Thursday, January 05, 2006

glChess getting there...

Just got board highlighting working again in glChess. I will be interested on feedback if players consider it useful or not.

It's quite disturbing to count the amount of effort put in and I'm still not back to the 0.8 functionality level! Though of course there have been some new ideas added in as I've been coding (i.e. feature creep!).

Hopefully there will be a spell low typing in my day job so I can spend my typing time on glChess. I really want to get it tidied up (and release 1.0 before it's a decade (!) old).

So what I'm currently aiming for to release 0.9:
- Get AI working again (part ported, only support GNUchess for now)
- Automatically save games to PGN on exit and reload on startup (not in 0.8)
- deb package for Ubuntu, alien built RPM packages.

And what remains to get to the level of 0.8 - these should be in the 0.9.1 release.
- Stored preferences (.ini to be portable)
- Enable GUI elements config, end game, surrender etc
- Animation (rotating board and moving pieces (new to 0.9.1))
- Network play (not sure how portable this will be to windows)

For 0.9.2:
- Windows installer made using pyexe
- Fixed network play :)
- Fix umpteen other bugs

And what remains to catch up with pre 0.8!
- Textures
- Lighting and transparency (but only as a theme this time)

And for the future:
- ICS (Internet chess) support

And I must update/complete the website. Or find someone who is good at that sort of thing :)

2 comments:

Joel said...

Keep it up Bob, it's been awesome seeing your chess piece models in screen savers and seeing the Apple version in Mac OSX.

Have they released the code back to you per chance?

Robert Ancell said...

Not sure what you mean...

The OSX game was supposed to be under some sort of MIT license but it was marked as GPL when I last checked.

Have never heard anything from other people who have used them - they just show up from time to time.

Oh and I refactored all the code so it's not thousands of lines of openGL calls - now it's in vertex arrays