DemiChess

By Chirmaya on April 25, 2009 3:03:49 PM from

Alrighty, just follow me on this crazy idea of mine. It will take a map and mod to make it without it being ugly.

The idea is to have a map of a chess board that contains all of the normal features of a map except for the flags. In addition to this, all players will see a chessboard on their UI that they can minimize. The first player on each team has direct control over their UI chessboard, and on their turn they can play their move. Every player can see the game progress and give advice to the first player. With more coding I am sure that the player of the chess game could pass off control to another on their team. And so, with a time limit of say... 60 seconds or some choosable amount, the teams' chess players will play against each other. If one gets a checkmate, that whole team wins.

Now, while this is going on, demigods are still fighting on the chessboard, trying to take out the enemy citadel. With the destruction of the citadel, this is also a win for a team, so taking the citadel or the king is how you win. Now, the locations of your pieces on the 2D overlay chess board will have a direct effect on the 3D map, though I am not 100% on how this will work yet. Perhaps knights will have an invulnerable trebuchet at its location, bishops heal units for XHP per seconds or something. That is all up in the air, but the main goal is to be able to make players of chess a little more reckless, since advancing will give them a better chance on the 3D board, but less of a one on the 2D board.

Well, I hope that some of that made sense. This is my plan for my first map, so I just need to wait until modding is supported before I make this >.>

+45 Karma | 26 Replies

That sounds really amusing, I would totally play that Just leave the rook and knight slots empty to be starting positions for characters I would suggest that portals be where some of the pawns would go.

Sounds insane, but fun.

Though you should have just one chess player that simply wouldn't have a Demigod instead of passing the chess playing around. (1 player that's not good at chess could well ruin the whole game).

Well, if people had the choice of passing off control of the chess board to others it should even the playing field me thinks. Plus, with Ventrilo or other chat programs, or once Impulse gets its own VoIP, it could be fun to discuss which move to make while you are duking it out in-game =D

Like having move peices gives you bonuses like flags? That'd be neat.

I spent a bit of time today adding in some of the UI stuff in order to test, and it has been working pretty well.

So far you can pick up and set down pieces around the board. What I need to do next is to add the rest of the pieces, make pieces auto-move to the center of the squares that they are dropped in, and check to see if the moves are legal.

EDIT:

Yay, more pieces!

I thought this idea would be inevitable with the biggest most badass char being called rook...

Creeps could spawn from a pawn location. also, would you make chess peices destructable by demigods?

I'd be willing to throw you a small hand where i could, ideas for code implementation, and some design stuff.

Damn this idea looks AWESOME!

Like Excalibur, I am available if any of you need a hand to lighten your burden a little!

Alrighty! I have just made it so that units will center on the tiles that they are dropped on. I have also setup the basic movements system, so now I have the pawns moving and taking pieces correctly (aside from that en passant, which will need to take a turn system into account.) Now I just need to do the movement of the other pieces.

I shall also add a minimize button later and make both the main window and the minized bar draggable on the interface. I guess that the bar should just have some info like "K-C6 TURN 37 P-G4" with K-C6 being white's last move, P-G4 being black's last move, and TURN 37 being the colour of the team whose turn it is.

AWESOME!!!!

BTW how did you mess aorund with the files..with the mod tools not being out..what program are you using to open the game files?

Alrighty. All of the units are moving correctly. Now I have to work out a way to tie this into multiplayer and get everyone connected to see the updated turns.

@ShadowMastiff2468: You basically mess around with the lua files in dgdata.zip. Don't do it unless you know what you are doing though.

EDIT:

Got it to work in multiplayer now. Now to try to setup turns and teams based on faction =D

EDIT:

Got it working turn by turn for darkness and light. Woohoo! Next step is to get that en passant working, (which seems reeeeeeeally annoying, but could possibly be easy to do. Off to try that for 10 minutes and then sleep )

EDIT:

Okay, I stupidly spent an hour on it, but at least the en passant works perfectly. So hopefully I am not missing anything. Tomorrow I shall work on the display bar and a minimize feature!

Wow. This idea is totally awesome and zany, I approve. Also: I haven't played chess for like 12 years, and I'm sure my chess teacher would be rolling over in his grave (except that he's not dead) because I can't remember what en passant is. Something to do with pawns and I forgot it a lot even at the time. Yay for Wikipedia!

I can see why it would be difficult to get that working!

Awesome can't wait

Glad to see some people looking forward to this! I haven't had much time, and the other time that I have had has gone towards fighting zombies with flowers. And so, I have made the chessboard moveable to wherever you want on the screen. The next step is to make it minimizable and then show the moves in the title bar. Oh, and I need to eventually do castling, but that can wait! (For a long time >.>) Oh, I also need to do some 'check-detection', which doesn't sound too hard to do... yet. Oh, and I need to add the a,b,c 1,2,3 along the sides of the board. Well, hopefully I will be able to spend a good deal of time on this over the weekend!

EDIT:

Got minimizing to work. You can drag the minimized window to a different location for your perfect setup

Got the dynamic text all working.

Added check detection and it displays it in the last move text with a '+', although it doesn't force you to move out of check yet! That took a long time >.<

Have you got castling working? oops see you are thinking bout that

edit: keep at it, looks good

you could try to make it so the citadels are only vulnerable when they are in check

Quoting Szadowsz,

reply 17

you could try to make it so the citadels are only vulnerable when they are in check

I'd never win.

Insane!!!

Tell us when you've made DemiSnakes&Ladders. Now that would be awesome!

As far as I can tell, forced moving is now working perfectly. Now I am thinking of how I can possibly do checkmate detection seeing as a lot of the code takes place upon trying to move instead of before a move is initiated >.< Oh, the giant flaws that you come across when you just start randomly programming things instead of plotting out how the whole thing will work. But whatever, maybe I can come up with a way to do that. Until then, I shall let my brain juices get back to their solid form.