I think it's now time to improve Nanook chess with a real new version. The last release v0.17 is weak, I identified a lot of problems 2 years ago but I never corrected them, a lot of functionalities are not implemented, and I don't feel very well to let this project unfinished.I started this project almost 8 years ago in C language, for a computer school project. The name of the project was "Epichess", and it has been developed to play chess through network, with client/server connections functionalities, 2D graphic, multiplayers/multi-engines for tournament, elo estimation, compatibility on Windows/Linux… I worked in this project during 2 months, the engine was weak, oriented for beginners.
4 years ago, I decided to extract the engine from Epichess project and make it compatible with UCI protocol, rewriting quickly just some pieces of code, with no improvement, Nanook v0.15 was born. V0.16 has been released in june 2007, with some improvements but nothing really new.
In may 2009, after 2 years of inactivity, I added some new functionalities, but it was more like a patch than a real new version, just to make it a little stronger.
Now, when I watch the C code source, I’m very surprised and I understand why Nanook Chess is so unstable… I patched this code for so long, I actually can see some error that I coded 8 years ago that are still there. The only way to have a new stable version is to develop this project from scratch, and that’s the decision I just caught: the next version of Nanook Chess will be developed in C++ from scratch. I expect from this version to be stronger than the 0.17, more stable and implementing the UCI protocol with all functionalities.
