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cutechess / cutechess

Cute Chess is a graphical user interface, command-line interface and a library for playing chess.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Unclear stderrFile and timeoutScaleFactor in engines.json #820

Open tissatussa opened 2 months ago

tissatussa commented 2 months ago

I'm using CuteChess GUI on Linux. In the file '~/.config/cutechess/engines.json' i see the entries 'stderrFile' and 'timeoutScaleFactor', which are unclear.

I can set a value to 'stderrFile' like '/path/to/mylog.txt', and sometimes lines are logged here when an error occurs, but do i have to set the path manually ? I expect this can be done in the GUI but nowhere i see an option for that.

And what about the setting 'timeoutScaleFactor' ? It's default '1' but what does it mean and do ? What happens when i change the value ?

alwey commented 2 weeks ago

ScaleTimeouts does what its name implies, it scales all the timeouts of the protocol the engine and cutechess use for communication. It is an expert setting. It was introduced to help with NN-engines which were notorously slow to start or for engines where enormous amounts of memory had to be initialised. So a factor bigger than 1 would increase every kind of protocol timeout accordingly.

Default settings seem to be reasonable and they are well tested. In general, best leave ScaleTimeouts untouched (value of 1.0).

Regarding stdErrFile I will come back to this later - I have to check the engines.json-File on my development computer first to remember.