Notices

Showing the game to more chess aficionados friends of mine. Just got a suggestion that perhaps someone has mentioned here before (?):

Sandra found disturbing the animation when turning the pieces. (Ivan likes it). She proposes that each player has the pieces orientated towards their own side. All the white pieces loking towards the white pleyer and the black pieces "upside down". Interesting.

Bad news: several bugs appeared in legal moves not allowed and also illegal moves allowed, during a game with Sandra. Couldn't find a single pattern but took pictures (with another device ) of the moves. They involved the King near pawns and with the potential influence of a Rook and a Queen. I will report the bugs later.

The good news is that Miniature seems to be really stable: not a single crash seen during a game, and they last about one hour.

A friend of mine I played with told me the same
The problem for somebody seems to be that the pieces always turn around and it is hard to think during the opponents view (when the pieces are upside down).

I for myself like the rotation of all pieces. Maybe this should be configurable?

OK, got it. The animation needs to go

I think the best look is to simply raise the chess piece off the board when selecting one and then dropping it back down at the destination square.

Many of the iphone chess programs rock the piece back and forth when selecting it which, quite honestly, looks like goofy fluff.

I think all that's needed to make the piece look like it's up off the board is by moving the graphic up a few pixels.

Should be easy enough.

I've updated the player's dashboards (that is, the area below/top of the board). It's rather ugly but then again I am no designer

Two screenies:


This code can be seen in action when using the dashboard branch.

Great! The screenies look good enough not to stop a release if we don't get anything better. In fact they are not bad at all.

Is there more playing real games with the version in Extras-devel? There is at least one bug in the engine caused by an unknown reason: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8141

More tests would help. If you don't find a sparring you can always pick a famous game and play it through with Miniature. Looking for inspiration? http://www.chessgames.com/

That is conceptually quite close to what we want to achieve with our dashboard BTW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wGLw...layer_embedded

I was cringing the whole time watching that as the dude was chewing up his screen with the constant dragging of the stylus.

The stupid idgit should have used his finger.

That would be really lightning chess.