Features - Observing, examining and editing games
- Multiple boards (there is no limit to the number of board windows);
tabbed boards for easily observing many games
- Integrated PGN viewer and editor, with support for
most chess variants (including Crazyhouse, Fischer Random and Suicide); the PGN
editor has unlimited undo/redo
levels, supports variations, comments and annotations
- The DGT electronic board can be used to enter variations and to setup positions
- Upload PGN game to the server
- User interface for setting up board positions on the server without having
to learn server commands
- Integrated engine analysis (not available while
playing): UCI and Winboard protocols supported
- Whole game analysis by the engine, with automatic annotations
and comments;
the analysis can run in background (if the user is not playing)
- Duplicate game command: allows to copy a game into a new board window (e.g.
to examine variations)
- Automatic move forward (with customizable time interval)
- Copy current game (PGN) or position (FEN) to the clipboard
- Automatic observe on game notify; automatic unfollow
when you start playing
- Support for circles and arrows in games examined on the server;
circles and arrows can be easily placed using the mouse
Smart Paste command (from Edit menu): it automatically detects if the data in the
clipboard is a FEN string, a whole PGN game or a partial move list and pastes it
in the active board;
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Features - Chat and console
- Tabbed Chat window (a separate tab for each user you are chatting with)
- Tabbed Channel window (a separate tab for each channel, automatically
synchronized with the the user's channel list on the server)
- Board console displays only kibitzes and whispers of the current game and
allows chatting with the opponent
- Customizable colors and text styles for different types of server outputs
- Individual channel colors and text styles
- Customized sound effects associated to different communication types
- URL and e-mail links
- Server command links (any server command enclosed by quotes is converted
into a link, which executes the command if clicked)
- Automatically display emoticons (can be disabled in the preferences)
- Automatically plays emotesounds (can be customized/disabled in the
preferences)
- Automatic conversion of stressed vowels for Italian and other languages
(e.g. è --> e')
- Command history and autocomplete from history (similar to the address bar
of Internet Explorer)
A huge amount of window layout possibilities: Main console, Infow window,
Chat window and Channel window can be independently configured as 1) docked window, 2) auto-hide window, 3) floating window, or 4) document window; they can be docked together when floating and/or placed into tabbed containers. Document windows (including boards) can be displayed as child windows or as tabbed document windows, using the "Tabbed documents" command in the Window Menu;
- Console logging
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Features - Help and wizards
- Contextual Help (press F1 or use the Help menu)
- Preference wizard to help configuring BabasChess the first time
- Themes: predefined set of preferences, to configure
BabasChes with a single click
Theme Packs: a Theme Pack is a collection of
pieces/backgrounds/sounds/themes/... compressed in a single file. This allows
new themes to be simply downloaded and
installed
- Formula wizard: lets you create complex formulae in few easy steps
- User interface for changing commonly used server variables without having
to remember their names
- Finger notes editor
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Other features
The general look of the User Interface can be configured in the User-interface preferences: several options
are available to control menu animation, autohide of rarely used menu items, UI
element colors and style;
New true color graphics for all the toolbar and menu icons
- Highly customizable and flexible windows layout manager (you can load/save
window layouts and associate different layouts for: playing, playing bughouse,
observing games, ...);
9 default layouts are provided and can be quickly loaded from the layouts button
Configurable keyboard shortcuts: a single interface
command or a multi-line script can be associated to any keyboard shortcut
- Message window for reading, sending and replying to off-line messages
- Multiple timers (multiline scripts can be associated to each timer)
- Customizable buttons, customizable mouse actions (contextual menu),
customizable quick commands (top menu);
the customized buttons toolbar can be docked to any side of the main window;
- Customizable related web links menu, for quick access to frequently used
web sites
- Multiple connection profiles with customizable logon scripts
- Different languages available for the user interface: English, Italian,
German, French,
Portuguese, Spanish,
Polish, Croatian
- Pending offers list
- List of games in progress on the server, configurable with filters (game
type, rated/unrated, guest/registered users) and sortable (by white/black name,
by white/black rating, by game type, by time controls, ...)
- List of on-line players, configurable with filters (available to play,
titled, computers, guest/registered) and sortable (by name, by rating, by
titles, ...)
- Friend list (contains information on the players in the user's notify list
that are currently on-line)
- Support for plugins
- TheBoss! option (particularly useful if you play at work...)
- Profile window for a user, containing finger notes, variables, history,
journal, stored games
- User rules: configure particular behaviors for
specific users (advanced unlimited client-side censor, custom users'
communication colors and sounds, ...
Scripts (sequences of server and/or UI commands) can be associated to specific events such as "Game start", "Game finished", ...
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