Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

EDIT: current status at http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature

DISCLAIMER: I'm doing this on my own and my free time without any link to my job at Nokia.

I love chess, even if I'm less than an average player (around 1500 with enough concentration). I love Maemo and its devices. They would fit so well, yet there is no convincing implementation of a chess game for Maemo.

Sadly I'm not a developer myself, but I can help developers getting things done with ideas, plans, test, feedback, promotion...

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 review 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).

Maybe there is already a good starting point?

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

Very good starting point there is: PyChess . Most features already there, but needs FingerGUI.
GTK+ instead of QT, however :-)

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

Yes, PyChess could be a good choice to get something up for Maemo, Moblin and GNOME desktops. However, I have a personal interest in seeing how this Qt cross-platform strategy turns out to be in reality, specially when it comes to Maemo-Symbian compatibility.

This is why I find Qt 4.6 as a starting point worth trying even if it's clearly not the fastest path to get something done for Maemo 5.

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

quim, I gather you have tried chess on the n900,
is it just me, or is it tougher to beat than it was on the n810?

in a quick search related to qtchess upgrades,

I found an older unsupporter Qt based networked chess game.
http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/FreeBSD...tgz.84691.html

also another

http://ostatic.com/qtchess

maybe these could be evaluated by someone with working qt compiler and could perhaps be used as a base or even just ideas.
its also possible the gnuchess engine may also be ported/embedded within qt too.

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

here's something to look at http://qtchess.sourceforge.net/ . it's qt, has multiplayer and chat. don't know anything else ::)

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

Definitely, a Python backend for GNU chess is the way to go, IMHO, and pyChess or glChess are good starting points.

I don't understand the Maemo approach for Qt. Which is the Hildon equivalent on Qt. I mean, is there any Qt widget library with equivalents to HildonAppMenu, HildonPickerButton, etc ? or they are supposed to be created by the apps developers from basic Qt widgets (this is not easy, specially for people who don't know anything about Qt).

Is this the place for getting the latest news about Qt for Maemo information ? [1]

[1] http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.ph...y:Qt_for_Maemo

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

I won't be using any chess game on a tablet to play on FICS. Most of the people there play fast games; I play 1-minute most days. You need something fast, because seconds count. Speed is partly a question of size. A tablet just won't work well.

Computer chess is generally not fun. The world does not need another computer chess game of any size.

What is needed is a good chess display program. You can go to FICS or ICC or other chess hangouts and watch games being played all over the world.

It would also be incredibly handy to have a good chess display program to use while reading chess books, a popular pursuit among people who care about chess.

The program SCID is already available for Linux. It has already been made available on tablets, but it needed a few modifications (it should have been rotated for better board size) and no one ever responded to requests to do that. (It also has a new play feature, but I wasn't impressed by it.)

For playing, the chess interfaces Eboard and Xboard were already adapted to tablets, but needed more work, which was never done. They could also be used for watching multiple games in an international tournament at the same time.

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

geneven - query?
why is the tablet not fast enough?

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

I think geneven is saying that the display isn't big enough to be able to play chess quickly. At least for geneven. ;)

You know another idea Quim is a way to play against your family and friends over Telepathy tubes (which lets you open up a tcp/ip connection over jabber basically). Imagine how fun Maemo conferences would be if some games like that existed and Telepathy-salut worked (Link local jabber, probably would already work if you wrote an opponent choosing gui into the game).

:)

Re: Contributors needed: the killer free chess game for Maemo
 

I think this is a very good idea.
I would be willing to help/start developing such a chess app.

I am setting up a Garage project right now ;)

And done.

I will try to gather some basic information about interfaceing with freechess.org.