Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

We can easily use this: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6-snapsho...n.html#details

But it doesn't do very much. You probably achieve the same results/performance by connecting to a QTimeLine's signal emission and apply the animation steps directly to a QGraphicsItem. In fact, that's what I naively did to create the fading selection frame: http://gitorious.org/miniature/minia...tem.cc#line126

Then there is of course the Qt Animation Framework: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6-snapsho...-overview.html
It briefly mentions how to interact with QGraphicsItem, though I haven't tried that yet (it looks a lot like WIP to me).

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

N8xx support please. I would love to have this in my N800 :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Well as long as I don't include any pngs or import layer styles from Ps.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

This is the way done in many places: visual designers work with the visual tools they master in order to express a visual proposal. Then everybody can discuss about that proposal just by looking at / interacting with a Flash file or something equally easy to access.

In the meantime the developers join the discussion looking at the feasibility of the proposal from a technical point of view, potential drawbacks (e.g. looks good but will give us 3 months of work, will hog the system and will drain the battery, etc).

About running Miniature in the N8*0. There are no official/community plans I'm aware of for porting Qt 4.6 to Diablo. Therefore, either the Mer project gets a Fremantle-ish platform for the N8*0 or someone backports Miniature to the Qt 4.5 bindings available for Diablo or perhaps there are other workarounds.

I agree Miniature would be very interesting in the N8*0 but anyway we need to get it done first in Maemo 5 before thinking of alternatives. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

A little status update:
mikhas and myself have just commited quite a bit of code in the area of move logic/ move analyzers. We managed to get a working example of Rooks and Knights. They can be moved by the user and only legal moves are accepted: rooks cannot jump over other pieces, knights can, only pieces of the opposing colour can be captured, etc. If you wanna see it in action, checkout my git branch in our repository:
http://gitorious.org/miniature/miniature/commits/kore

I think it shouldn't be to hard to add the other pieces. So I hope I can do that in the next few days and we will be able to play some real chess in miniature.

cheers
kore

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

So how can I help :S lol

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Make an animation with your preferred tools showing how selecting a piece and moving it to a square looks like. One example for an empty square and one example taking a piece. Be prepared for discussion. :)

Being the program called Miniature, probably a minimalistic animation will fit. At the end it's for mobile devices and it needs to be good fo fast playing without slowing down the app itself. No pieces fighting and eating each other like in Star Wars.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Some changes proposed to the Miniature roadmap:

- P2P games between 2 players online go up to the next item in the roadmap after we finish the current "Play games online" and before we start with "Chat with your opponent. We are getting more interest and requests about this almost every time we mention the Miniature project to someone. The good news is that some of this interest comes from developers familiar with the technologies involved and keen to contribute some time... We'll see. Also, it come before chatting because we can re-use the same portrait UI. The changes are more in the connectivity side.

- Added Asynchronous P2P chess (via email or SMS?). Yes, the good old correspondence chess with a technology refresh for the XXI century! :) Most of the UI and backend pieces are there and it's a good format for a mobile chess game, since you can think of your next move e.g. while commuting, waiting for someone, etc.

- Added Real-time P2P chess - 1 device, as proposed by Jukey. You meet a friend, you are in a bar, they don't have a chess board, he doesn't have a compatible/capable device... You still have a chance to play some chess face to face! Miniature needs to be all about playing chess so this scenario makes sense. We need to sort out the visual concept: is it 180 degree rotatio or a neutral zenital graphic? Sketches welcome!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...e_chess_basics cleaned so everybody can see where are we currently.

btw #miniature @ freenode has regular activity, at least I see it when logging in the European evenings. mikhas, korius and tbf are quite regular.

Seeing these designers bored willing to help in something (more concrete than a piec move animation?) I was thinking...

... we had discussed that when we implement the chats, the movement of pieces could be also communicated as a chat comment. Imagine this "conversation" in mikhas' Miniature generated just by playing, not typing anything manually:

We could introduce natural language strings in certain moves e.g. "Time to castle", "Here goes my 1st check", "Pawn promoted: one Queen please!". If you prefer silence then an option in the Settings will be there for you. Anyway we will need an option to disable chatting when we have it.

Anybody willing to take http://wiki.maemo.org/images/f/f0/Screenshot00.png and make a proposal for the chatting look & feel in the space below the board?

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

If the intention is to have all of Miniature's user interface to be entirely finger friendly, I'd like to make a suggestion.

Since the screen is limited in size perhaps implementing some form of kinetic scrolling for such things as chats, menus, etc. could be an acceptable idea.

You would be able to retain the current layout only that certain parts of the screen could scroll left or right for these added features.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

So after another long nights work, mikhas and I managed to pack a release for you guys to try (I think it is not released yet, but should be tomorrow). As you can see in the screenshot, all pieces are up and running with their move rules implemented. Also black and white take turns and pawns are promoted to queens.

Things to be done are: check, checkmate, all sorts of draws, castling and en-passent.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Not yet, according to http://maemo.org/packages/view/miniature/

/me is impatient! Thank you for the hard work.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I can donate some iTunes credit if any of the guys working on this would like to download a bunch of chess apps for the iTouch/iPhone for testing.

I think T chess (forgot the full name) looked pretty good.

Anyway, it might help to improve creative methods on how to best have a friendly UI on a limited display screen.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Addison, I don't have an iPhone/iTouch but I would really appreciate your feedback on best implementations out there.

Also, what about having releases for Maemo 5/N900 and Ubuntu at the same time? If it's not much extra work. It is useful to get testers (now most people in this thread don't have an N900) and also good to keep in mind the cross-platform strategy, even if currently having a full supported desktop version is not a goal.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

To me, there are three important things to understand before taking on any type of new project. And that is research, research and research.

That all night, coding marathon on programming legal piece movement has been done before, several dozen times over by others, and I'm sure that the open source code for this was already available somewhere just looking to be found.

I think someone should step up and volunteer as a sole researcher for Miniature. Find parts of open source coding that is currently needed, play virtually every available chess program that could potentially fit within the framework of this project, and document all records if certain coding is being used from another author. You know, junk like that.

Maybe I missed the post somewhere but I don't remember reading any type of research that has been done already. It will save time in the long run.

Don't look at me to do this though. :)

I have no intention of getting a N900 and I wouldn't have the first clue how to run Ubuntu on my computer.

I can donate some iTunes cards though if needed. It's my wife's iPhone that I don't ever use. If no one else has one either I guess I could always ask her if it's okay to borrow it for awhile.

By the way, I think that this was the program that Miniature could borrow the most from since it features finger friendly touch screen controls and a dynamic UI. No stylus needed.

T Chess Pro

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

You are probably right, the stuff we've been coding the last few days has pobably been done loads of times before. But, honestly, it would spoil most of the fun to just look around for reusable open source code and copy&paste the hell out of it. Of course it would probably be faster but I really enjoyed what we've been doing so far and I don't think I would have joined this project if we would just walk around like bums searching trash cans for things others might have done.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Ah if software development was only that easy ... take that component from here, then that one from over there, then wire it all together in some designer tool, push a "make it so" button, release.

There are many reasons why it doesnt work like that, but I'll cut that out. It doesnt belong here.

Also, your link points to a commercial app (admittedly, it looks nice!), so how am I supposed to reuse code from that?

I am not even touching the issue of code portability, given that the iPhone lives in its own Objective-C world whereas Maemo's future lies in Qt.

You can be assured that I *did* look at code from other FOSS projects, and while doing so I changed my mind several times but we eventually decided to focus on writing our own move validation engine, simply because we want a component that integrates nicely with the rest of our program. Think of the UX, even a simple chess board needs to know a lot about chess if it ever wants to present useful feedback to the user. For example, take the dots in that app's screenshot, showing the possible moves. How does the board know where to draw them?

Nevertheless, we still dont aim at writing our own complete chess engine, that'd be insane. Again, look at our roadmap!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

History shows that this is true and not. There is also plenty of very good research that ended up nowhere. There are also many examples of deep research that knew so well the precedents that could never escape from them.

I think we have a good proportion of research, user feedback and development. These Talk threads are being quite useful keeping this balance.

Welcome!

Doh, I got too enthusiastic too soon. ;)

This program is for "Play against computer", which is our item number 9 in the roadmap.

http://www.iphone-game.com/images/st...%20pro%201.jpg shows an implementation for selecting a piece, which is something we are asking to the designers around. Apparently mikhas & kore want to try the idea of selecting a destination square first and then highlight the piece(s) that could reach it, as a way to minimize false moves.

They have decided to make the board smaller, adding the coordinates outside the board. Maybe good enough for analyzing games but for playing any pixel counts.

If someone could dissect the settings menus that could be useful.

The UI for playing games is more austere. Traditional notation (what do you think about my proposal for using natural language?) and of course no chatting since this is quite pointless with a computer (unless you reach HAL levels of AI).

The user comments seem to be very good. If that is the best chess game for the iPhone then I'm confident the Miniature plans are on the right path. When someone plugs the Scid backend to the Miniature UI we will have a good contender.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

A new .deb release is available: http://maemo.org/packages/view/miniature/

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

There is a simple route to enable online chess for the n900, that is to enable Java for the n900. This would have many spin offs, my last mobile a Samsung e900 seemed to have no problem with Java, but you could not install apps like Jin because of memory requirements. Enabling Java for the 900 connects both ICC and FICS to the 900 in terms of chess on the 'net and allows a myriad of other web apps to be accessible by the 900 also.

All we need to look into is, acquiring the source code for Java, find a competent coder and I possibly know one, compile a binary, ride the wave and Nokia has a winner BIG time.

Regards,

Peter.

http://dollyknot.com

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Heya mikhas!

Yeah, those iPhone chess apps, there was no expectation of using any of the coding from them. I mean, like how could you?

It was just for reference to get a handle on how other commercial companies integrated touch screen controls and features with chess, that's all.

I agree with qgil, giving a chess piece a "glowing" feel of lighting up almost like a light bulb rather than merely changing the color of the piece or drawing a colored box around it is a really nice touch.

It's little stuff like that one could draw from simply by testing out what other people have done before.

Hence the offer to dish out some iTunes credit.

Anyway, my opinion is that even bad suggestions (like mine) are still pretty good since they keep a thread like this near the top front for people to read and publicity of any kind is always good! :D

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Yep, I agree :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I agree that having .debs for those two platforms makes sense, even at this early stage. I just uploaded a heavily modified miniature version to my launchpad PPA since I could not get an official Qt4.6 for Jaunty (which means the buildbot can't get it either). Maybe it builds this time.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (it was initially only "grrr" but didn't fufill the requirement of minimum characters) ;)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

If enabling Java for Maemo 5 is simple then the supporters of http://wiki.maemo.org/Java will be happy receiving the help of your friend. But this is anyway a topic for discussion elsewhere, maybe http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=31678

Nokia's cross-platform strategy is based on Qt and this is the approach we are taking for Miniature as well.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

First bug report, testing the latest version of Miniature in Ubuntu on a laptop. Cool!

https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/c...er/000079.html

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Extras-devel works now and I could test it in the N900.

Boot up time could improve?

Some moves could feel more snappy? If we add animation etc will it be slower?

mean, it's not bad but could feel better. :)I

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

First "usability test" with N900 and one hand (while walking, to make it more X-treme) was not very satisfactory.

Fast moves where not selected or completed and I had to mover again, slower. Can this also be related to the "heavy" feel reported in the previous post?

A couple of wrong destination squares. Not bad in terms of percentage of moves but you just need one miss to loose the game...

But nothing that feels like a showstopper for a unstable release. I will keep playing. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I blame that on the DBUS initialisation since it was faster before. I'd wait for more Qt releases first :)

That's the most annoying thing actually, and the #1 reason I added debug output. Result: it's not on our side of code where we lose time (logic analyzer is still below 10ms, for example). Once I know how to profile Qt apps properly on the device I'll find the issues, I think. My gut feeling tells me it is still the SVG hack we had to employ, but without solid test data this means nothing.

As far as animations go: if 1-2 concurrent animations slow down a QGraphicsView then something's wrong with the frameworks ;)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

A big "confirm" button below the board then? Or clicking anywhere *on* the board to confirm, and outside of the board to abort? I think
kanishou already proposed that, together with the reverse piece move (which I definitely want to try out, at a later point).

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

There are two schools of thought currently: http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...id_false_moves

- You tap directly a destination square and then the pieces that can go there get highlighted. You tap on the desired piece and done. Very interesting but I'm not aware of other software doing this so let's be prepared for experimentation and initial user resistance.

- you tap first on the piece and then tap twice in the destination square. If the first tap goes to the wrong destination you still can tap on the right one more carefully, twice.

Any preference?

ok to the rest of points about boot up time and snappy feeling.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

After some more solitaire chess games...

I believe most of the reliability problems are consequence of the information gatherd by the finger press. In portrait mode and with your hand is going to be the thumb, most of the times without nail help. I guess the resistive screen still has to calculate one dot and in many situations when playing fast this can go over the edge of the desired square.

Frequently that square is not valid, resulting in a no-move. The.piece perhaps doesn't get highlighted anymore and you need to start again. Or maybe that square is valid, and you get a missed move.

After playing a bit youcan see that things are just fine even at comfortable blitz speed. For fast blitz and lightining you want to use the stylus. But all this makes sense, actually.

Still, the method to avoid false moves is needed, if only to reassure the user that a game won't be messed just because of one missed square.

It also looks like having the board more on the top, right below the status area, would be better handling the device and playing with one hand. This way the squares on the bottom (the ones you hit most of the times) are reached more comfortably. My reason to separate the board from the top was to avoid false clicks to the menu and status area but probably this is a minor problem.

Good that we can start having discussion and progress based on real testing! And all this only one month after I sent the first post proposing the idea of an online chess game. Amazing!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Wow, nice observation. And I can confirm this! If I use the device in portrait mode with my left hand I can reach row 3-8 easily, but not 1-2. It probably depends a lot on the size of your hands! So we need two (three?) layouts, I guess:

A)
B) C)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Why 2-3? Just B looks enough.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

would it be a lot of work implementing all three possibilities and make it a menu option to decide which to use? That way we (those who have devices) can test and we can ask people which is most comfortable (usability tests). In the final application I would only include the best option though.

I would discard the first option as this could be again interpreted as cheating (call me a CSU voter, tbf...)! It's more or less the same as clicking one piece and highlighting possible destination squares. maybe an option in human vs computer or training mode or if agreed. but in a standard internet game not an option at all, imho.

The second option is better, but still not good imo: I'm pretty shure you would get used to that and just double tap quickly everytime you want to move a piece. Although what you should do is tap once, check, and then tap the second time. You might say this then is the users fault, though...

I like mikhas idea of showing a confirm button somewhere outside the board. the time the user needs to get there with his finger might be the time he needs to check if his move was correct. although this might slow moving down, i admit.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Look what mikhas has been playing with:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:Miniatur...-excorcism.png

We started discussing a release aiming at least to Extras-testing concentrating on offline chess. Useful if you miss a board to play with your friend in a bar. Useful also to start getting user feedback about usability and UI improvements, while starting to fight for the online thing.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Offline chess release proposed: https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/c...er/000081.html

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Today in Barcelona I jumped on the train. A man sat in front of me and took a magazine from his bag. Blody hell, it was a chess magazine! A real printed chess magazine.

Tomorrow I will meemikhas face to face, I think for the first time (?) and definitely for the first time as Miniature team members.

(PS: I just wanted to write my post 2000 about something nice) ;)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Option 2 seems most intuitive to me.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

One comment on the screen shot; having the black pieces upside down looks wrong to me. I'd prefer, If possible, to have this as an option and default to them being t'other way up.