Ok I went back and checked on the castling using only the ChessV engine with default settings with me as white. I've been playing mostly standard, gothic, and omega. Of three quick openings/midgames, Omega alone castled. What seems to happen is that the engine will push pawns away from a potential castle position before it gets the chance to castle into it.
Yes, I did some testing and I see what you mean. It has no particularly strong desire to castle, so I'm increasing the castling bonus. I'm also increasing the length of the opening phase. The development evaluation bonuses/penalties "fade out" as the game progresses. (By the endgame, it doesn't matter if you've castled or not.) So some games it just doesn't get around to castling before the bonus is no longer applied. And maybe this is right - maybe sometimes there are more urgent things going on.
On a different note, I tried to get P2P.exe (http://hgm.nubati.net/p2p.html) to work with this to play over the internet, but through no fault of either programmer, it won't work. This is because when you bring up the engine settings there should be a specialized window, but in ChessV there is always the same variation, weakening, etc. I only bring this up bcs there might be an easy fix ;)
Interesting. I'm not surprised this doesn't work, although I don't know of any specific reason why it shouldn't. The ChessV GUI doesn't support everything in the xboard protocol and there could be bugs with that which is implemented. I may dig into this at some point, but there are other things needing attention more urgently. At some point, ChessV should just have the ability to play matches across the internet on its own.
Yes, I did some testing and I see what you mean. It has no particularly strong desire to castle, so I'm increasing the castling bonus. I'm also increasing the length of the opening phase. The development evaluation bonuses/penalties "fade out" as the game progresses. (By the endgame, it doesn't matter if you've castled or not.) So some games it just doesn't get around to castling before the bonus is no longer applied. And maybe this is right - maybe sometimes there are more urgent things going on.
Interesting. I'm not surprised this doesn't work, although I don't know of any specific reason why it shouldn't. The ChessV GUI doesn't support everything in the xboard protocol and there could be bugs with that which is implemented. I may dig into this at some point, but there are other things needing attention more urgently. At some point, ChessV should just have the ability to play matches across the internet on its own.