Renegade 1.3.1 - new version chess engine

Renegade - UCI chess engine  Author: Krisztian Peocz  

Rating Chess Engines Diary CEDR=3619

Renegade is a chess engine written in C++ using Visual Studio 2019. It values readability and simplicity, and uses the UCI protocol to communicate, making it easy to connect it to chess frontends. Under construction since October 7, 2022 and released publicly on January 15, 2023.  

The project can be compiled using Visual Studio 2019 with C++20 features enabled. The engine makes heavy use of `popcnt` and `lzcnt` instructions, thus only processors from 2013 or so are supported, but the calls to these instructions are wrapped in a custom function, and replacing them with something more compatible is relatively straightforward. Currently only Windows binaries are compiled, but in the future I would like to make them for Linux as well.

v.1.3.1:

Renegade 1.3.1 (July 14, 2026)

This is a small bugfix release addressing two issues:

After adding support for non-power-of-2 transposition table sizes, the wrong part of the board hash got saved for each entry. This resulted in losing resiliency against hash collisions, corrupting parts of the search tree. The performance severely degraded as hash size, time control, and thread count increased.

There was a move generation bug in FRC, where the engine allowed castling even if the king got in a check by a sliding piece on the backrank. Fortunately, positions like this are fairly rare in games.

Performance against version 1.3.0 at a time control of 50+0.5s (UHO_Lichess_4852_v1.epd):

Elo   | 3.65 +- 2.36 (95%)

Conf  | 50.0+0.50s Threads=1 Hash=128MB

Games | N: 20004 W: 4675 L: 4465 D: 10864

Penta | [4, 2283, 5217, 2495, 3]

While in most cases the performance was still acceptable, it is still advised to update to this version, especially when running it in a high hash, high thread count configuration.

github:https://github.com/pkrisz99/Renegade/releases/

Renegade 1.1.9 JA vs other engines:

Sloth 2.0 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Trinket 3.5.0 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Topple 0.8.1 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Thrawn 2.1 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Reggz 0.6.0	6/6	+6	6 Games
Roc2 2.0.4	5.5/6	+5	6 Games
Yakka 1.2	5.5/6	+5	6 Games
Stro4k 3.0 JA	5.5/6	+5	6 Games
Sentinel 2.0	4/4	+4	4 Games
Odonata 1.0.0 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Mufasa 0.2.1 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Fatalii 0.9.0	4/4	+4	4 Games
Gnuchess 6.2.9 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
GOOB 1.8.9 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Pioneer 0.3.2 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Altair 7.1.5 JA	2/4	+0	4 Games
Stockfish dev-20250213	1.5/4	-1	4 Games
Booot 7.4	1/4	-2	4 Games
YuliGM 19	0.5/4	-3	4 Games
Kopyto 5df55e1	2/2	+2	2 Games
Motsog 22	2/2	+2	2 Games

Renegade 1.3.1 download