I thought about it for a while and decided to start BlenderChess. BlenderChess will aim at making a realtime 3D GUI for different chess engines and chess servers out there. It’s not aimed at making a chess engine because there are already a lot out there and therefore concentrates on making a GUI instead.
I have some ideas and have registered a sourceforge project to make any results available to the public. Some of the ideas:
Skinnable chessboards and custom chess pieces
Connect to different existing chess engines using a standard chess protocol
connect to existing online chess servers
I noticed some mentioning of chess games in blender before in the forums but this project might be easier to complete because it doesnt aim at writing an chess engine itself.
At this moment I’m just collecting information about Chess protocols and other information. I do not have much experience in Python so this might result in very slow process.
For now I’m collecting python libraries that could be usefull and trying to design some interface concepts.
I hope some people would like to offer their assistance in the near future together try and make a truely functional Chess GUI that possibly will be used by many Chess fans outside the Blender community.
Well it could be better to have a system of creating new python functions for the GE to cover this sort of thing.
If you do this it could be a good thing and would come with future Blender releases but writing it just for chess seems a bit too specific. Why not implement a series of move checking and predicting python functions that can be used not just for chess, but for plenty of other things as well.
Just my opinion, having these kinds of python functions built in for the GE could be very useful in certain cases.
It is not for making the chess logic as there are many good engines already in existance. It’s also not geared toward developing a serversided solution as, again, these systems already exist. To be short: It offers a GUI to connect to these existing system using the available protocols.
I guess it would be cool to have other board games but it might be more interesting using the same system; taking existing engines and protocols.
For people interested in making a chess game logic this is also interesting as it could use these same protocolls to connect to this and other GUI’s. A well known example of a GUI is Winboard.
BlenderChess @ SourceForge.net: https://sourceforge.net/projects/blenderchess
I committed theDesign Document to SVN.
If anyone wants to join the project let me know. Also people willing to donate Chess Pieces or ChessBoard designs. The boards could be just an (PNG) image.
