Miniature

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!

1 The concept
2 News
3 Features
4 Screenshots
- 4.1 Mockups
5 Contact us
6 Development
7 Contributors

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

Miniature is based on Qt, targets Maemo as primary platform and plans to have ports for Symbian, Windows Mobile and desktop OSs (Linux, Windows, Mac).

News

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.

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 v0.1.3-x.

All UI elements turn towards the active player (offline mode).	There! An '80s-style solid grey drop shadow! My eyes! Arrrrgh!!!	Starting position for human vs human, face to face.	Selecting one piece to move.
Selecting destination square.	Minature-20091219-4.png Confirming the move.	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
Miniature-movelist.png Players can see their moves in a separate view. It's only mock-up code at the moment.	Miniature-about.png The about dialog.	All pieces.png Rules for all pieces implemented	Miniature learns chess in korius' development branch. Here rooks and knights know how to behave with each other.