Little progress on SMIRF's successor program

[SMIRF]

As you may notice that program intends to run on Windows and Mac OS X. Its position editor part has become working now. It will take al lot of time to finish with that approach. Comments on its editor's layout will be welcomed.

[hgm]

Very nice piece set! Are these your own design? If so, would you consider making them available for general use, or do you want to reserve them for your own GUI?

BTW, how do you feel about Seirawan Chess? Wouldn't that merge excellently with normal, FRC, Capablanca, CRC? I am pretty sure that also implementing that would significantly raise the interest in your program, and help drawing more people to other flavors of 10x8 Chess. You could even implement a shuffle version of it, SRC = Seirawan2880.

[SMIRF]

Indeed, the design of those pieces is of my own. But those shapes are not images. They will be dynamically drawn upon an 8x8 point raster. Because of this the GUI is seamlessly adapting to any size. Moreover the GUI could be up- and down-scaled in several steps to vary the size of the used fonts as needed by the user.

The created shapes are intended to reflect clearness und simplicity. Each different type has at least one significantly distinguishing picture element. Because of the underlying common raster they clearly belong to one graphic family of shapes.

If someone would like to make use of its design (without any commercial relation) he/she should ask me for permission by private mail.

Concerning Seirawan chess I still want to use only traditional gaits. Nevertheless I intend to implement my interpretation of free castling as an option. The program should behave as a kind of closure of traditional chess elements combined with liberty.

[SMIRF]

I forgot to mention, that board display colors are multiply customizable. Also an e.p. field will be discreetly marked.

[hgm]

The created shapes are intended to reflect clearness und simplicity.

I think you succeded marvellously in this respect!

Concerning Seirawan chess I still want to use only traditional gaits.

Well, Seirawan Chess only uses Archbishop and Chancellor next to FIDE, that is why I asked. Or isn't that what you meant?

[SMIRF]

Ok, I probably had a wrong idea on Seirawan's rules. So I will learn about it ...

[Richard Allbert]

Very nice.

I've been developing a mac GUI myself (but native to Mac OS) - you've done a far better job with the look, especially the pieces.

Good luck.

[SMIRF]

One problem is, that there isn't a common Unicode piece set for 10x8 chess as there is one for traditional chess. So a set of shapes has to be created. It is interesting to see how different candidates for the mixed gaits types N+R and N+B could appear.

To have a new genuine Mac OS X GUI may interest a lot. So why not present your approach?

The idea here is to use Embarcadero C++ XE7 with Firemonkey to target several OSs having just one source. But that is not that easy as it intends to be. Thus I target merely Mac OS X and Windows, hoping to fix unwanted divergences. Whether e.g. Android will become another target or not still isn't on the agenda.