Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Sure, but do you realize this experimental UI would for 2 player sitting in front of each other with a device in between? Black pieces are upside down for the white player just as white pieces are upside down for the black player: equal discrimination.

mikhas is trying to come up with the rotation alternative: white player sees everything upside down while black is playing and viceversa.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I saw several printed chess magazines in Barcelona in stores. There is at least one heavy-duty chess club in Barcelona, but I got lost when looking for it. I think it might be associated with elite chessplayer Alexei Shirov.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

mikhas and me didn't play chess during the Long Weekend at Barcelona. I blame myself, since I had to leave earlier so my weekend was actually not long at all.

We discuss about Miniature a bit, but actually not much. The reason was quite positive though, I believe: we have a good communication through mailing list, IRC and this forum. The discussion (most of it while commuting from Cornellà to Barcelona) was more about confirming previous agreements than about discussing discussing divergent viewpoints or something. We also shared more about our motivations behind this project (get an early and very concrete experience about Qt 4.6) and our expectations for the next months.

All this to say that I feel we are in a good path. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

No problem - we only need to wait for this phase to finish :D

I was hoping to discuss the UI problems we will face with the next phase (just take a look at the Jin plugin @ FICS, or look here). But I had difficulties explaining the Jin UI, and what we have to display to the user on the N900.

So what we did instead was to work on what is currently usuable in Miniature - moving pieces on the board! Better feedback on wrong moves or piece selection was also titled as "this is a must" in the proposal for the first end user release. The result of several iterations and feedback from two UX specialists was this: http://taschenorakel.de/pictures/scr...urn_states.png
The color names can be read as different roles, applied to some UI element.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Alright, so a move without mistakes would be:

- Select piece with one tap.
- Select destination square with one tap.
- Tap clock to confirm move.

This is quite familiar for chess players, that tap a physical clock in tournaments once they are done with their moves.

We need to have a UI making this evident for first time users, either with a very visible highlight of the timer when it's the time to confirm the move or with those instructions in the 3 first boots. Probably info in the banner is enough to start with.

What about games without timer? ."OK" button in the position of the clock? No games without clock to start with? I'm more for the latter.

Also maybe there are users that prefer to make moves without confirmation. This can be an option in the setting but, like many other possible options, I would leave it for later if there are real requests from users.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

The diagram shown by mikhas above is now implemented in Miniature 0.1.3-1 (screenshots), available in Maemo 5 Extras-devel, Maemo 5 Extras-devel, a repository recommended only to developers. You can test the Ubuntu version too. Feedback welcome!

New features in the last version:

* Candidate UI to move pieces: one click to select piece, second click to select destination square and click to an external button to confirm the move. Pieces and squares can be changed at will before clicking the confirmation button.
* Checks are detected now.
* Backend fixes improving the responsiveness of the moves.

Features implemented in previous releases:

* Boot a screen in portrait mode.
* Display a nice-looking board.
* Set the pieces in starting position.
* Enforce basic chess rules except:
o Checkmate
o Stalemate
o Castling
o En-passant
o Pawn promotion (works in the desktop version)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

How did you manage to get this ugly white background in the UI element spacing? Could you please tell me which Qt version you are using on the device?

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Hi, here you have a mockup done with pencil: http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:20091219_001.jpg

And a workflow: http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Deve...ew_UX_proposal

I think this is good for offline games, and is mostly reusable for online games, games review, chess lessons, etc. The difference is that on the other modes the opposite player don't need his buttos, so that area on the top can be used for chatting, etc.

We have just discussed it with mikhas and seems to work for him. Feedback appreciated! Specially anything you find confusing.

I'll try to make a second pencil -iteration this evening.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Pencil iteration available at http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:20091219_001.jpg

Changes:

- Now the resolution and sizes are quite real.
- Status area is gone: all real estate was needed so we go fullscreen. Also the status area was the only non-symmetric element, perhaps disturbing the Black player.
- "Check!" and "Draw?" messages demonstrated.
- The bottom right corner is now dedicated to keep the last moves of your opponent. The figures will be drawn with pure Unicode characters!

You can download the image and set it as background of your 800x480 display device to give it a usability go.

To me this is ready to be handled by a graphics designer. I guess that mikhas has enough to keep his code going as well.

EDIT: added point about the status area gone.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Miniature has now bugtracker: https://bugs.maemo.org/buglist.cgi?q...op&value0-0-0=

... and 3 bugs reported. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

sigh ... I knew the bugtracker was coming. But couldn't it have waited a bit longer? ;)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

All those 3 bugs in there are for me, what should I say ;)

I screwed my ubuntu installation running the scratchbox a few days ago, so i'll need to reinstall. While I'm doing this I'll give the checkmate some thoughts.

Mikhas made my day though by releasing version 0.1.5-1 to extras-devel a few minutes ago! great work!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Looks amazing! Can't wait to play some games with my family during the holidays. :)

Great animation! Great to see that the pieces are always looking into players direction.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

kore, do you have a bugzilla account? Please assign your bugs to yourself or your humble bug triager will. :)

PS: grrr I'm on data only right now and downloading Miniature pulls 16Mb, I guess from frsh Qt 4.6 packages. That would be very expensive free software? Hopefully I will get under a wlan tomorrow. Can't wait!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Any volunteer willing to refresh screenshots at http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature#Screenshots ?

I'm gelous of the fortunate ones able to get the last version! :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I didn't refresh screenshots but added two new Screenshots no. 5 and 6. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Our veteran programmer vetoed the drop shadow animation, as it looks too '80s for him. I'll try to make it '90s then, with a mosaic zoom-out/zoom-in effect.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Choosing a transition is something a graphics designer can do. Is there somewhere a collection of effects to choose from?

The bug that is bugging me more at the moment is the lack of castling. There is no way to go ahead with a proper game without this. Then the pawn promotion. We can leave with a King not knowing that is under check from a Knight as long as the human players don't miss it, just like happens with an analog board. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

just mock up? I'm down, I'm here and there, but I'm here for good now. Life in order again!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Hahaha, not really :) There are the QGraphicsEffects, which would be awesome if they wouldn't fail so badly on the performance side. So it's all down to manually programming the animations (not as bad as it sounds, connect to a QTimeLine, apply transformations in the callback), and do pixmap caching where possible.

Right, there is a whole series of bugs related to check. I even managed to get my king captured (no knights involved).

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Great! It would be nice if you could come up with some graphical ideas for the players' action areas (on top/below the board). I prepared some files that could serve as a base for mockups (see attachment).

Perhaps we want to keep in mind that people theme their devices (and that theme integration is something applications need to be aware of). I haven't thought about that too much, and for fullscreen mode this is even less of an issue.

The board, but especially the pieces, is a given at this stage (chess players can be difficult if you mess with the piece sets, so we simply use a default piece set that's been accepted by many chess players). We will allow other boards/piece sets later - see http://taschenorakel.de/pictures/mae...ure-maebar.jpg (done by Alisson Santos) for example.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Yes please! Take http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:20091219_001.jpg and do something beautiful without touching the current board and the layout proposed.

As mikhas has explained the board and figures will be themed anyway at some point so we keep the current very standard theme.

About the layout, any suggestions to improve it are welcome but it's better to sustain the proposals on something real and now it is urgent to have something that just works and looks decent, so mikhas & co can go ahead with the programming. With that more users will be able to give it a try and we can dfine tune things based on real and concrete feedback.

It would be great if you could take this task!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

After playing a bit with 0.1.5-1...

If I should choose an effect I would perhaps go for "pulling up the piece and throw it on the other side", as if they were flat wooden pieces laying on the floor. The current transition is funny but maybe too chaotic / distracting and actually slow. It is fast in its execution, but could be faster in total time a fast stand-up + lay on the other side might work.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Please check the link! It seems to be very unrelated to Miniature. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Indeed, I meant http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:20091219_001.jpg !

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I installed miniature in a fresh image and I'm getting some rendering artifacts, probably a problem with Qt, for e.g: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vdvsx/4209538658/
Does anyone have similar issues ?

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Do we have a psd with the board already? So you want me to just design some custom elements over this sketch?

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Heya Joshua, try the PSD file from the ZIP file above: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=101

HTH

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Confirmed. It seems there are issues when OpenGL is used as the application-wide backend. I needed to do this to increase the QGV rendering performance, but I now switched to the raster backend + OpenGL for the QGV only in latest master: http://gitorious.org/miniature/minia...baaa65e73d4ce9 Strangly enough, the native backend did not seem to enable OpenGL rendering for the QGV's viewport (a QGLWidget). I will write about those issues in the Qt4.6 for Maemo5 feedback ML, eventually. But I want to collect some reliable data beforehand.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Some more design work needed.

On the layout, when a player presses the "Stop" button, a floating window will appear covering all the dashboard area below the board with the following options:

- "Pause": stops the timer.
- "Draw"
- "Resign"
- "Adjourn": saves the game and closes the app.
- "Exit": closes the app without saving.

Text only, icons only or both?

If we go for icons, then we need to find the right metaphors:

- "Pause" = the known Pause of media players.
- "Draw" = two symmetric kings, black and white?
- "Resign" = own color king laying, or even upside down?
- "Adjourn" = "save" metaphor (is it still a floppy?) on top of the "X" of app closed?
- "Exit" = the same "X" on the top right corner in Maemo 5 apps.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but what about top down figures with shadows? They can solve your paradox with rotated figures I suppose.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

The thing that baffles me, is tons of open source chess software has already been written, so why as it not been recompiled for Maemo 5?

I have tried to install a SDK for Maemo 5 in Mandriva and it sent me nuts and it seems like Debian is a must be, if you want to port stuff for Maemo.

Getting Debian working via a USB HD is not easy if you have an older mother board that does not load the USB drivers off the bios instead of off the HD before the OS is in RAM.

Now I have to spend dollar buying hardware with USB drivers in bios, thanks Nokia for helping me empty my wallet.

Trying to write a chess engine for Minature is a serious case of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Crafty is open source and plays at GM strength, why not recompile it to work on Maemo 5?

I make no idle claim, I ran Crafty as a chess engine on ICC, my last game in my account on ICC as kismet, was in the year 2004 and my account using crafty reached the dizzying height of 2676, most definitely GM territory and I have the games to prove it.

No, give me the ability to log into FICS follow GM matches and chat to other FICsers and analyze GM matches with Crafty and I for one will be happy. maybe Eboard would be a good candidate.

Spend 2 years developing a chess engine for Maemo and Crafty will still kick it's but.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

wazd, I looked for zenital graphics for chess pieces with no luck. If you or someone finds or creates something we can use I'm sure we will give it a try.

Dollyknot, welcome to the discussion! Rest assure that we are not creatig new free software for no reason, overlapping or in vain:

- We are well aware of the chess related alternatives in Maemo. See http://wiki.maemo.org/Chess . Also search for Crafty or Eboard in this forum and you will find active thread about ongoing and somewhat functional ports for Maemo 5. I have Eboard installed in my N900 and play on a daily basis. It works, but is far from an optimal mobile experience.

- We haven't found source code written in Qt (or anything else, I think) that is finger friendly and works well in 800x480. This is one of the main focuses of Miniature.

- We are not trying to write a chess engine! We are happy teaching Miniature the simple rules of chess. Then Scid/Crafty can work in the backend as a pure chess engine, but they alone don't solve the problem of the optimized UI based on Qt.

Check http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature to see the overall plan.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development#Roadmap goes into more details on the current and next steps.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Development#References might be also interesting for you to see that we have done our homework looking for useful references.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Ukki found this online.
Scid vs PC

Who knows, but it might be worth looking into a little.

It looks to be more lightweight than it's monster of a father. :)

Anyway, I thought it deserved a mention here.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Very nice. Still, the old problem remains: Scid vs PC is still Tk/Tcl-based so I have no clue how that would ever become properly hildonized. Also, the FICS integration requires you to have a separate FICS client opened?! Anyway, perhaps contacting the author of Scid vs PC to help us with the Scid/Miniature interfacing is a good idea :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

On his webpage, he makes mention of ChessX.

This could be interesting.

Last update was in October and it also uses the QT library. :)

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

ChessX looks nice. I just want something to display online games with; I really don't understand the objections to Scid because I guess I don't care about cool graphics.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Mock up will be done by Wednesday! Sorry for the delays, yet again!

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

There is nothing really wrong with a stylus UI as long as you have a stylus friendly display, that's all. Miniature focuses on 100% finger friendly UI that works with displays not suitable for stylus e.g. capacitivde.

Re: Miniature development: Play chess games online
 

Started working on this thing, from the sketch i see that the other players status and buttons are available on the top. Is there a reason for this? Shouldn't only "your" buttons/info be displayed?