Doom Battle Chess

[Fonze]

Lol at that video when they all tilted. Also, glad you're back from Hell or whatever rock you crawled under ;p

Man you've gotten a lot of progress done in the last couple days: from camera controls, to sprite selection and organization, to menus, and even all the way to streamlining the rendering. That's awesome bro!

I like the look of the menu, very simple and the importance of the use of index pics when selecting sprites/tiles cant be overstated.

I lol'd also at the pic of the video here on the thread. SavageCorona's avatar grabbed my eye and made me do a double-take. Then I saw mine and Maes' avatars too. Hahaha. You need to get Job's new avatar in there as well. Who wouldn't want to play chess with a totally-not-distracting necrofiliac-Doomguy-fucking-a-mancubus that goes around and kills pieces while not missing a beat. He's a real trooper, that one.

[geo]

Tonight's update after 3 hours is a highlight cursor on the chessboard and more practical camera functionality. Here is the 30 second video:

http://imgur.com/qptpXsq

Highlighting a tile on the board is the first step to selecting a piece to actually play the game. I made a disco floor at some point tonight, but I forgot to include it in the video.

I think selecting the tile rather than the piece might be helpful since a cyber demon can stand towering in front of a barrel king or a zombieman and block them out from selecting them. That is if you select the piece rather than the tile.

[dg93]

I like this idea of a Doom chess game. I'd like to play test it if it's in a beta stage.

[Fonze]

geo said:

Tonight's update after 3 hours is a highlight cursor on the chessboard and more practical camera functionality. Here is the 30 second video:

Highlighting a tile on the board is the first step to selecting a piece to actually play the game. I made a disco floor at some point tonight, but I forgot to include it in the video.

I think selecting the tile rather than the piece might be helpful since a cyber demon can stand towering in front of a barrel king or a zombieman and block them out from selecting them. That is if you select the piece rather than the tile.

Yes, that's a great idea. Highlighting the tile is definitely the way to go. Now I wanna see the disco floor ;p
I need to get LanHikariDS here to post up that gif of the Doomguys dancing in that disco hall.

the_miano said:

I like this idea of a Doom chess game. I'd like to play test it if it's in a beta stage.

If you'd be willing to play me, we could have a public "1st game of the beta" type of thing and post it up here. I'm not the greatest chess mastermind by any stretch, but I'll typically at least get a few beads of sweat out of my opponents before they put me in the ground, heh. As to how we'd work it out, Skype and some video software seem to be quite flexible, which is what Hikari did with the videos on that other thread. One of us could record a game, the other would be present only through skype. We could run games simultaneous with one another or just use the one being recorded. It's easy to communicate what piece to move and even easier if we both know the grid lettering/numbering system.

As a side note, we won't have any animations in the beta.

[geo]

Yes he asked you to play with him.

I put in another hour, now the tiles are selectable and recognize their pieces. Shown is a system that highlights where the piece on the tile can move to and what its being blocked from.

Here's the rainbow happy video, because on my hard drive, all of these videos look and start the same.

http://i.imgur.com/E0Dlgwi.gifv

[geo]

Battle Chess Bump of the Night. Tonight took 5 hours. 3 hours was on a problem that I was able to overcome.

http://i.imgur.com/QmCgsJP.gifv

You can play a game of chess against yourself now. Pieces slide and capture. There's still no way to win. No animations. Just sliding. I figure that might be tomorrow.

Everything is color coated to help decipher what's what. The board is a rainbow again, because its fancy. There's a giant colored box telling you which player's turn it is. I didn't pay attention to it at all.

The player can click on both player's tiles... I guess to see where the other player can move. They just cannot take the other player's turn, unless it is that player's turn.

The highlight and selection code is 700 lines long. I'm a little surprised its turned out that long.

Its now a day later. Rather than bumping a one man conversation, I'll just write tonight's update in yesterday's update.

I sank in 2 hours to make an 8 directional sprite system. There is no animation yet, but depending on the camera angle, you'll see the back, front and side of sprites. You only need 5 directions, back, back / left, left, front left, front. If you don't have the other three, the game just mirrors them. So you can have all 8 directions or not.

The animation system has been started as well. I have only the pinky animations and angles. There are also two memory leaks. One is somewhere in the tile system and the other is in the sprite angles.

[geo]

Tonight's video:

... will be up later, apparently IMGUR is over capacity and shows a giraffe with kittens on it.

- 2 characters have 8 way direction and movement animation

Details:

Its now a day later. Rather than bumping a one man conversation, I'll just write tonight's update in another update.

I sank in 2 hours to make an 8 directional sprite system. There is no animation yet, but depending on the camera angle, you'll see the back, front and side of sprites. You only need 5 directions, back, back / left, left, front left, front. If you don't have the other three, the game just mirrors them. So you can have all 8 directions or not.

The animation system has been started as well. I have only the pinky animations and angles. There are also two memory leaks. One is somewhere in the tile system and the other is in the sprite angles.

Now its a day later and two hours into tonight's update, I might have a bump worthy update.

I've got two test character animated, the only real issue is the pieces move too fast compared to the animation. See I'm fine with making the animation slower or faster, but I think the issue is "how long do you want to see a chess piece move?" Right now it moves 600 pixels per second with 100 pixels per tile.

So just to see how it looks, I changed it to 120 pixels per second and it looks a lot more realistic. Its just 5 times slower.

I can always make the movement speed adjustable if it ever becomes an issue.

[dg93]

Fonze said:

If you'd be willing to play me, we could have a public "1st game of the beta" type of thing and post it up here. I'm not the greatest chess mastermind by any stretch, but I'll typically at least get a few beads of sweat out of my opponents before they put me in the ground, heh. As to how we'd work it out, Skype and some video software seem to be quite flexible, which is what Hikari did with the videos on that other thread. One of us could record a game, the other would be present only through skype. We could run games simultaneous with one another or just use the one being recorded. It's easy to communicate what piece to move and even easier if we both know the grid lettering/numbering system.

As a side note, we won't have any animations in the beta.

Yes I'm willing to play you. I'm not the best chess guy out there but the idea of making a Doom themed chess game seems pretty cool. Does this beta run off Windows 7? To record it, I would use FRAPS. And to communicate with players I would use Teamspeak.

[Fonze]

the_miano said:

Yes I'm willing to play you. I'm not the best chess guy out there but the idea of making a Doom themed chess game seems pretty cool. Does this beta run off Windows 7? To record it, I would use FRAPS. And to communicate with players I would use Teamspeak.

Cool man! I don't care about the outcome, win or lose I'm gonna have fun. I'll download TeamSpeak so we can use that.

To Geo:
I think slowing it down was a good idea. As to how slow, I couldn't tell you til I saw it. But Battle Chess had the pieces move really slow. Too slow, IMO. But by the same token, too fast would destroy the effect, like you had stated. Maybe speed would be a good thing to put in as an "option," but I trust you'll make it look good. Also, I'm a pretty easy person to please, maybe because I'm so easily entertained that a piece of string would likely be enough.

[geo]

I have come to realize that with this engine that I'm making, and the 8 directions, it would be easy to translate this engine from Battle Doom Chess to DooMario Kart, SNES / GBA style. Its a flat surface, no walls, no ceiling. Easier to make than my own Doom engine. In fact a Doom Kart might be easier to pull off than chess itself. DM-Zero would be easier than that. No weapons. I'm just throwing that idea out there.

What's that? Doom Battle Chess you say?

Shift key now makes the pieces move at their original speed, whatever that was. Shift key also speeds up the camera movement, as it always has. I spent the first 50 minutes fixing small minor stuff.

The game can actually be beaten by taking the opponent's king. Yes I know revolutionary stuff. Afterward, you see a Gungratuzation message and you need to hit R to replay.... which has always been in there. It also specifies how many moves were needed for the victory.

For anyone wondering about a video... I still can't upload to imgur. There's Youtube, I just don't want to use it. I hear videos take an excessively long time and when I'm doing this extremely late, I risk falling asleep before the upload is finished. Tonight's coding was 2 hours.

There is now an indication for the CPU or a human playing. There's no way to select it, but it exists now. If a CPU is playing, it blocks the player from taking the turn. If the player is playing, it blocks the CPU from taking a turn. Before it was both at once... always.

[Noiser]

geo said:

I sank in 2 hours to make an 8 directional sprite system. There is no animation yet, but depending on the camera angle, you'll see the back, front and side of sprites. You only need 5 directions, back, back / left, left, front left, front. If you don't have the other three, the game just mirrors them. So you can have all 8 directions or not.

Man, this is cool as fuck... I'm cheering for the project!

[geo]

Noiser said:

Man, this is cool as fuck... I'm cheering for the project!

Thanks! I was surprised that a fifth person said they'd pay. We've brainwashed another one!

To elaborate with the 8 direction sprite system; a cyberdemon and chain gunner should have 8 direction sprites since they carry a weapon with a specific hand. It's still fine if there are 5 direction sprites, you'd just see the rocket launcher mirrored.

Oh and there doesn't have to be directions or animations; a simple jpg or png with no animation still shows up.

The sprites animate when they move if they have animations, but they also animate when you click on them as just an extra bit of interactivity.

So with cacos and painos they float. I think I'll have a txt file for hovering and make a hover effect up and down even when they're idle.

[geo]

There is now a way in the settings menu to change who or what is playing Player or Human. I figure that I'll do some proper selection screen when the game starts, but but at least this allows the flexibility to bow out of a game, or take control.

Around 2.5 hours in, I've made mouse clickable basic camera controls. Basic like "top view," "player view," and "side view." Its more than just those three controls, its more like the start of mouse menu. Not that I mean mouse, so much as touch interface / mouse. There is a button to show and hide these preset camera angles. The buttons are larger for people that like to tap with their entire forehead. The mouse presses also do not affect the board tiles beneath.

3.5 hours in, when you have the top down view, it shows you the sprites flat as if it is just 2D, which is what this originally started as. So its come full circle. Anyway, flat 2D looks okay, but I think the colors just start to look like rainbow vomit with the blending of the tiles and monsters..

This is all setting up to the piece setting. I have a piece setting mode, it just doesn't work, and I thought it would be easier with a top down view, so here we are.

I intend on a double click to make a piece hidden or shown. One click to highlight it and a click and drag to move the piece wherever on the board. This should help with testing and the time it takes to do said testing.

Counting Code:
- The code for a chess piece is now 185 lines. Each piece uses the same code.
- The code for the 5 & 8 way directional sprites is 275 lines.
- The code to make the highlight and chess piece selection is 705 lines.
- The code for the GUI is 250 lines long and includes the camera prefabs.
- The code for the camera is 150 lines.

[Fonze]

Ok, so I've officially given up typing long messages on my phone. Would a battery change fix the problem? Likely would have if done months ago. Could I change the battery if I so chose? Of course not, that would simply make too much sense. Should I have used my brain before I bought the device and they said, "you cannot change the battery?" Hey, who needs brain cells? *Bubbles*

So all this stuff sounds awesome Geo. I have a few questions as to how it'll work, though. Maybe most are pointless questions, but I like to know how stuff works.

So first off, the floating flying pieces.

What I'm referring to is a few things:

• This game is avoiding possible legal trouble with the Doom folks by being generic and no real sprites being involved. It therefore is not Doom-specific and can handle, say, a floating Batman carrying a fire-breathing, baby Jim Morrison with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a lighter in the other (I guess he already took the LSD). Now that floating BCAFBBJMWABOJIOHAALITO should be able to float as well. So the first question is this: Does the game recognize what type of thing each character is? And how?
  
• How is that going to affect the eventual animations? (God I still need to either find someone who does animations or learn to do it myself)
  
• Is the floating-while-moving thing going to stay in for all flying things?
  If so, then cacodemons and similar stuff wouldn't need walking animations because the game already handles it, though something like a helicopter still would for the rotating blades. Is that correct?
  
• Does the toilet paper roll forwards or backwards? Wait, that has nothing to do with anything.
  

Couple other things:
The top-down view might be best if displayed as regular, non-animating chess pieces. In Battle Chess they called it 2D mode and 3D mode for the other. Board set-up was only available in 2D mode, but the game could be played from either mode. I suppose if you scaled down the monsters size 2D mode would look ok without making them standard chess pieces. Idk, maybe this thought is going nowhere. Anyway, it sounds like you're already doing that.

With regard to the controls: First let me say I don't care much about what the controls are, I'll get used to it regardless. Also, you can't please everybody. But from what you said earlier, you want the camera to have total movement capabilities. So would it then be best to make the camera drag-to-move and pieces click once to select and again to select spot in order to move?

I don't understand the importance of hiding a piece, unless if it's for the size of them in top-down view. Perhaps scaling could be tied to the height of the camera. That would add some additional 3D aspect to it as well.

For camera controls, if you are just doing buttons (which I'm totally cool with, as the battles will always have to be from the same angle anyway), perhaps you could add a "flip board" feature so the camera automatically flips over to the other player's perspective. Unless if that's what you meant by "player view," in which case I'm behind the curve, heh. Idk if people are gonna use a "side view," but perhaps that could just become a fixed position behind player 1, for matches against the computer.

I just thought of that some people may like a timer, I don't ever use one, so I wouldn't care if it weren't in there. That's your call. If you do decide to go for it, they usually have 2 options for it, one for total time allowed for each player, the other for additional time added per turn. Each is as important as the other from the way I see it, but usually programs will have the total timer to be set as a requirement for the per-turn timer to be set. The timer would have to cut off at the start of an animation and start for the other player at the end of it. Like I said though, I'll likely never use the thing.


I'm not gonna lie, I'm getting more and more hyped about this each post. The amount of work you're putting into making this is certainly an eye-opener and I'm so grateful that your making this happen. One day we'll have to play a game on this thing :) Don't matter if you don't know how yet, I can teach you enough to get you to the point where you can make a good player sweat. I think everything after that point is either out of my capabilities or comes with more experience than I have. Or maybe just paying attention and remembering particular set-ups and their outcomes. Patterns are key in chess; the more you can notice, as well as the broader of a picture you can handle seeing patterns in, the better you will be.

Maybe when this is done and I have some animations to go with it, I'll host a DoomWorld Chess Tournament and offer a prize to the victor. I'm totally not casing the competition >:D

If anyone wants to learn to play chess I can teach you, you'd be surprised how easy it is and how fun it can be to learn to implement strategies to: defend yourself, attack, chase, pin-down, deploy (they call it develop), create diversions/use decoys (sometimes it's a good thing to sacrifice a good piece for even better position), not waste moves (a fatal error every time. It's one of the Ten Commandments of Chess [to me]), and more. Getting old? Chess is great for mental health; it keeps you sharp upstairs. PM me if you want to learn to play.

Also, looking forward to that match, miano :)

[geo]

Around 2 hours later, I have a hover to talk about as in it now exists in the game, rather than just an idea.

Hover is done in a settings.txt file in the folder of the character. The settings file currently looks something like this:

float_min = 20
float_max = 25
float_by = 2
asflad

or

hover_min = 2
hover_max = 3545
hover_by = 10
sdafjlfdassdjklasjkl;

So what do they both mean?

min is the minimum number that the character hovers above the board. max is the maximum. Why is there hover and float? They both mean the same thing. Technically hover is more appropriate since it means to hang in mid-air while float has something to do with not sinking in liquid. Sure we've all come to know them as the same thing, but why not have both?

by means the pixels per second. So if you want a slow, gentle hover character, its hover_by = 2. If you want a real spaz, jumping imp, its:

hover_min = 0
hover_max = 35
hover_by = 10

So it looks like the imp / character will just be jumping up and down.

Hover isn't limited to above the board. If someone wants to make a shark chess game, you can do:

hover_min = -20
hover_max = 0
hover_by = 2

So you would see the sharks rise out of the board, then disappear below depending on what the sprite height is for the characters.

As for any other random jibberish... they mean nothing, the game ignores them, since it has no idea what they are.

With helicopters and dragons that need to be animated to look as if they can realistically stay in mid air, there is now:

always_animate = 1
always_animate = true
always_animate = yes

All of these do the same thing. You will find them in the settings.txt for each character. In the future I might just make a settings editor inside the character piece selection screen so people don't have to go editing .txt files. I have yet to test it yet, but I assume it works.

For all of these hover animations, I assume that the hovers will all come to their hover_min when attacking. The trick is, whoever animates the capture will have to have the helicopter floating hover_min in the air. While I'm thinking it will be more difficult, its literally they take a sprite and move the Y height in their .png file. So its just their placement.

Currently the controls are:
R = replay
Arrow Keys = camera circles object
Arrow Keys in menu = move menu cursor
Left Mouse Click = select a piece / move a piece
Right Mouse Click = focus camera on that tile
Mouse Wheel = Zoom in / out
Left Mouse Click + Drag = camera circle

Hiding / showing pieces is for setting up the pieces on the board like 8 pawns vs 1 king. You hide the other pieces so they don't exist. Technically its removing them and adding them to the board, but I said hiding / showing.

I have thought about a timer, and its just something to add to the settings. 1 minute, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 seconds for the lolz.

[dg93]

Fonze said:

Also, looking forward to that match, miano :)

I'm looking forward to it too Fonze! I used to play chess with my friends back in high school during lunch hour and it's been at least 5 years since I've played a game lol. I'm not exactly a chess wizard but I'm good enough where I understand how to play.

If you and geo have a beta version that's ready for playtesting, just shoot me a PM and we can arrange a day to play a game or two. My time zone is Eastern (New Jersey USA) :)

[Fonze]

the_miano said:

If you and geo have a beta version that's ready for playtesting, just shoot me a PM and we can arrange a day to play a game or two. My time zone is Eastern (New Jersey USA) :)

New Jersey, huh? You must be one of them damned greaseball Italians...

Spoiler

Me too ^.^ Except my family lives in New York. Truthfully, it's next to impossible to mistake that I'm Italian in-person; it's written all over my face and name, heh.

BS aside, idk how long it's gonna be on the game, that's geo's department. But when it's ready I'll PM you and let you know we're good to go. I'm also on US EST, so scheduling should be easy, but I work evenings typically and am a night owl. Still, I can sleep when I'm dead, so I wont mind if we have to schedule it during my sleep hours if you want to play in the morning. Idk about doing a game before work unless we do it hours in advance, just in case. Prolly best if we get lucky and both have the same day off one day, unless you're also a night owl, lol. Still, win, lose, or draw, I'm gonna have fun watching the game operate, as well as the friendly competition. I'll have even more fun if I get some animations together before then.

I can say that animations will be a while... It's likely that I'm gonna wind up doing it. Hopefully I can learn quickly and don't make it look like a rat's ass with a dying giraffe as it's noise. I'm gonna create a new thread asking for help learning soon.

Speaking of which, geo, is there/will there be sound capabilities?
If so, I'll need to figure out how to get everything to work. More specifically, I'll need to figure out what I need to prepare in order to make it work, since you're doing the heavy lifting here. But I'm guessing that stuff like battle sounds would have to be it's own complete file for each specific scenario, is that correct? So for example, a revenant attacks a cyberdemon. Now, randomly timed or even universally (every battle animation together) timed sounds, even with a well-timed death scream, would sound funny. Therefore, it seems to me that the best way to handle battle sounds, if they are even implemented, would be to have a special sound-bank for each battle, same as the animations themselves.

Oh I just got a random idea! If sound capability is featured, do you think an ambient noise function would be possible? It would likely have to be it's own thing that operates on it's own, but draws sounds randomly out of any ambient sound files in the folders for each piece in use. If not, that's cool too, it'd just be another one of those frills most people would never think about, but I think it'd be both hilarious and form a good atmosphere for the game, rather than complete silence. As for how often, Idk; not too much or it'd be annoying/distracting to some and not too little or it'd be silence interposed with "WTF was that?" followed by, "shit, what was I thinking about?" Prolly be best if it were quieter than the battles, too.

geo said:

float_min = 20
float_max = 25
float_by = 2
asflad

For a second there, I thought that said "Aflac," as in the Aflac Duck... Now I really want to learn to animate so I can make a Aflac Duck character. It would be so brutal, lol. Couldn't you just imagine the Aflac Duck just getting totally pissed off and biting off an imp's leg then making him starve to death because he's out of work and no longer getting paid? Wait a second, that took a weird turn; whatever, you get my point; blood everywhere, Aflac Duck, so brutal.

*Edit*
Just got this and can now post it, little late, but you remember that disco floor?
http://i.imgur.com/micd4D3

[dg93]

Fonze said:

New Jersey, huh? You must be one of them damned greaseball Italians...

Spoiler

Me too ^.^ Except my family lives in New York. Truthfully, it's next to impossible to mistake that I'm Italian in-person; it's written all over my face and name, heh.

Spoiler

Yep I'm from the Garbage State know as New Jersey, though I'm originally from Staten Island NYC lol I can assure you that I'm not your run of the mill greaseball/dago Italian :P
What part of NJ are you from?

[geo]

I'll ask my spriters about a 64 x 64px 4 frame animation. Their pricing structure usually dictates it would be $16, but they're usually happier with $30. If I can get the $16 price out of them per direction, it would still be around $200 for 6 characters, 2 directional cycles (front and back) of 4 frames each.

Then there's the actual death animations themselves, which might be around 6 characters * 6 characters * $4 per sprite * 4 animations * 2 animations (killing / dying) = $1,152. That's with 4 frames of animation and that might make for some ugly simple capture animations. There is a cheaper route 6 deaths / falling overs * 6 killings / throwing fireballs * 4 per sprite * 4 animations = $576

That's probably why Mortal Kombat and other 90s games went the digitized actor route. Much easier to pay 4 people to be in front of a green screen or even pay a modeler to make a model.

You can always reduce costs by going 32 x 32px, but at that point you lose a lot of detail. Those are the logistics of it; a minimum of around $1,352 and that doesn't even cover miscellaneous stuff like tiles. That's why shmups are much more cost effective to make... little need for animations.

As for sound and music, there currently is neither. That's always the last step with finalizing a project. It usually goes programming > design > graphics > sound + music. There can be sound / music capabilities with mp3, wav and midi.

I can make the settings.txt files for each character cue up sounds when certain frames happen whether its animating to make a helicopter sound or killing.

Ambient / randomly selected sounds at random times would be easy to do.

[Fonze]

Damnit another long message on my phone... well, here goes:

To miano: I'm not from Jersey, I just meant I was a greaseball Italian myself, lol. Like I said, my family was from New York. But I was a military brat growing up, so lived in many places. My family was from long island, but we lived for a short period in Staten island and I think we then moved to New Jersey after that when I was in kindergarten. Idk, something like that. I don't remember what part of Jersey it was, it was over 20 years ago now, but I'm pretty sure it was military housing and it was by a bridge not too far from Staten island. I remember passing it on road trips with my mom as a kid going from VA to Long Island, NY when we took the route that takes you through Staten island.

I like George Carlin's stand up about New Jersey. He called it the toll-booth capitol of the world, haha. God bless old George, RIP.



To geo:
Ok, I was curious if itd even be included, but that's cool to hear about the timeline of how stuff is made and added.

As for the animations, I'm just gonna have to do it myself then. No way I'm paying upwards of $1,000 for a game. Even $100th is a lot for one game, even if not in the grand scheme of things. A lot for one person to throw down on one game, let alone thousands. That's investing and retirement kind of money there. No, I'll just have to do it myself. After mutiny is done I'm gonna have to hit that hard and stay at it til it's done.

Maybe I can figure out a way to use existing spritework in this. There are already animations of monsters killing each other. I'll do some research on that later.

[geo]

I'd actually pay it myself but the odds are against any return on investment. Even ghetto bundling something in indiegalas awful bundles net about $500 per game for 100,000 license keys or so I hear. Other bundles give a cut, but without the doom name no one will find it or care. So that's why there's the fallback of just letting people import and make their own stuff as planned.

I can still do generic scratch and death animations as a demonstration.

There's always rpg maker style sprites and animations too. Like building animated paper dolls. Plenty of sites have rpg character sprite makers and rpg maker vx ace comes with one.

Graphics cost is another reason why it comes after design. If a project can't bankroll graphics its time to start cutting stuff in the design process. Like walk animations. Id rather have capture animations than walk animations.

Or just make most of the character pieces 32 x 64. I think imps are 33 x 44.

[Fonze]

Interesting, we could cut down on the pixels per character, but if I'm gonna do something I'd rather do it right. Most of those empty pixels should be blank anyway, if I'm using my brain correctly.

The first thing you said was the same reason why I wouldn't want to dump that much money into it. No chance of return on investment, especially since its not mine in the first place, haha. But even for the sprite work, no chance of people buying what cannot be sold (Doom sprites). That's why I'm leaning towards reaching out to people that have already made existing sprites and seeing where that goes. Stuff like Smooth Doom and Brutal Doom and what not. I forget what mods have monster-to-monster fatalities, but I'll have to find out soon.

[geo]

I'm also not really doing it as an investment thing so much as a matter of pride and glory. A one month diversion.

There are all sorts of technicalities. Even if you use someone else's sprites id or the doom artists hold the copyrights. Our lawyer at work told me I can't or shouldn't be using doom sprites even in my demo video cuz again not my characters or sprites to use but I guess if no one goes suing youtubers for using materials someone else owns I might be safe from using them in demo video.

With that being said, no one would sue Youtubers, they'd go after Google for hosting, providing, distributing and having money that individuals do not have. Then shit goes downhill, so Google would just do something to the Youtuber like kick them off.

Then there's the fair use, "Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship." I don't think this game will do any of that. UNLESS... I TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO PLAY CHESS! ... but chances are I'd need to teach people about Doom sprites and not chess.

Not that I'm afraid but you never know I could be the lucky one that gets a cease and desist.

Anyway, back to making zee game.

*** EDIT ***

After about 75 minutes, I now have a set piece system that works really nice. Well that was surprisingly quick. I'll take it off the list.

- pause the game
- turn on 'set piece mode' from the pause menu
- unpause the game
- left mouse click to select a piece, drag it to an unused tile
- doube mouse click to make it transparent or not
- transparent pieces are destroyed when you exit 'set piece mode'
- the pause menu has a brief paragraph explaining the 'set piece mode' and its controls.
- if there are any transparent pieces when the mode is on, it will warn you that turning the mode off and exiting the menu will remove the pieces and you will not get them back without restarting the game.

Basically, you can cheat your way in, but not cheat your way out. If you're ten moves in and decide eh I want to remove all of dark's pawns, you can do it, but you can't say wow I want my queen back. You can't just make it happen.

This should all go like dominos now.

[Fonze]

Quick question about that piece set system, why not have a delete piece option?

The piece set feature is mostly used to start a game somewhere for specific practice scenarios. If used from game start not having a delete piece feature within the piece set mode would be inconvenient and seem strange to not have. It would ultimately lead to needing to enter the piece set mode multiple times or jump through a few hoops moving pieces to unoccupied squares and marking them for deletion upon exit. Idk, just seems like itd be confusing and cluttered.

Then again, I also don't know how much of a pain it'd be to add that feature.

[geo]

How it works is at any time, you can pause the game, turn on the mode, set the pieces, turn off the mode and play the game.

The whole transparency thing is a delete. Its just that the pieces are transparent until you exit, then they're removed.

Double click to hide / show the piece just seems quicker than completely removing the piece and bringing it back. There's an oops factor with the double click. Bringing it back relies on a different set of logistics. Which piece are you bringing back?

I can always stick the pieces off to the side when they're removed, but that too is a whole new set of logistics, that's even worse than the previous.

There's always the idea of transparent pieces being able to share the same tile as other pieces, since they will be deleted anyway. I can also make it so two pieces swap with one another if you drag a queen on a pawn, they just flip tiles. That way there's less arranging.

I can make it just as a beginning thing where before you begin, you can use the mode, then when you start the game, it prevents you from using it.

Turns out IMGUR is now working for me. Here is tonight's update and I probably did it too fast, but fast shows you how fast it can be done:

http://imgur.com/fAWH2NW

[dg93]

To Fonze:

Spoiler

Fonze said:

Damnit another long message on my phone... well, here goes:

To miano: I'm not from Jersey, I just meant I was a greaseball Italian myself, lol. Like I said, my family was from New York. But I was a military brat growing up, so lived in many places. My family was from long island, but we lived for a short period in Staten island and I think we then moved to New Jersey after that when I was in kindergarten. Idk, something like that. I don't remember what part of Jersey it was, it was over 20 years ago now, but I'm pretty sure it was military housing and it was by a bridge not too far from Staten island. I remember passing it on road trips with my mom as a kid going from VA to Long Island, NY when we took the route that takes you through Staten island.

I like George Carlin's stand up about New Jersey. He called it the toll-booth capitol of the world, haha. God bless old George, RIP.

It's good to see that there are fellow greaseballs on the Doomworld forums lol I'm not sure which military base is near SI, but I know there are a few nearby where I live. Yeah NJ has quite a lot of toll booths on the turnpike and parkway. I swear, the state tries to suck as much money out of you as possible haha

But on another note, I'd like to test this Doom chess game with you when it is ready

[geo]

Well apparently I never realized what the clock actually does. I thought each player had time for their turn. Nope, its time for ALL of their turns and that makes sense since would a person forfeit a turn if they fail the deadline? Then that can be a tactic.

Anyway, now I know what a clock does. So in 60 minutes, I have made a clock system. No clock all the way up to 75 minutes per player. Looks like there are some rules that play until a clock runs out then there are X amount of moves remaining until its determined a draw between both players. I think I'll wait for that feature to be asked for. There is also a special message for the time up condition.

Playing against myself with the timer, I think that I might have to make the piece movement click and drag. Right now the "set pieces mode" has a click and drag, BUT the actual game is click to select a piece, then click elsewhere to move it. A mouse click and drag just seems faster. One less step I suppose. Click, release, move, click release, rather than click, move, release.

With the clock, you see minutes, seconds and frames with 60 frames per second.

I can make an actual clock button to press or a keyboard button to press in order to stop the clock.

[geo]

TONIGHT'S UPDATE: PROMOTION SYSTEM
VIDEO: http://imgur.com/assu6E9

Time to continue this one man conversation with tonight's update done in 140 minutes. Easy enough update, the real time investment was to make the boxes to select the piece. There are mouse and key controls for the selection process. Only pawns can be promoted of course, using only captured pieces.

The images themselves look imperfect, but they are cropped from the sprites that do not use index.pngs. The highlighter could look better too. Currently, the computer cannot select a promotion, but it should be easy enough to do by having it either randomly select a class or go queen, bishop, rook and knight.

There's just not much to say here.

[dg93]

geo said:

TONIGHT'S UPDATE: PROMOTION SYSTEM
VIDEO: http://imgur.com/assu6E9

Looks nice geo. My only gripe is with actual board using the door FLAT textures. I personally would rather the board have the traditional black and white colors. But that's just my opinion. Other than that, it looks like you are making good progress.

[Fonze]

Ah shit, I was wondering why I didn't see any updates to this, got unsubscribed again :/

Well I got a lot to type out, but there's no way I'm gonna attempt it on my crappy phone that apparently thinks the word "crappy" is supposed to be "Dr appt," because you know, people type that all the time. W/e.

Anyway. To miano: it might not have been a base. Could have just been that we were living in base housing and I was just too young to note the difference between that and a real base. Matter of fact, that's prolly what it was.

To geo: the majority of this message will have to come later, but 2 thing for now:

First, promotion is not limited to pieces that have already been captured. By the same token, it should be theoretically possible to put in, say, 12 queens for each side through the piece set-up mode, because it uses the same logic, which once again is not limited to what has already been captured or what the standard pieces are to start a match. As it is now, what happens if you lose 0 big pieces and promote a pawn?

Along the same lines, the computer should never pass up a queen when promoting. My uncle did that to me once; it's insulting, to say the least. I could see the computer doing that on the easier difficulties, however I'm assuming that chess ai's are written for the top difficulty and edited to be stupider on the easier ones.

Second, en passant is another special move for the pawn. It is absent (not not used, but not possible) in the latest video, where there was a chance for it to be used.

Also, I noticed the king wasn't required to break check in the video.

I'll type the rest later tonight and update the OP, but it's looking and sounding good.