Subversion Repositories Games.Chess Giants

# Chess Giants

![Chess Giants screenshot](https://pmbaty.com/chess/pic-2.jpg "Chess Giants screenshot")

[Chess Giants](https://www.pmbaty.com/chess) was (and still is?) a chess software handcrafted with much attention to quality, style and detail.

I wrote this software in 2010 when Microsoft removed from Windows 7 the excellent chess game they had since Windows Vista, _Chess Titans_. I wrote **Chess Giants** from scratch (including the Direct3D engine), added Windows XP support, other high-level chess engines (UCI and CECP), skinnable themes and sounds, and network play (using the FICS chess server).

This program was long distributed as a [donationware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donationware), but I eventually made it open source. It's still working well in 2024 on Windows 11.

If I were to redo it today, it would probably be a mobile app reusing a 3rd-party 3D engine (e.g. Unity, Unreal or Godot) instead of writing my own engine like I did here.

This was the first game I ever did seriously, and it aged not too bad. I don't feel shame in 2024 at how it looks. Rest assured that my quality of coding has much evolved since :)

## Characteristics

All this code was written from scratch by me with zero initial knowledge, so certainly some things might not be done in the orthodox way.

- Direct3D 9 rendering engine with mirroring effects, materials, depth and stencil buffers.
- OpenAL spatialized sound.
- Supports all Windows versions from Windows XP up to Windows 11.
- Chess game annotations, load/save, resume.
- Forsyth-Edwards and PGN parsers.
- UCI and CECP engine connectors to connect popular engines such as [Crafty](https://craftychess.com/), [Stockfish](https://stockfishchess.org/), etc (I did not develop chess engines myself, though).
- Network play on the [FICS server](https://www.freechess.org/) (ICS protocol compatible).
- Instant messaging between online chess players (good old MSN-like).
- Easily skinnable and translation system (most skins and translations here were actually user contributions).

## How to build

Open the Visual Studio solution file -> Generate.


-- 
Pierre-Marie Baty <pm@pmbaty.com>