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thecommons-urbit / chess-app

Urbit app for P2P chess
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chess hoon urbit

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%chess

About

%chess is an Urbit app which allows you to play chess with other Urbit users. It is a fully-decentralized, peer-to-peer chess application.

The original %chess was made by Raymond E. Pasco for several reasons:

You can find his original repository for Urbit Chess here and his Urbit Chess Announcements page here. Ray paused work on %chess in March 2021 due to personal reasons.

In August 2021, Tlon (who at the time performed the Urbit project management duties presently performed by the Urbit Foundation) released software distribution in an update to Arvo. ~finmep-lanteb updated %chess to work with this update as an example of app distribution for Assembly 2021. Afterwards, he continued to support the app to add features and improve usability.

In September, 2022, ~bonbud-macryg, ~nordus-mocwyl, and ~rovmug-ticfyn began working on %chess in their spare time for an Urbit Foundation bounty, which they completed in September, 2023. Since then, they have continued to help maintain the app.

Install

This repo contains only the Hoon code for the chess agent, without any sort of user interface. See the chess distribution repo for detailed instructions on how to install the chess app.

NOTE: The above advice is not only for users, but also developers. Developing / testing with an interface is much easier.

Development

Below is a step-by-step guide for working on %chess and testing changes. This section assumes at least minor Urbit development experience, i.e.:

The above is not to say that people with no prior development experience are barred from contributing, just that this is not a place to receive guided help. There are plenty of issues with %chess that need fixing, many of which are simple and would be good "first-time" Urbit contributions.

0. Setup your development environment

See this guide on the Urbit developers portal for information on how to get the Urbit binaries and what sort of software may be useful for developing Urbit applications.

1. Pull a copy of the %chess code

git clone https://github.com/thecommons-urbit/chess-app.git

2. Do development stuff

Check out the IDEA Hoon plugin if you want to work on Hoon in a fully-fledged IDE, instead of vim/emacs/VSC!

3. Setup test ship

Create a development ship:

./urbit -F zod

Create a %chess desk from inside your dev ship:

|new-desk %chess

Mount the %chess desk, so that code can be pushed to it:

|mount %chess

4. Install the %chess app

Push the %chess code onto the dev ship:

cp -rfL [path to chess code]/src/dependencies/* [path to development ship]/chess/
cp -rfL [path to chess code]/src/chess/* [path to development ship]/chess/

Alternatively, you can run the provided installation script to copy the %chess code. Substitute the path to the pier parent folder using option -p, and the ship's name using option -s:

./bin/install.sh -p /home/user/Urbit -s zod

Commit the changes from inside your dev ship:

|commit %chess

The first time you commit %chess code to a fake ship, you will need to install the app:

|install our %chess

5. Testing with other ships

You can launch multiple test ships to communicate with each other to test %chess. Any other test ships on your computer are able to install %chess just like they would if they were real ships:

|install ~zod %chess

NOTE: About fake-ships

Fake-ships hosted on the same computer can talk to each other, but they still have 'realistic' packet routing. This means that fake galaxies can talk to each other, but fake planets cannot, unless they have appropriate fake stars and fake galaxies also active on the computer to route for them. Examples:

~tex & ~mex:            GOOD
~tex & ~bintex:         GOOD
~mex & ~bintex:         BAD
~tex, ~mex, & ~bintex:  GOOD

Contributors

Appearing in alphabetical order of @p: