A big thread of easy-to-implement Chess suggestions

[Docterchese 1,570]

So, I played a few games of chess at the Friendalong this weekend (and commentated a few others) and it was really fun! I think having games in-game (like chess) is awesome fun at community events, and I'd love to start a Wurm chess league or something. I think there would be a good amount of demand for it, too! However, other than a few bug fixes that I believe are on the list of things to fix*, I think a few things are missing from the games that would be great to see added. And what's best is that these suggestions are all easy to add!

 

* I think the list of known bugs is: king & queen on the wrong squares; unable to castle; no en passant; no stalemates/draws; unable to resign a game.

 

But anyway, onto the suggestions! I see a lot of promise for more board games in Wurm in the future. I imagine chess and checkers share a lot of the same code for how the boards work. So, a lot of the suggestions here would benefit other board games in the game and would benefit other ones in the future, too.

 

1. Messages in event (visible to everyone!) when moves happen

A first noticeable thing is that it's quite difficult as a player (or spectator) to tell when a move has happened on a given chess board, as there is no message in event. This is a shame when lots of people are watching a game as it's hard to tell when something happens, unless you're watching the board at all times with eagle eyes. A simple message in event like "Docterchese plays knight to f3" would be perfect, and easy to add.

 

2. A way to spectate the game

Secondly for spectators, it would be great if there was a way to bring up the same camera angles that players get when playing a game. Currently you have to stand very close to be able to see the board. It would make watching games a lot easier. (It could be "right click -> spectate".) This could be added to checkers, too, as I imagine both games share a lot of code.

 

3. A way to get a PGN (notation) of a game

This is a big one for me before organising any in-game tournaments. PGNs (which stands for Portable Game Notation) are a way to record the moves played in a chess game. It's a really simple and common system that would allow us to save and export games to other chess websites for analysis (e.g. https://lichess.org/). You could make it so that anyone could right click any board, and have a window pop up with a PGN they can copy elsewhere. It's basically just a long string of moves so should be straightforward to generate.

 

An important thing here is that it is easy to cheat at chess, by using a publicly available "chess engine". I would not want to organise a chess tournament with prizes without a way to view moves played and check that players are playing human moves. Having PGNs of games readily accessible would make it easy to export games to another platform to analyse and check, as there are a lot of effective ways to check for chess cheaters. I don't expect the devs to add cheat detection to Wurm (it would be way too much work) but we as players/tournament organisers should have a feasible way to do this ourselves.

 

4. Chess clocks

Almost all games of chess are played with time control! Common variants include "blitz" chess (both players have 3-5 minutes each), "rapid" chess (~10-20 minutes each) and "classical" chess (which can be as much as an hour of time each). In addition, "increment" is also common (where every player gets an amount of time added to their time remaining after every move, e.g. 5 seconds' increment.) Increment is a nice way to stop "time scrambles" at the end of a game when both players are low on time, which can make it more about who can move fastest than who can play the best chess.

 

Again, this is simple to add (the server just needs to track how long each player has spent making moves and then display this somewhere) but is a massive quality of life change for in-game chess tournaments, as this would mean we can make sure games are finished in a timely manner (and don't take hours) so that tournaments of multiple people could be adequately organised. This could also be added to checkers and any other in-game games that get added in the future. Again, the lack of in-game time control is another big barrier right now to organising a hypothetical Wurm chess tournament.

 

(Right click board before game: "set time per player" "set increment per move" and have it get displayed to players while they play in the pre-existing game window in the top right. Easy!)

 

5. Labels on squares

Finally, it's quite common for chess sets to have labels on squares. Chess uses a grid system (columns go from a to h, rows from 1 to 8.) This would be a quick graphical change on the board texture to simply add a few numbers and letters, but would be a big help to any more avid players who want to talk about certain squares and moves of pieces to those squares.

 

 

Quite a few of us had a lot of fun playing chess yesterday at the impalong, and with these changes (plus the bugfixes about missing moves and rules), I think chess would become an excellent little minigame within Wurm for community events. It would make me very happy to see these changes added. I also don't think most of them are much work to code up at all, so these are not big feature requests - just a few QoL things that would make a lot of people very happy!

[Tilda 651]

All good ideas. I haven't played chess in many years, but your commentary last night made it so much fun I was quite surprised I was enjoying it so much! You did such a great job some impers stopped imping for awhile it was so interesting  

[DaletheGood 1,073]

Yes to all of the OP. I rarely play chess but do often watch 'agadmator's Chess Channel' on Youtube as his style of recapping games is quite enjoyable, not to mention conducive to improving your game.
It's a shame that the devs introduced chess with such obvious flaws in the game mechanics, rendering it basically a new game. Seriously, you can't be bothered to check the position of the King/Queen beforehand? Lack of en passant, stalemate and draw mechanics, and a resignation option are bad as well, but not quite as egregious as the King/Queen BS.

As to the suggestions in the OP, they are all needed, but the big ones for me would be PGN notation and clocks, followed closely by the ability to spectate with a top-view mini-board window showing the last move and time remaining for both players.

Make it so!

[Sidereal 1,119]

Having enjoyed a very intense game with Docterchese this weekend (wow, what a finish!), I want to add: thanks Doc for writing up this thoughtful list of suggestions - I'd love to see these get implemented as well. 

If I remember our conversation correctly, we discussed the possibility of a new 'Games' chat tab as a place to print out in-game moves for chess (and possibly checkers, and any other future games we might see) - possibly even color coded for the side the person is playing (white for white, grey for black).

And I have no idea if this is possible, but I think it would be neat for the chessboard to be a container - and at the conclusion of a game, two parchments appear inside with the PGN notation of the game as a keepsake for the two players.  I'd love to be able to make a book of 'Chess Games I Have Played in Wurm' and use it to keep all the records of the games inside of.

[Docterchese 1,570]

37 minutes ago, Sidereal said:

Having enjoyed a very intense game with Docterchese this weekend (wow, what a finish!), I want to add: thanks Doc for writing up this thoughtful list of suggestions - I'd love to see these get implemented as well. 

If I remember our conversation correctly, we discussed the possibility of a new 'Games' chat tab as a place to print out in-game moves for chess (and possibly checkers, and any other future games we might see) - possibly even color coded for the side the person is playing (white for white, grey for black).

And I have no idea if this is possible, but I think it would be neat for the chessboard to be a container - and at the conclusion of a game, two parchments appear inside with the PGN notation of the game as a keepsake for the two players.  I'd love to be able to make a book of 'Chess Games I Have Played in Wurm' and use it to keep all the records of the games inside of.

 

Yeah, the game yesterday was amazing! So intense

 

And ooh those are both great ideas too, I forgot about the chess tab. Colour coding it would be great. Having game notation sheets would be amazing and I love that idea, being able to keep all of your games from the past would be so cool. Would also make it easy for anyone running a tournament to run games (people could hand in their sheets after the game - like at a real chess tournament!)

[Karrde 343]

Huge chess fan.

 

Completely agree with the OP suggestions, especially for the grid coordinates that have been a mainstay of chess for millennia.

 

It allows for games to be "saved" for later replay. In a related note, a function could be added for "writing" unto paper a game's history and/or the current board setup. Furthermore this paper could be used to load the game to another board.

 

Perhaps even allow players to edit much akin to the way RL chess games are recorded.

[Burdok 163]

Yes please, there is absolutely nothing I disagree with in this post, come on devs, please doooo deeeees 😎

[amorfides 49]

Something that could also be done to board games is the ability to cast courier on them to give the option to play against the spirits. The strength of the spell could determine the strength of the AI of the spirits.