android-chess
Play chess on Android! For two players, or one against the computer. AI difficulty: laughably easy.
grid
The Grid interface details the specification of a generic grid. You can add types to a certain location, query to see what is there, and print the board out to whatever output is specified.
The Location class obviously encapsulates a location. It has support for converting numerical coordinates into proper chess coordinates (file and rank).
The Chessboard class is an extension of Board, which is an implementation of the Grid. It represents a standard 8x8 chessboard and uses a HashMap to map a Location to the Piece occupied by it. Besides placing pieces on it, you can draw the board out to standard output, invert the board, etc. For Android, we can use this method to draw to the screen, invert the buttons if necessary, etc.
pieces
This package defines all of the standard chess pieces as their own object. All pieces are subclasses of the Piece class, which defines some standard behavior shared by all the pieces.
Some important methods are getAttackedLocations(), which return a list of the locations attacked or defended by that piece, and getMoveLocations(), which lists the valid locations the piece can move to. There are also some helper methods for dealing with piece notation for playing the game.
game
The game package defines some handy classes for actually playing a game of chess.
The Game class is the most important, as it actually represents a game that is being played. To interact with the game object, you query the game's move() method, which moves the piece from the source location to the destination specified. This means that we need to write a new class (perhaps called Chess) that has a Game object, gets input, sanitizes it and then feeds it into the game. After that, it is up to the GUI to render the board to the screen.
Other useful things are some exception classes, which allow for robust handling of error conditions and the like. There is also a Move class, which represents one move in the game and can be used for the move-by-move playback.
Things to Do
- Make an AI that selects from the possible moves and picks one at random (this should only take a slight modification of my original code)
- Find out how we can save games on the phone
- Render the board to the screen; handle touch input