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

This is quite off topic, but there's "only" one unbeatable strategy for chess, or any other competitive game for that matter: do not draw! ;)

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

Well, if you have 1500 points and you play against a 1800 player (or something notably higher) have no doubt that you can consider a draw like a personal victory, and this will be reflected in the points you will earn.

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

The wiki page was growing fast, so we have split it.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature is focused on end users, even if we have none now. ;) Are you missing anything essential at this level?

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development is focused on... development. I have just dumped the sections moved from the main page.

The next step is to detach a subpage for the current development phase. This way we also get a quite nice and well established Development wiki page, while most of the chaos goes to the wiki page of the current sprint/phase.

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

Would it be possible to think/develop it in a way that would allow me to plug gnugo and a go board to make miniature more of a "board game framework" than a chess game ?
I've been thinking about building a fremantle go game for a while but it seems both games have the same requirements : online/offline gaming, chat, replay/analysis.

Scp

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

eboard an crafty also are working out of the box on the N900. Fullscreen mode doesen't work and it's hard to use the menus without a stylus. If you want to store stetting, played/watched games, ... you have to create the folders:
I am using eboard nearly every (working) day while commuting.

You can use the diablo build to install it. The .deb could be found there:
http://www.v7f.eu/public/n810/

Beside of this I'll have a look how I (also no developer) can help to bring this chess on N900 project forward.

Thanks for this thread! :-)

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

Go support, next to chess, is probably very interesting to think about.

But personally, I'd rather have a Miniature/MiniatureGo package with two apps that maybe share some core components. I'd feel restricted if I program a chess app and always have to think on a higher abstraction level whether this certain feature is go-compatible, as well. There is value in abstraction, and there's overdesign ;)

See the chess-devel ML, Andy brought up the idea of a board game framework [1] as well. Perhaps we should discuss it over there?

[1] https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/c...er/000018.html

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

Yes, porting the UI is exactly why we take the approach of a complete UI rewrite: Instead of starting with Non-Maemo technology (and in case of eboard and co, very outdated, too) we want to use "the new cool stuff" [1], since it will enable us to create smooth move animations and hopefully a good fingertouchable UI.

In case of support: Of course I don't want to write a complete chess app from scratch, I want to reuse the best chess engines possible. For that I imagine to either implement the FICS/ICC [2] protocol and/or to have a generic PGN file reader. That would enable us to ask an external chess engine about valid moves, check mate, etc ... So if anyone wants to port something usable to Qt, say for example this perl CPAN module [3] (a PGN-to-EPD/FEN converter) it would help us a lot! (Disclaimer: we haven't really decided on the architecture, it needs discussions and fancy diagrams ;)).

[1] QGraphicsView, see http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009...uxury-version/ and http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/graphicsview.html

[2] ftp://ftp.chessclub.com/pub/icc/formats/formats.txt

[3] http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/HSMYE...-PGN-EPD-0.24/

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

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development

I'm half way and therefore it looks messy and ugly. But I'm going to sleep now and I wanted to share the direction.

This page should be more and more static as the project consolidates. The dynamic parts should update themselves. For instance, can someone help getting the feed just like http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer has?

Each roadmap item will be addressed in one or more development phases. Each phas has its own wiki page where contributors should point what are they doing, what they plan to work... This way we avoid dupolication.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve..._Project_setup
http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...e_chess_basics

Let's see if I finish tomorrow. Ideas welcome.

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

mikhas did http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...t/Instructions (apparently after announcing on #miniature IRC channel that he would go to sleep - never trust this guy).

I haven't tried the step by step guide myself but I will once I'm done with the wiki work. If you want to follow the real Miniature even before having the first .deb package here you have a good chance.

In fact that long wiki page has three segments and I wonder if they should correspond to three wiki pages, 2 of tbeing common Maemo documentation:

- Setting up the stock Maemo 5 SDK.
- Getting the Qt environment (4.5 now, should be updated to 4.6 when available in extras-devel)
- Miniature specific environment, first git repository cloning and running the app.

Feedback and direct edits both from experts and novices is very welcomed. The simplest is to get Miniature running in your PC the more contributors and feedback we are likely to get.

PS: don't thank this post. Thank mikhas twice instead. :)

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

Sounds reasonable.

To everyone trying this out, please be careful. If you get error messages, be extra careful and rethink what you did. If in doubt, abort the whole procedure. There are instructions on how to remove scratchbox, too (cant find the link), and that's sometimes useful if you want to start over.

To me, those instructions are more of a checklist, but that's because I went through the sb installation procedure several times now, and I still manage to make stupid mistakes.