Here's a project that's been floating around for a long time. I would be
surprised if there wasn't at least one way to play chess on the net
already, but I thought I'd experiment a bit anyway.
Here's a project that's been floating around for a long time. I would be
surprised if there wasn't at least one way to play chess on the net
already, but I thought I'd experiment a bit anyway.
(Just for the record, I don't play chess myself, so won't accept any challenges - well, not to play, anyway! I do know how the pieces move, but had to look at a picture of a board to check the starting positions of the knights and the bishops... So I'm doing this for the programming challenge...)
The original idea started years ago, before the net - well, before I got involved with it anyway! Back then the basic idea was a dream of a kind of BBS like program that could keep track of several games and not just let people play but let other people "watch" as well. One thing that halted further development of that idea was that I didn't have a modem (or a phone for that matter!) back then... Even back then I had some vague ideas for a GUI that would require a special client program.
Then I got on the net and finally started thinking about the old idea again. As you probably have guessed by now, one of the first ideas I got was to use web forms for input, thus eliminating the need for a special client program and enabling users on any platform to play.
The best way to do this would of course (?) be to use some kind of CGI or something to generate HTML code and graphics on the fly, so that each move would be registered and be available to the opponent and possible spectators more or less immediately, but I am not that advanced yet, so for the time being I am just planning to have a program generate the required files for each move offline, upload them and then accept input by email. Right, that would mean the games would run pretty slow even if I were to connect several times each day, and I can't really run a lot of games until I get a cable modem, but everything has to start somewhere. Besides it's still faster than playing by mail and probably about as fast as playing by email (without graphics or spectators).
It's going to take some time before I can start even a test game, but just
to give you an idea about how (I hope) it will work:
Each game has its own directory like this one, with a "front
page" (index.html) much like this one, with a board like the
one above (That was pieced together by my second program BTW) that everyone
can look at, and instead of all this text there would be some info about
the players and (once the game got going) a list of previous moves. Then
there would be two pages that (at least theoretically) only the players
knew how to get at. For demonstration purposes, let's pretend the game
above has just started and you are playing White. You would then go to
this page to make your first move....
Go ahead, click on the link already!