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!

Contents

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.

The developer mailing list is chess-developer@garage.maemo.org

Mockups

These are the current sketches.

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Old ;)

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Use cases

Draft. Sorted by priority.

  1. Play games at http://www.freechess.org/
  2. Display games by you or others, live or stored.
  3. Learn chess lessons with moves + text.
  4. Chat with your opponent.
  5. Play with other opponents P2P e.g. via Bluetooth.
  6. Play local tournaments e.g. via Telepathy Tubes.
  7. Play against computer.
  8. Chess variants (suicide, randomhouse...)

Architecture

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

  • 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.
  • Xboard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms.
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