• Intro
• Downloads
• Community
• Development
• News
• TALK

Miniature

Revision as of 20:12, 3 November 2009

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

More or less:

• The main use case is playing online against other players at freechess.org
• Now imagine that you can also chat with the other player.
• Playing against the computer is a given (chat is optional)
• Learning is important and it would be great to watch games, review stored games and also process offline the lessons given at certain times in freechess.org
• A variant would be to play against othe player with a compatible device via local network or bluetooth.
• I guess if we got at this point then implement variants such as suicide chess, random house, etc is peanuts.

Basing this on Qt 4.6 would be useful to assure the Fremantle - Harmattan path, be fully compliant with whatever the Ovi store brings and have ports for Symbian, Windows Mobile and desktop OSs (Linux, Windows, Mac).

Project status

Kicking off. Nothing exists. Just a Talk thread, a Garage project and this wiki page.

Mockups

These are the current sketches.

Old ;)

Features and roadmap

Draft. Sorted by priority.

Current features

None. Minuature is currently vaporware. :(

Roadmap

1. Play games online
   1. Chess game basics, demonstrated off-line.
      1. Finger friendly UI.
         1. Mechanism to avoid false moves. First tap to point squeare, second to confirm?
      2. Portrait mode.
      3. Pieces can be moved manually.
      4. Only legal moves are possible.
      5. "Black/White Wins!" banner after a mat.
      6. Resign.
      7. Pawn promotion, piece selection.
      8. Draw request/accept.
      9. Timer
   2. Online chess basics, targeting http://www.freechess.org/ first
      1. Log in & out
      2. Register
      3. Search challengers / by time
      4. Propose a game
      5. Timeseal support.
   3. Online chess advanced
      1. Join tournaments
      2. Full access to FICS console (might make sense only in landscape mode)
2. Chat with your opponent.
   1. Landscape support.
3. Play with other opponents P2P e.g. via Bluetooth.
4. Learn chess lessons with moves + text.
5. Play local tournaments e.g. via Telepathy Tubes.
6. Play against computer.
7. Chess variants (suicide, randomhouse...)
8. Display games by you or others, live or stored (moved to back since Chessmonk is concentrating on this for Maemo 5 - not that urgent)
   1. History of an opening.
   2. Take a picture of a printed game, process the notations with OCR and display it.
   3. Display several games at a time.
   4. Watch game via webcam stream

Development Status

1. Phase 1
   1. Setup development environment

• • • See the preview of Qt for Maemo Developers Guide
    • The Qt 4.6 packages are about to land in extras-devel
    • Official Qt 4.6 port for Maemo 5, including mailing list for developer feedback.

1. 1. Implementing the Board. The Board represents the current state of the game and is equivalent to a real physical chess board. It has no knowledge of legal or illegal moves. For now it will only accept chess pieces. The board does not know about the future or the past, any logic will be in the Game.
   2. Creating a basic GUI to display the Board and the pieces. A piece can be moved by tapping on it and then tapping on the destination.
2. Phase 2
   1. Implement a basic chess Game adapter. The basic Game adapter knows the starting position of every piece and can determine if a move was legal. The concept of alternating player moves is also implemented here. It also recognizes checkmate, stalemate and threefold repetition thus ending the game.

Technology selections

How to make the most from existing free projects avoiding forking and duplicated work as much as possible.

• Qt 4.6 for UI layer. The goal is to have Maemo as primary development platform, aiming for straight ports to Symbian and other Qt compatible platforms.
  • Can we save work by looking at pacaq and Knights? Others? --qgil 06:22, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• What starting point to get the online chess features?
• What starting point for chatting?
  • TP connection manager: http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Components
    • Qt 4.6 wrapper (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/TapiocaQt) might be a good idea to look at.
  • Rationale: I would like to see a "I play chess!" tag next to each contact I have. This information would of course have to come from a central server or such. Also, it would be great if we could just re-use the chat functionality that is already there with maemo5 (of course it needs a modified view to fit into our UI) --mikhas.
• What starting point for game analysis?
  • Scid (see dependencies) would be nice by itself and as gateway to Crafty (see dependencies) and other engines.--qgil 06:22, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Architecture

GUI:

• Board
• Chat
• Player Cards
• Online Play

Logic:

• Game - the logic for a particular game, right now that would be just chess, but other board games could be possible too. (Chess based or other)
• Pre-Game - How to find players, select a server or engine

Domain:

• Board - Represents the data structure of the board (duh)
• Player - information about the other player, like online status, skill level

Communication:

• ICS
• Bluetooth
• Telepathy
• Computer Chess Engine - an offline engine should be accessed the same way any online game is, the engine does not have to be in the same task

References

• Crafty is a free, open-source computer chess program.
• EBoard and Crafty for the N810/N800/N770 - OS2007 Downloads page.
• Knights aimed to be the ultimate chess resource for the K Desktop Environment... years ago.
• pacaq is a chess game visualizing and analysis tool done with the Maemo 4.1 Qt4 port - Talk thread.
• SCID, a chess database application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS operating systems.
  • See also SCID Pocket
• Xboard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms.