doug rosenberg - 2013-10-28

Chess Tutor:
The purpose of ChessTutor is to teach chess to complete beginners over the internet so that they can eventually play over with a real board. It is to be used in conjunction with a tutor who will be teaching the beginner the proper moves.

This program is intended complete beginners how to play chess over the internet with the assitance of a tutor. It does not attempt to be a complete chess playing program as there are many excellent free sites already, although I intend to add features in the near future and I will take requests for features from users. To change the connection string select the from the options menu the “Connection String” dialog and enter in your new connection string. If you do not have a fixed IP, then you should avail yourself of free dynamic DNS which is very easy to set up on the tutor's end (eg. Www.Noip.com)
The program is written in Java and it requires Jave 7 to run. You will have run the server and client on one machine and the client on the other machine. You will have to change the connection string (under menu options) for the distant student to the IP or DNS of the server. The default is “localhost” which will only allow you to run the client and server on the same machine.

As such it does not currently constrain your moves to legal moves but allows the tutor presumably connected by Skype or similar means to correct the student. Some more modes will be added to support moves if I get requests and time such as to such the legal moves or to tell the player he just made an illegal move.

It has three modes:
1. Toggle Button Playing: Moves alternate
2. Toggle Button Move Pieces: Player who has turn can selects this move and can move all pieces until he exits this mode.
3. Toggle Button New Pieces: Allows the player to put down new pieces on the board to configure a new board.

Assisted Display Modes:
“Show Attackers” toggle button. Next press the mouse over a piece on the board. The piece and square that are being attacked or defened by this piece will be hilighted in red

I anticipate the following to be implemented in the near future:
1. Show Defenders & Attackers – Will highlight your pieces defending and your opponents pieces attacking a square or piece.

In case of problems or crashing:
This program has had very limited testing on my home machine and if you encounter any problems please let me know. There is also a log file that can be shown through a menu item. This is just programming debugging information and is of new interest to the programmer. If the program is not working, you can copy and send me the log file. If the program crashes, then it would be useful for me to know what exceptions were thrown. You can send me this by opening a a command line and running it from there cmd> java -jar chessTutor.jar or java -jar chessServer.jar