Chess software with personalities

Someone knows of a good modern chess software with personalities of diferent strength, in the style of the old Chessmaster, that works with Windows 10?

Lucas Chess is the best for this by far.

I know Fritz and Lucas, both are interesting and generally good but none has personalities with idiossincratic styles of play and even avatars and fake biographies in the style of Chessmater. Its hard to understand why Chessmaster died and nothing in the kind comes to the place.

I don't know of anything better than Chessmaster in the realm of personalities. Majestic Chess was interesting, but not nearly as good as Chessmaster, and it wasn't designed for any OS later than XP. A few engines like Glass, Rodent, and Pro Deo offered some personalities, but no fake bios or anything.

Nowadays the only thing similar to Chessmaster is Dasher, the ICC (Internet Chess Club) client. But the feature is very lateral in Dasher and underdeveloped.

<https://www.chessclub.com/downloads>

Lucas Chess absolutely has personalities with different styles of play.  No avatars or fake biographies.

Last time I played with Lucas Chess it had no true styles of play (personalities) just different chess engines set for various strenghts.

It sounds to me that you need to figure out a way to get Chessmaster to work on Windows 10.

I don't even have Chessmaster now. Last version I had was Chessmaster 6000 Mac version. At that time it had a very good collection of personalities.

I wasn't aware of the Dasher personalities. I didn't install Dasher, but it looks like it's using the Crafty 20.14 engine with custom-created personalities.

What did you mean when you said the feature is very lateral in Dasher?

Dasher is buildt and maintained as a chess client to ICC, which is a commercial chess server. If the surrogate partner in Dasher is too developed (in the kind Chessmaster used to be) the online chess partners would be less appealing and people would connect less to ICC and not more. That is why the offline sparring partner feature is underdeveloped in Dasher.

OK, now I understand what you meant about Dasher. So, I guess there's not really anything out there quite as good as Chessmaster for personalities.

If you want to create personalities of your own, probably the best engine for that right now is the Rodent II engine. However, it's only an engine, so there isn't a GUI that can display fake bios and photos.

http://www.pkoziol.cal24.pl/rodent/rodent.htm

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=59257

P.S. - Oh, I almost forgot - The NagaSkaki GUI has a rudimentary personality system with about 10 pre-built personalities; You can create your own.

http://www.mayothi.com/nagaskaki.html

Then you should try it again:

I never managed to set personalities in UCI chess engines, looks complicated and probably I am not using the chess GUI they were set to be used with.

NagaSkaki 5.12 is an excellent piece of chess programming and I know it since 2009, problem is development stalled there, seven years ago... Anyway it still work with my Windows 10.

Ok. I will take another look. Thank you.

From what I can tell from using Lucas Chess a short while, it looks like you have lots and lots of choices of engines in Play mode, but all you can set is the depth or time. I can't see how you can change any other engine parameters like evaluation terms, king safety, etc.

Additionally, some of the settings are confusing. For example, I can choose a 600 elo engine, but then set the depth to 30 ply. If I'm choosing a 600 elo engine, it shouldn't let me also specify a huge ply depth.

Sure. Too many options, a bit confusing on the so many ways for playing engines. Also it is not so stable in my computer. Had some crashes in a few minutes evaluation.

I don't think you can set those parameters manually, but the personalities use different settings.

You can read more about the playing personalities in Lucas Chess here:

http://www-lucaschess.rhcloud.com/static/pdf/english/Personalities.pdf

They are new in version 9, so if you are using an earlier version, you won't see them as an option.

OK, I'll give a look.

[Later edit] - Well, the pdf file discusses how much better and more human the 2nd gen engine designs are, but as far as I can tell, the inner settings of the engines are completely hidden from the user and are not changeable. I have no way to get insight into how these engines work; I simply have to use them.

So, I guess LC would be nice if you only want to use the engine personalities and don't care what the settings are. But, if you want more details of the engine settings, I guess you're out of luck.