A console chess game in the repositories, could be cool :)

frenchn00b · 07-24-2010, 01:44 AM

Here I foudn this link to it:

http://www.systemcall.org/rengolin/stuff/chess/

Nice idea for system administrators, bored, using their screen over SSH

or imagine even, competiting with his collegue ... during the day ... with some chat line added to this console chess debian

nice idea, I know

smoker · 07-25-2010, 05:18 AM

I found it hard going really. Here are some observations :

Make sure you have the terminal maximised when starting the game. If you don't, you may labour for some time under the misconception that the game is broken, and dither about trying to understand the play controls. (when maximised, the whole display is visible)
There seems to be no concept of "check" built into this game. So you may as well use a text only interface. You can see that the King is in Check, but the program doesn't know it.
The choice of characters for the pieces is a bit odd.
The board is not square. This makes diagonal movements harder than they should be to visualise.
If you try to make an illegal move (whether by accident or otherwise) you lose your turn. This is annoying given the shape of the board.
There seems to be some confusion in the listing of captured pieces. Sometimes it records them accurately, but often it arbitrarily assigns a captured piece to either opponent.

Other than those criticisms, it's a good effort.

There is no configure, just make and run the binary from the same directory.