Graphics 8.0  Content 9.0  Usability 8.0  Innovation 5.5 2 users rated 76% average

Hi,
just finished the main work for a chess game in AS3 and I'd love to have some feedback from you. The game is on http://www.flashchess3.com

What do you think of it? How fast is it on your machine? What new features you'd like to see? How easy is it for you to beat it?

I plan to add a board editor and some tutoring features, depending on your feedback I may concentrate on different areas.

It's difficult to make a really powerful chess player in flash (AS3 is still roughly 10 times slower than Java and much more slower than C++ and it has to finish whatever is doing in less than 15 seconds -- more details on my blog) so I'm not aiming for a very strong chess, but rather to a game that's fun to play.

http://www.flashchess3.com/

[Nutrox]

Very cool.

I love the graphics and the gameplay seems solid enough to me. I played an advanced game and the thinking time was fine, the computer never took longer than 3-4 seconds to work out what move to make. It beat me.

Great stuff armandn, welcome to Ultrashock.

[mindtwitch]

That's awesome. Playability on it is fine. Pretty quick decision making. Great job!

[Gregaz81]

Great Job armandn, well executed

[enkriptid]

very sick.. how long did it take for the AI engine, and where can i learn what you did? one suggestion i would have is that when a piece is selected .. that it not be necessary to only click that same piece again before another piece can be selected.. but instead automatically deselect the last piece upon the focus of another.

[Anik]

very nice job, iam sure that took a LOT of work.

[armandn]

Hi all, thanks for the feedback. The engine took about 2-3 months to build, it's a little difficult to say because about half the time was spent studying algorithms and there was a lot of trial-and-error involved. I am in contact with an Adobe engineer who's working on the Flash player, he's been profiling the game with their internal tools and I'm still improving the speed. By improving the speed I can also improve the strength of the engine. A month ago, the engine could calculate 1000 moves/second; the beta2 version online can do about 9000 moves/second; the latest build is close to 13000 moves/second.

In terms of interface, your suggestion is well-received, enkriptid. I wish I could give you a reference to a book or something like that, but I don't have one. Everything I learned was from bits and pieces found here and there... I thought of looking at existing chess engines (like GNU Chess) but they are either overkill (optimized C with data structures impossible to duplicate in AS3, like 64bit integers for bitboards) or very messy and buggy.

[Nutrox]

@armandn

Any idea when the desktop version will be available? Will it be an AIR application?

[armandn]

I plan to finish in about 1-2 weeks. Basically I want to add a Board Editor and maybe a higher search depth. I'm currently trying to increase performance a little bit more.
Yes, AIR will definitely be available, maybe PC/Mac executable for those without Zinc.

[enkriptid]

a version for the psp would be sick-sauce, theres a flash player with the psp, i just dont know its limitations though, ive ported a small game of Simon i created for the psp's screen dimensions and added some button listers but it ran a little slow. im not sure how well Chess in flash would work out performance wise but it would be the first one im sure of that.