Show HN: My 6 Weeks Project, MultiplayerChess.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My 6 Weeks Project, MultiplayerChess.com

multiplayerchess.com

79 pointsdiamondhead54 comments

Very nice. It looks great and seems really easy and intuitive to use.

A few suggestions:

1. When playing against the AI (on Chrome/Vista) after a move the piece briefly stays where I put it (not centred on the square; and with two pieces visible if I capture the opponent's piece). It only properly completes the move once the AI has moved.

2. When I promote a pawn it asks me to choose from a set of pieces which are black, even though I'm playing white. Might be nice to use piece icons of the same colour as the player.

3. Are there any open source AI players you could use? I'd be tempted to come back if there were some reasonable ones, but the current AI player is no challenge, even for a real amateur player like me.

Also in Chrome, it never switches to Black's move. It's always White's move no matter which player is moving.

Otherwise, this is great. I salute you.

thanks for the ideas and suggestions jonp. I asked Oscar Toledo (http://nanochess.110mb.com) permission for use of his javascript ai (a.k.a 1k chess) yesterday, guess I'll use a fork of his work

You could also have GNUChess run on the server: http://www.gnu.org/software/chess/

How on earth did you get the domain? I'm shocked that it wasn't already taken :)

Do you want a job? :)

Forget job, do you want to co-found something? :)

My email is in my profile page, get in touch (yours isn't yet) :)

http://lichess.org/

You need to allow people to resign. Instead of just letting them leave.

Nice. The single-player mode is a bit slow, though (client-side - FF seems pretty busy.)

[EDIT: also, the AI tries a bit too hard to lose.]

hi all, I hope that AI won't make your browsers crash. I've disabled its deeper search, it was accumulating time limit of search after every move.

BTW https://gist.github.com/889174

Your AI does work for me, although I'm still not sure it's not trying to lose.

BTW, have you seen http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/method.html? It's not great as a chess AI, but the "wow" factor is definitely there.

That's really cool. It was strange to see the thinking simplify as the game progressed, but I guess chess is a game of eliminating possibilities.

great game, feature request: add chat

So, give us the lowdown :)

What did you use, etc?

NodeJS and CouchDB. Mustache (http://mustache.github.com) for templating, Jeff Hlywa's chess.js for move validation and JSBuild (http://jsbuild.kodfabrik.com) for the compile of CommonJS modules for browsers, and excanvas for cross-browser canvas

Until the original poster gives us more info, you can read the source here: http://multiplayerchess.com/mpc.js

You should try doing modern renditions of the Yahoo Games card games. They are all getting really long in the tooth now, and are completely inaccessible (for disabled people), as they are Java applets. It would be nice to see someone put together a nice site with classic card games, like Pinochle, Hearts, and Bridge. There are many older players out there that would even pay monthly for such a service, for example OKbridge ($100/yr) users. Let me know if you do, my grandmother and her group of players would be happy to try it out! :)

From the domain name, I was under the impression that there would be an option to join a "team" and vote on moves or something like they did for Kasparov vs world

Seems pretty awesome, I like it! I don't suppose you would consider making something similar for us go players, would you? ;P

I was thinking about doing that for the next node knockout :)

You're awesome. Keep me posted. The go world needs more apps!

Seems like it'd be easiest to work on extending http://eidogo.com/, which is open source.

It's probably a bad idea to put new players into an already-existing game when someone disconnects. If I win a queen, my opponent will disconnect, and then everyone else who gets my opponent's position will disconnect after they realize they're so far down. Just let someone win the game when their opponent disconnects.

Hi, great work! Very clean and easy to play.

I just played a game against your AI - I should've lost but it got stuck at the very end. I had a king and 2 blocked pawns, AI had queen, king and 1 pawn. It should've moved in for a checkmate at that point, but it just kept moving the king right and left on the spot.

Fun. I think the AI is fairly simple. I managed to beat it on the first try. I typically don't play chess because I thought I was pretty bad. That's one way to get me to come back though.

Here's the moves: https://gist.github.com/894826

Good Design and neat execution. I'll just add: I don't know how to play Chess, I would prefer that I find a tutorial in the site itself that offers the game rather than looking in Google.

Design Note: It would be better that you add a hover effect. It feels more user-friendly and realistic.

I don't think that's really necessary. It's targeting a niche of people who want to play chess. If you want to learn, there are plenty of other resources out there.

Fantastic design. Only issue at the moment is people leaving after 3 moves or seemingly permanently idle, but no doubt that's due to people trying it out.

Great domain by the way! I think this could have massive numbers of users if you want it to (like other far less appealing chess sites).

I second the design comment. Extremely easy to jump in and start, no log-in bs, nothing to get in your way. The minimalist aesthetic is nice as well. If only I knew how to play chess..

It looks nice. A couple of issues occur when using Opera 11 on Vista. The pieces are not centered on the square, they're about 5px up and left. And when pieces move they leave blue or green backing square artefacts for the next turn.

Seems to not be iPad Mobile Safari compatible. In a singleplayer match, says it's white's turn, but I can't move pieces (presumably I need to be able to drag them), and the site doesn't warn m that I don't have a compatible browser.

With Internet Explorer I see only an empty chessboard. Is it working only wiht Chrome/FF/Safari?

Just before anyone start a rant on decent browser, this is my office PC and I can't install anything else than IE :-(

Which version? It's working with IE7 and IE8 but I haven't tried yet with 9

I tried with IE8

Nice work. I just got trounced! Chat would be good, or at least a few communication buttone ("Nice Move", "I resign" (!) etc). I'm sure some players would like a game timer.

Great simplistic design! Just a question, I havent done some more twsting but; is it normal that the game doesn't work on iPad Safari? Do you need to drag the pieces ?

Fantastic site. I think I am going to pick up online chess again. Really nice work.

Could you put some contact info in your about? I'll send some feedback after I use it for some time.

That looks great diamondhead.I have web game with mutiplayers.can you tell me please what tools,langauges did you use for MultiplayerChess.com.Thanks in advance

Using Safari on a MacBook, the site briefly flashes a white knight, and then just a blank, black background where I can do nothing.

Pretty nice, I did beat the AI pretty easily but I guess that's because you disabled the deep search. Is the AI made in Javascript?

When I tried to start a game, it put me in a game that was in progress already. How can I just start a new game?

Your rules for a draw are broke.

http://i.imgur.com/KH91X.jpg

Great job, tried the single player, it was very slow on Safari and the AI couldn't beat me :)

When I saw the domain name, I thought it would be about bughouse. Great app nonetheless!

I had never finished a chess game before. Well done!

Seem like HN killed your site? ;)

Ok it's working again. UI looks clean and simple. I would center the layout, not left align. The AI opponent plays very badly ;)

Sleek and simple interface. Where did you find the AI though? I know you aren't supposed to play the AI, but it doesn't seem to be aware of anything happening on the board.

  1. e4 Nf6 2. Nc3 g6 3. e5 a6 4. exf6 d5 5. fxe7 b5 6. exd8=Q+ Kxd8 7. Nxd5 f6 8. Nxf6 h5 9. Qe2 Nd7 10. Qe8#

Also, it would be great if "White/black disconnected" was shown in the session log as well.

Would be great if you added a time limit, like zynga poker

Javascript fail. Crashes Firefox 3.6.16. Screenshot:

http://tinyurl.com/627mftb

Is it just me, or is the computer incredibly bad? I played the AI and I'm really bad at chess. I beat it easily.

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