Show HN: My 6 Weeks Project, MultiplayerChess.com

[jonp]

Very nice. It looks great and seems really easy and intuitive to use.

A few suggestions:

1. When playing against the AI (on Chrome/Vista) after a move the piece briefly stays where I put it (not centred on the square; and with two pieces visible if I capture the opponent's piece). It only properly completes the move once the AI has moved.

2. When I promote a pawn it asks me to choose from a set of pieces which are black, even though I'm playing white. Might be nice to use piece icons of the same colour as the player.

3. Are there any open source AI players you could use? I'd be tempted to come back if there were some reasonable ones, but the current AI player is no challenge, even for a real amateur player like me.

[wyclif]

Also in Chrome, it never switches to Black's move. It's always White's move no matter which player is moving.

Otherwise, this is great. I salute you.

[diamondhead]

thanks for the ideas and suggestions jonp. I asked Oscar Toledo (http://nanochess.110mb.com) permission for use of his javascript ai (a.k.a 1k chess) yesterday, guess I'll use a fork of his work

[grammaton]

How on earth did you get the domain? I'm shocked that it wasn't already taken :)

[petervandijck]

Do you want a job? :)

[yakto]

Forget job, do you want to co-found something? :)

[absconditus]

http://lichess.org/

[dbz]

You need to allow people to resign. Instead of just letting them leave.

[JoachimSchipper]

Nice. The single-player mode is a bit slow, though (client-side - FF seems pretty busy.)

[EDIT: also, the AI tries a bit too hard to lose.]

[diamondhead]

hi all, I hope that AI won't make your browsers crash. I've disabled its deeper search, it was accumulating time limit of search after every move.

BTW https://gist.github.com/889174

[steg132]

great game, feature request: add chat

[noob007]

+1

[raarky]

So, give us the lowdown :)

What did you use, etc?

[ndunn2]

Until the original poster gives us more info, you can read the source here: http://multiplayerchess.com/mpc.js

[diamondhead]

NodeJS and CouchDB. Mustache (http://mustache.github.com) for templating, Jeff Hlywa's chess.js for move validation and JSBuild (http://jsbuild.kodfabrik.com) for the compile of CommonJS modules for browsers, and excanvas for cross-browser canvas

[oomkiller]

You should try doing modern renditions of the Yahoo Games card games. They are all getting really long in the tooth now, and are completely inaccessible (for disabled people), as they are Java applets. It would be nice to see someone put together a nice site with classic card games, like Pinochle, Hearts, and Bridge. There are many older players out there that would even pay monthly for such a service, for example OKbridge ($100/yr) users. Let me know if you do, my grandmother and her group of players would be happy to try it out! :)

[psb]

From the domain name, I was under the impression that there would be an option to join a "team" and vote on moves or something like they did for Kasparov vs world

[ricefield]

Seems pretty awesome, I like it! I don't suppose you would consider making something similar for us go players, would you? ;P

[masylum]

I was thinking about doing that for the next node knockout :)

[lacker]

It's probably a bad idea to put new players into an already-existing game when someone disconnects. If I win a queen, my opponent will disconnect, and then everyone else who gets my opponent's position will disconnect after they realize they're so far down. Just let someone win the game when their opponent disconnects.

[mraybman]

Hi, great work! Very clean and easy to play.

I just played a game against your AI - I should've lost but it got stuck at the very end. I had a king and 2 blocked pawns, AI had queen, king and 1 pawn. It should've moved in for a checkmate at that point, but it just kept moving the king right and left on the spot.

[joebo]

Fun. I think the AI is fairly simple. I managed to beat it on the first try. I typically don't play chess because I thought I was pretty bad. That's one way to get me to come back though.

Here's the moves: https://gist.github.com/894826

[csomar]

Good Design and neat execution. I'll just add: I don't know how to play Chess, I would prefer that I find a tutorial in the site itself that offers the game rather than looking in Google.

Design Note: It would be better that you add a hover effect. It feels more user-friendly and realistic.

[zacharycohn]

I don't think that's really necessary. It's targeting a niche of people who want to play chess. If you want to learn, there are plenty of other resources out there.

[nopassrecover]

Fantastic design. Only issue at the moment is people leaving after 3 moves or seemingly permanently idle, but no doubt that's due to people trying it out.

Great domain by the way! I think this could have massive numbers of users if you want it to (like other far less appealing chess sites).

[ndunn2]

I second the design comment. Extremely easy to jump in and start, no log-in bs, nothing to get in your way. The minimalist aesthetic is nice as well. If only I knew how to play chess..

[zipdog]

It looks nice. A couple of issues occur when using Opera 11 on Vista. The pieces are not centered on the square, they're about 5px up and left. And when pieces move they leave blue or green backing square artefacts for the next turn.

[jschuur]

Seems to not be iPad Mobile Safari compatible. In a singleplayer match, says it's white's turn, but I can't move pieces (presumably I need to be able to drag them), and the site doesn't warn m that I don't have a compatible browser.

[VinzO]

With Internet Explorer I see only an empty chessboard. Is it working only wiht Chrome/FF/Safari?

Just before anyone start a rant on decent browser, this is my office PC and I can't install anything else than IE :-(

[diamondhead]

Which version? It's working with IE7 and IE8 but I haven't tried yet with 9

[sc00ter]

Nice work. I just got trounced! Chat would be good, or at least a few communication buttone ("Nice Move", "I resign" (!) etc). I'm sure some players would like a game timer.