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• Rev 196 2024-11-22 20:27:17
• Author: pmbaty

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  improved README.md

Chess Giants

Chess Giants 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, 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, Stockfish, etc (I did not develop chess engines myself, though).

• Network play on the FICS server (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