Daily iPhone chess programs releases

[JuLieN]

Julien,

Thank you for posting this! I am the lead programmer for Warlord Chess. I very much appreciate you taking a look at the game and value your comments.

As this is a v1 release, we are planning to do much more with the game and will be adding additional features and functionality improvements in future updates. The AI is complicated on a board of this size with the number of pieces and sheer number of moves but we have many ideas for improvements. Stay tuned.

Thanks again!

Cameron

Warlord Chess ($2.99) (iPad):

This game was released a few days ago and I must say it's an interesting twist around our good old favorite game: this is a four players game! As you can play against the IA, I decided to buy it and have mitigated feelings: it sure is very interesting, but it tends to become very messy very soon. It's a total brawl of a game: everyone against everybody. If you feel patient and adventurous, you must definitely give it a try. And the realization is very well done, too.

Thanks Cameron! As a chess engine developer myself I'm aware of the difficulty of having four players competing on a single chessboard. Are our classic alpha-beta algorithms even usable for such a configuration or did you resort to other kinds of algorithms?
Impressive achievement, really!

[cambrose]

To be honest, this is the first chess engine I've ever written, so it has been a great learning experience. I was not aware of this message board when I started writing so I missed the great resource it could have been.

I basically developed algorithms that matched the specifics of this board, but I'm sure I could integrate classic chess engine algorithms to improve our results. I think the current AI is quite playable, but we certainly want to improve it's capabilities and motivations and also implement personality. The Hard AI could also use some optimization. You certainly have to be patient to play a game with it.

Glad I found this board. It looks very interesting.

Cameron

Thanks Cameron! As a chess engine developer myself I'm aware of the difficulty of having four players competing on a single chessboard. Are our classic alpha-beta algorithms even usable for such a configuration or did you resort to other kinds of algorithms?
Impressive achievement, really!

[JuLieN]

@All:
There, iMame got pulled from the AppStore. Hopefully you were lucky enough to get it.

@Cameron:
Welcome to our cuckoo clock! As a programmer you'll obviously find the dedicated "Programming and Technical Discussions" sub forum to be especially useful, along with CCC's archives:
http://www.stmintz.com/ccc/
(It's Talkchess's archive, covering the 1996-2006 period).

Talkchess is the main place to be for CC programming. If it were a land, it'd be the USA or UE.

- Then there's our quiet and friendly neighbors from WinBoard: http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/
Think about them like they'd be Canada. Or Switzerland.

- there is also Rybka's forum: http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/forum_show.pl
It's a place of dragons where all the evil and dissidents gather. Visit at your own risk. And yes, you can think about them like they'd be... errr... North Korea ?

- Hiarc's forum, the famous chess engine's forum : http://www.hiarcs.net/forums/
Go there and say hello to the Queen.

- OpenChess: http://www.open-chess.org/index.php
Yaaaarh, for old sea men and pirates. Turtle Island?

[cambrose]

Welcome to our cuckoo clock! As a programmer you'll obviously find the dedicated "Programming and Technical Discussions" sub forum to be especially useful, along with CCC's archives:
http://www.stmintz.com/ccc/
(It's Talkchess's archive, covering the 1996-2006 period).

Talkchess is the main place to be for CC programming. If it were a land, it'd be the USA or UE.

Julien,

Thank you! That's quite a stack of resources interestingly described

We're trying to figure out how best to market this game. I know a game like this does not really appeal to the hard core chess player. Need to find the casual chess players who might be interested in the variant genre. Guess I'll be scouring all these boards for the variant threads Don't really like advertising in message boards but we need to make people aware that it exists.

Also need to make the game more visible on the App Store. We'd really appreciate it if you posted your review and rated it on the store. Every little bit helps.

Thanks again for everything!

Cam

[geots]

Just what I needed. One question dredges back to page one all the chess for iphone, ChessTiger and Theron crap.


Nausea regards,

gts

[JuLieN]

1) Playchess.com (Free):

ChessBase just released its iOS application to play on their PlayChess service. The application is free but you need to have a PlayChess account, of course.

Their description:

If there is one place to play online chess, this is it! On Playchess.com, the world’s biggest chess server, you will find 20,000 chess lovers every day, from all over the world. You will quickly find an opponent of your own playing strength, usually within seconds. You can kibitz grandmaster games and follow world class tournaments.

Features
- Play Blitz and slow games.
- Get a rating.
- Watch live grandmaster games.
- Kibitz games in beautiful 3d sceneries.
- Different piece sets.
- Supports landscape and portrait.
- Send challenges according to your favorite time control.
- Supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch.
- Board sounds.
- Arrows indicating last move.
- Navigate through game.
- Click in the notation for easy navigation.
- Figurines in notation.
- Log in with your existing PlayChess account or create a new one.
- Option to purchase subscriptions.

It looks beautiful (iPhone screenshot):


The game screen (iPhone):


The list of games screen (iPad):


AppStore link (Universal application, free): http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/playches ... 14684?mt=8


2) ChessHero ($O.99):

If you want to pay for Stockfish here is your chance, as ChessHero is yet another clone of Stockfish... with different graphics...

Their description:

Enjoy playing your favorite Chess game with this amazing application.

Play against your iPhone/iPod Touch or your iPad with different challenge levels.

Play against your friends.

Choose the set of pieces and the board from a large variety of impressive designs.

An iPad Screen:


AppStore link (Universal application, $0.99) : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chessher ... 14846?mt=8

[Don]

But what a pleasure to use xcode, once one feel fluent enough!

Despite having used OS X as my development platform of choice since OS X 10.1, I still hate Xcode. But then I dislike IDEs in general, except for highly dynamic languages like Lisp, Smalltalk or Factor. There is something about the workflow in C/C++ IDEs which is fundamentally incompatible with how my brain works, and working with them makes me feel miserable.

I almost never use Xcode, except in the very few cases when there is no other option. The rest of the time, pencil, paper, Emacs and a few terminal windows are my tools of choice when writing C, C++ or Objective-C code.

Emacs is what I use too. I do not like IDE's either, maybe I'm just an old fart. Which software revision control system do you prefer?

I have considered moving to Vim as emacs seems so heavyweight to me. It's difficult to change once you really get comfortable with something though but even 10 years ago I have wondered if I would have been happier with VI or some other editor. Emacs is certainly powerful though.

[Cubeman]

1) Playchess.com (Free):

ChessBase just released its iOS application to play on their PlayChess service. The application is free but you need to have a PlayChess account, of course.

Their description:

If there is one place to play online chess, this is it! On Playchess.com, the world’s biggest chess server, you will find 20,000 chess lovers every day, from all over the world. You will quickly find an opponent of your own playing strength, usually within seconds. You can kibitz grandmaster games and follow world class tournaments.

Features
- Play Blitz and slow games.
- Get a rating.
- Watch live grandmaster games.
- Kibitz games in beautiful 3d sceneries.
- Different piece sets.
- Supports landscape and portrait.
- Send challenges according to your favorite time control.
- Supported languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch.
- Board sounds.
- Arrows indicating last move.
- Navigate through game.
- Click in the notation for easy navigation.
- Figurines in notation.
- Log in with your existing PlayChess account or create a new one.
- Option to purchase subscriptions.

It looks beautiful (iPhone screenshot):


The game screen (iPhone):


The list of games screen (iPad):


AppStore link (Universal application, free): http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/playches ... 14684?mt=8

I just installed the Playchess app on iphone and managed to create a new account on device, the trail membership lasts, I think 2 weeks.The renewal rate of 3 months $5.29 NZD/ 6 months $12.99 NZD/ 12 months $15.99 NZD seems good value when compared to the ICC iOS app which costs about 3 times as much.Strange how the 6 month costs more than twice the 3 month sub.

[mephisto]

Hi Alex
Unfortunately, it kept crashing on my iTouch which was disappointing.
It would only load the 3D pieces but not the board and again after about thirty seconds would crash again?
I'll just have to keep playing at Chess.com their app is very good and stable on the iTouch.
Bryan

[Cubeman]

I think I spoke too soon After a few games the app froze on me and screen went black.
And this is using the latest iPhone 4s.I closed it down and tried to re-launch but am stuck on the home screen.I might have to uninstall and try again I hope ChessBase are aware of this problem.Even when the app was working I found some things I don't like, the pieces are too small for the squares but they look nice, trouble finding games, had to wait minutes to find a 5 min game against any-one,any rating.