Didn't expect to see a Chess game in this year's Game Jam, that's for sure! This is the most polished chess implementation I've seen yet in minetest and proved to be a lot of fun. Normal chess rules are all here, unlike the other minetest implementations: en passant logic, three-fold repetition, and correct castling! Only one thing I didn't notice was the 50-move rule, but that's not really necessary in a minetest subgame. I would absolutely love to see a Fischer Chess implementation in this game (with proper castling) someday :) Multiplayer chess is pretty cool, but it really needs timers to be at it's full potential, since your opponent can just stall forever. I think it would improve the game a lot if that was added.
The bot itself is OK and interesting to play with, but it's not very smart and could use a lot of work: it is extremely materialistic, and simply can't see most checkmating attacks and pin attacks. It makes decent, solid moves in the opening, but if you set up a decent attack against it, you've basically won the game (Also, it always picks the same opening, which is a little dissapointing). It will usually always take material over a decent defense, which means that if you find tricks in the position, you're going to have a very high success rate. The bot also, most of the time, can't convert winning positions: even if the bot has many pawns and pieces and all you've got is a king, it still somehow manages to find a way to repeat moves and end in a draw. It can definitely win though - if there's a checkmate in immediate sight, it can usually find it.
The unexpected changes to the board were pretty awesome to play a game with, although they could use some highlighting, as I had to search the board for what happened many times. Maybe a 3 second highlighting of the affected pieces would improve the gameplay.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, and I think it's currently the best minetest has to offer in terms of chess.
Unrelated, but did you play and record the moonlight sonata rendition in the main menu (Since you said everything was created by you)? That's pretty impressive if so - just wanted to give credit where credit is due :)
Thank you very very much for your kind feedback! I hope you enjoyed your time playing the game.
As for the bot, it was quite a challenge to find a good balance between "thinking time" and good moves. That's why we kept it simple. However, it is possible to make the engine look even further in the game by compromising on speed. Perhaps this is something that could be added as a separate setting in the future.
Also, checking winning positions is something that takes some time to calculate. At least in our implementation. So it is possible to make the bot more powerful, but we wanted to give everyone the best experience, even if they use a less powerful PC to play.
The time frame for the jam was so tight that it was even difficult to implement a real game and not just a prototype. Therefore, it was not possible to implement a timer for the multiplayer mode as well as better highlighting for the unexpected behavior in addition to all the logic. But maybe we can implement them in the next version :)
Since the Moonlight Sonata is a piece that is out of copyright, it's easy to find the MIDI files of it. Just paste them into a DAW and you're good to go. ^^
Therefore we mixed it, but I hope it's not a big problem that we didn't play it ourselves. We had so many other things to do to finish in time.
Thank you for the detailed response! Yes, I figured the reasons for the bot behaviour would be something like that - perhaps in a future version you could finetune the thinking time for the bot, for "higher rated" bots? I would be absolutely thrilled to see those things implemented (and most importantly the timer, of course) :) - And yeah, I was just curious if the rendition of Moonlight Sonata was actually played & recorded, because I enjoy playing that song too. Not a problem at all, great job on this game!!
Yes- There are just far too many bugs in xdecor chess. My server just gave up on it a while ago. Sometimes you can't even make legal moves unless you make the move like 5 times and it finally executes, and there's also hidden crashes. The computer (Singleplayer mode) is even weaker than this one.
Of course, what this mod (and xdecor chess!) really needs is timers :) Congratulations on winning third place!
Strange. I am unaware of any of the bugs you just mentioned. Sure you use the latest version of X-Decor-libre (libre8)? If yes, I would like to see the crash logs.
Okay, I do use minetest 5.6.0 (latest version of xdecor though) - maybe there is a problem there? I have no idea where to refind the crash logs but they were mostly to do with the computer (singleplayer mode). I'm not sure exactly what triggered it, but getting into complicated positions usually did the trick. Fluxionary has also had a lot of problems with the chess, he removed it from his server for that reason. My home server tried reverting to a previous version that was tested and was more stable, but castling didn't work at all, so we gave up on that too.
I think the reason this version seems much more polished is that it has all the modern chess rules (except 50 move rule as mentioned in the OP, which seems pointless), and you can click on a piece to see all legal moves. It doesn't have a move log like the xdecor version does, though.
Try taking an opponent's piece in the xdecor version- it will often take a few attempts before it actually 'takes' for me. Maybe this only happens in 5.6.0?
It sounds like you’re not using X-Decor-libre but only X-Decor which is the original but outdated and very buggy. I assure you X-Decor-libre does support the 50-move rule (but a player must invoke it for it to count as draw (I applied FIDE rules)) and castling, too. Also, you need at least Minetest 5.7.0 for X-Decor-libre.
Didn't expect to see a Chess game in this year's Game Jam, that's for sure! This is the most polished chess implementation I've seen yet in minetest and proved to be a lot of fun. Normal chess rules are all here, unlike the other minetest implementations: en passant logic, three-fold repetition, and correct castling! Only one thing I didn't notice was the 50-move rule, but that's not really necessary in a minetest subgame. I would absolutely love to see a Fischer Chess implementation in this game (with proper castling) someday :) Multiplayer chess is pretty cool, but it really needs timers to be at it's full potential, since your opponent can just stall forever. I think it would improve the game a lot if that was added.
The bot itself is OK and interesting to play with, but it's not very smart and could use a lot of work: it is extremely materialistic, and simply can't see most checkmating attacks and pin attacks. It makes decent, solid moves in the opening, but if you set up a decent attack against it, you've basically won the game (Also, it always picks the same opening, which is a little dissapointing). It will usually always take material over a decent defense, which means that if you find tricks in the position, you're going to have a very high success rate. The bot also, most of the time, can't convert winning positions: even if the bot has many pawns and pieces and all you've got is a king, it still somehow manages to find a way to repeat moves and end in a draw. It can definitely win though - if there's a checkmate in immediate sight, it can usually find it.
The unexpected changes to the board were pretty awesome to play a game with, although they could use some highlighting, as I had to search the board for what happened many times. Maybe a 3 second highlighting of the affected pieces would improve the gameplay.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, and I think it's currently the best minetest has to offer in terms of chess.
Unrelated, but did you play and record the moonlight sonata rendition in the main menu (Since you said everything was created by you)? That's pretty impressive if so - just wanted to give credit where credit is due :)
Thank you very very much for your kind feedback! I hope you enjoyed your time playing the game.
As for the bot, it was quite a challenge to find a good balance between "thinking time" and good moves. That's why we kept it simple. However, it is possible to make the engine look even further in the game by compromising on speed. Perhaps this is something that could be added as a separate setting in the future. Also, checking winning positions is something that takes some time to calculate. At least in our implementation. So it is possible to make the bot more powerful, but we wanted to give everyone the best experience, even if they use a less powerful PC to play.
The time frame for the jam was so tight that it was even difficult to implement a real game and not just a prototype. Therefore, it was not possible to implement a timer for the multiplayer mode as well as better highlighting for the unexpected behavior in addition to all the logic. But maybe we can implement them in the next version :)
Since the Moonlight Sonata is a piece that is out of copyright, it's easy to find the MIDI files of it. Just paste them into a DAW and you're good to go. ^^ Therefore we mixed it, but I hope it's not a big problem that we didn't play it ourselves. We had so many other things to do to finish in time.
Thank you for the detailed response! Yes, I figured the reasons for the bot behaviour would be something like that - perhaps in a future version you could finetune the thinking time for the bot, for "higher rated" bots? I would be absolutely thrilled to see those things implemented (and most importantly the timer, of course) :) - And yeah, I was just curious if the rendition of Moonlight Sonata was actually played & recorded, because I enjoy playing that song too. Not a problem at all, great job on this game!!
So more polished than Chess in X-Decor-libre?
Yes- There are just far too many bugs in xdecor chess. My server just gave up on it a while ago. Sometimes you can't even make legal moves unless you make the move like 5 times and it finally executes, and there's also hidden crashes. The computer (Singleplayer mode) is even weaker than this one.
Of course, what this mod (and xdecor chess!) really needs is timers :) Congratulations on winning third place!
Strange. I am unaware of any of the bugs you just mentioned. Sure you use the latest version of X-Decor-libre (libre8)? If yes, I would like to see the crash logs.
Okay, I do use minetest 5.6.0 (latest version of xdecor though) - maybe there is a problem there? I have no idea where to refind the crash logs but they were mostly to do with the computer (singleplayer mode). I'm not sure exactly what triggered it, but getting into complicated positions usually did the trick. Fluxionary has also had a lot of problems with the chess, he removed it from his server for that reason. My home server tried reverting to a previous version that was tested and was more stable, but castling didn't work at all, so we gave up on that too.
I think the reason this version seems much more polished is that it has all the modern chess rules (except 50 move rule as mentioned in the OP, which seems pointless), and you can click on a piece to see all legal moves. It doesn't have a move log like the xdecor version does, though.
Try taking an opponent's piece in the xdecor version- it will often take a few attempts before it actually 'takes' for me. Maybe this only happens in 5.6.0?
It sounds like you’re not using X-Decor-libre but only X-Decor which is the original but outdated and very buggy. I assure you X-Decor-libre does support the 50-move rule (but a player must invoke it for it to count as draw (I applied FIDE rules)) and castling, too. Also, you need at least Minetest 5.7.0 for X-Decor-libre.
Anyway, let’s continue this discussion here: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=28891