Dear Shogi-friends,

It's been a while sinds a new version of the Gnu Shogi Database came out, so this time I wanted to make something special for you. The one thing that bothered me the most the last couple of months was the terrible layout of the Gnu Shogi Database Client. So, since I was rewriting the complete game tree code, I gave the layout some work too.

Also, the need for a variations window had become so clear, and Thomas kept telling me to write something, that in this version it replaces the Score window. To make things easier for the poor programmer, I rewrote the complete game tree. (I'm going to spare you the boring details) A lot of work still needs to be done in the variations departement, but the skeleton is there to add functions in a decent way.

From a database perspective, the big news is that we now almost doubled the size of the database. Over 1670 games can now be consulted in the blink of an eye. (a slow eye, I admit :-)

The people that really deserve the credit for this are Thomas Majewski and Patrick Davin. Thomas did a great job entering around 70 game scores from the last few European Amateur tournaments. Thomas, you saved us a lot of work !

Patrick Davin's Shogi Nexus website is loaded with game-scores and I got permission to add them all to the database. Thanks to the very good quality of the game-scores, the conversion of HTML files to games took less then a week. The only problem I found was that not all games had a date, but I solved this by using the date 01-Jan-1970. I will correct this as soon as I can but it's going to be a huge job to make the database more consistent.

For the people using a firewall, I included the "Open game file" option in the "File" menu. This will allow you to read files from the web-server.

The last thing I want to mention is that from now on the database has a new field, specifying for each record when it was updated. For all the old records, this date is 31-Dec-1997. This will allow you to look for the new records in the database. Use the "what's new" option in the "Search menu" and select "updated today", "updated this month", "updated this year".

Enjoy -- matt