3D Chess / News: Recent posts

Right now the code won't do much other than display the board. The mouse cursor will let you select pieces by left clicking.. and if you hold down the right mouse button, you can move the white queen with W,A,S,D. Moving right moves faster than moving left... I will fix that in the next release.

I realized after I posted the code that there was some important information missing. I put a lot of this in this news section but realized it really should be in the readme.

This file release is the exact same code... only the readme file has changed. It now includes the copyright information as well as information about changing the screen resolution and the fact that the chess logic is incomplete and not tied to the engine at the moment.

I forgot to mention.. and will add to the readme in the future.. that you need to change the main.cpp file to fit your screen. I generally ran it on a widescreen monitor at 1440x900. If your monitor doesn't support that resolution.. I don't know what will happen.. maybe crash? Anyway.. just change "deviceWidth" and "deviceHeight" in Main.cpp

I forgot to mention.. right now the chess logic is not actually tied to the graphics logic. I wrote this a long time ago when I was just a budding programmer so please don't be upset by the chess logic code. My long term goal would be to get the whole thing working one day... but I am not sure what kind of timeline exists for that.

Right now.. if you start the program.. it will simply show the board and I believe you can move closer or further from the board if you hold the right mouse button down and hit "W" or "S".... read more

So I worked with this code a number of years ago. It is not perfectly clean and I am not sure if it will run on all platforms. As mentioned before.. the shadow map code requires 2.0 shaders. I changed the code to check if they are present and if not, they shouldn't be used. I do not however have a computer that does not have at least 2.0 shaders so I have not tested this.

A second note is the copyright. I was heavily influenced by the code from the book "The Zen of Direct3D Game Programming" by Peter Walsh. In fact, this was my introduction to DirectX programming. It is no longer in print, but if you are interested in the design choices in the code, this book would be invaluable. Since so much of the engine code was influenced by Peter Walsh's code, I have put all of the engine code files under his copyright. The only problem was that the copyright notice in his code is very tricky to quantify... here was the copyright from his code:... read more

I worked on this project a number of years ago. I have never distributed it before so it will be interesting to get feedback. I wrote it on a computer that had DirectX 9 with 2.0 shaders. I put some code it to use the shaders if available to put the shadows in the scene using a shadow map technique. I believe that it won't use the shadow map if your card does not support 2.0 shaders. I have however never tested it on any other computer so I am not really sure what will happen.... read more