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Miniature

Revision as of 16:13, 18 August 2011

You love chess. You love Maemo and its devices. You believe they fit so well... yet you haven't found a convincing implementation of a chess game for Maemo. Miniature to the rescue!

The concept

Miniature is a chess board that is always with you, ready to let you play and learn wherever you go.

• The main use case is playing online against other players at http://www.freechess.org/ (FICS)
• Now imagine that you can also chat with the other player.
• Play P2P games against other players next to you or remotely with your Contacts.
• Learning is important: watch games live, review stored games and also process offline the lessons offered at FICS.
• And not only regular chess. See also Antichess, Chess960...

Miniature is based on Qt and targets MeeGo Harmattan as primary platform. Repackaging and ports to other Qt platforms are welcome.

News

• 2011-08-15: New Miniature UX concepts integrated to the master branch - the new engine gets a UI (screenshot).
• 2011-08-13: Miniature can be developed using Qt Creator (instructions).
• 2011-08-01: Miniature 0.2.1 released! The new Encore engine and the new QML UI, together for the first time. The game can do real seeks but still no real games.
• 2011-07-27: New UI targetting MeeGo Harmattan developed in parallel - source & packages for Nokia N9/N950.
• 2011-07-18: engine refactored around Encore, a GNUChess wrapper. This is the beginning of a rewrite.
• 2011-07-06: request to port to Meego : http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?p=25031#
• 2010-07-12: P2P support available. Play against other Miniature users. Full changelog here
• 2009-12-21: Miniature learns to use animations (0.1.5-1). Miniature is now using exclusive features of Qt 4.6.
• 2009-12-20: Miniature got a bug tracker component, thanks to André!
• 2009-11-28: First bug report.  :)
• 2009-11-27: Miniature 0.1.2-1 released for Maemo and Ubuntu with first Chess rules applied.
• 2009-11-17: Miniature available for your desktop PC
• 2009-11-16: A first & dummy .deb package of Miniature is available in Maemo 5 extras-devel.
• 2009-11-11: "(10:52:48 PM) mikhas: well, it's confirmed: Miniature runs on Qt 4.6, on the N900"
• 2009-11-10: Talk thread started: Miniature development: Play chess games online
• 2009-11-09: Miniature - it moves!, first blog post from Michael Hasselmann.
• 2009-11-08: First running example mimicking the "first realistic mockup".
• 2009-11-06: Code repository created: http://gitorious.org/miniature - source code exists since the beginning.
• 2009-11-06: First realistic mockup for playing basic online chess (portrait).
• 2009-10-31: First idea proposed in a Talk thread: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo

Features

Miniature is still not ready for end users. It doesn't play offline games and doesn't even know how to go online. If you still want obtain an unstable release then please refer to the development section.

Miniature 0.1.3-1 is available in Maemo 5 Extras-devel, a repository recommended only to developers. End users will do good staying far from it, but there is a launchpad PPA with irregularly updated Ubuntu 9.04 packages.

New features in the last version:

• Candidate UI to move pieces: one click to select piece, second click to select destination square and click to an external button to confirm the move. Pieces and squares can be changed at will before clicking the confirmation button.
• Checks are detected now.
• Backend fixes improving the responsiveness of the moves.

Features implemented in previous releases:

• Boot a screen in portrait mode.
• Display a nice-looking board.
• Set the pieces in starting position.
• Enforce basic chess rules except:
  • Checkmate
  • Stalemate
  • Castling
  • En-passant
  • Pawn promotion (works in the desktop version)

Check Miniature/Development to follow the latest status and to get involved.

Screenshots

This is how the real application will look like in v0.1.x-x.

Cool little animation to show that pieces turn around between the moves	Situation after white's move: The player with the black pieces also is able to see it's pieces from his/her point of view	Starting position for human vs human, face to face.	Selecting one piece to move.
Selecting destination square.	Miniature learns chess in korius' development branch. Here rooks and knights know how to behave with each other.

Mockups

How things should look like in the future. (We are looking for real designers!)

First boot.

Contact us

Questions, feedback and contributions are welcome!

• Talk discussion thread: Miniature development: Play chess games online.
• With some luck you will find us online at #miniature in irc.freenode.net.

Development

See /Development for more information on developing Miniature.

There are some policies that we follow in the project.

Contributors

• Michael Hasselmann: lead developer.
• Dennis Stötzel: chess logics.
• Mathias Hasselmann: veteran programmer.
• Dariusz Mikulski: P2P telepathy integration.
• Quim Gil: documentation.
• Ekaterina Gerasimova: Game icon.

Special thanks to Colin M.L. Burnett for his free piece set used by Wikipedia.

Users

Do you want to test Miniature and it's cool possibility to play against other people over the air? Or do you want to make simply a match versus someone who is part of the community?

-> A list of users should help you to get an Opponent.