Battle Chess


Description

This project started essentially as one of those "can it be done?" things. And, after a lot of experimenting and building proofs-of-concept, I'm confident it will work. What it does is add a working, playable chess game to Oblivion. One where the pieces fight to the death!

In this version of battle chess, the black game pieces are Daedra and the white pieces are more terrestrial creatures of Cyrodiil.

Battle chess is played in a "pocket dimension" dedicated to this cruel game. The balcony (see screenshots) surrounding the chess board provides a way to gain unique vantage points on the action, as the pieces can be moved remotely.

Note: Don't expect the first release to feature very intelligent play on behalf of the computer player. I'm not sure how much look-ahead capability it will have. It will basically figure out available moves, prioritize them, and choose one of the high-priority moves. So, it will be fairly easy to win.


Details/Summary

• Playable Battle Chess
  
• An interesting environment to play in.
  
• Requires OBSE (I tried without it, and I think I could have done it. But if I kept on that path release would be delayed due to an inevitable mental break and subsequent asylum stay.)

Progress

Work on this has just passed the proof-of-concept stage.

World Spaces -- 10% (Currently have only the basics needed to provide a base to work from.)
Interiors -- 0% (Only one is planned, as a way to get onto the balcony.)
Scripts -- 5% (No major hurdles remain, but there is a lot of programming left.)


Screenshots

Please keep in mind these are very early in development, there are a lot of floating structures at the moment and a major lack of landscaping. Also, the lights above the board are just temporary markers, and will be going away.

http://i43.tinypic.com/2rd8c55.jpg
http://i43.tinypic.com/k0pkpe.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/2506sg6.jpg
http://i43.tinypic.com/21e4586.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/11rrblv.jpg

http://i39.tinypic.com/2ll20pe.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/nx9l6x.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/o0tq14.jpg


Request for Feedback/Opinions

It may be hard to see in the screenshots what pieces are which creatures.

Black/Daedra:
King - Mehrunes Dagon
Queen - Spider Daedra
Bishop - Xivilai
Knight - Daedroth
Rook - Frost Atronach
Pawns - Scamps and Clannfear

White/Terrestrial:
King - Minotaur Lord
Queen - Spriggan
Bishop - Troll
Knight - Land Dreugh
Rook - Ogre
Pawns - Goblins

My questions: Any suggestions or thoughts on the creatures used as pieces? I don't really like using Mehrunes Dagon, but couldn't think of a better king. Should I make patches to allow various creature/piece sets to be used?


Credits

Thanks to Russell Lambert for allowing use of his awesome chess engine!
Thanks to Phitt for the lovely marble blocks used to make the chess board and for the textures used on the game pieces!

This is extremely awesome.

I like the way you've set up the board.
Marble squares are a great natural way of displaying this instead of an actual board.

I assume the actual moving of the pieces will be done by ordering coordinates?
In that case the coordinates should be visible as well.(I'm sure you've thought of this, but hey.)
http://www.oblivionsrealestate.com/Resources/Misc/misc.html mights be useful for this.

Anyway, as for creatures.
Indeed a Deadra as king is great, but a bit overpowering compared to the Minotaur
How about:
King - Xivilai
Bishop - Dremora

I can see this being done with allot of different sets.
Shivering Isles, Undead, Simple Men and Mer.., famous Tamrieliens?

I myself like a chess set best when every individual piece has gotten its own character.
Makes for a more diverse board and fun to look at even the pawns.
There are already minor differences in vanilla models, so it could be done easily.

Well, back to dinner.
Good luck to you!

What a superb idea, reminds me of battlechess on the amiga but obviously with a lot better graphics (and it wont take an age for the animations to load :brokencomputer: ).

Are you going to incorporate all chess rules/moves, en-passant, castle move; more here for reference...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling

and will they actually fight, with the taking piece always winning?

For the bishops they dont really stand out too well, traditionally having a pointy/clerical hat, maybe a wizard/mage would be more suited.

Pawns, personal preference would be to stick with one type of creature for each side, drop the scamps for instance, but as suggested above minor changes would be good to give pieces individuality, during game having two types of pawn for one side could be visually confusing, unless they will be distinguished with colour and maybe size adjusted slightly... or maybe you want to vary attacks per-creature/piece type and having different creatures allows this?

Causing more work with patches for piece sets, but I think it would be a good idea. People do get used to a different set after a few games, but the set can initially put people off, thats going to be a personal thing... all you can do really is give a good initial balance setup - Ultimately its your baby and you have only so much time.

Sourcing AI... no idea how you are going to incorporate this, but thoughts along the lines of looking at open source chess games for linux, GNUChess or similar, ( hmm engines quick search - http://tim-mann.org/engines.html ) might be helpful if they are programmed similarly to how you will be doing this.

Will the PC be able to move around/float, magic carpet/small cloud stylee?, for different views of the game in progress. In this way moving pieces could be initiated by casting a spell (or are you doing it that way already?)

Edit: Maybe a bit ambitious but a few more thoughts; If you do animate fight sequences - Deadly reflex moves for check mate, blood pool spilliing all over those nice tiles. People will initially be wowed by the graphics, realising the depth of attention to the AI later. And difficulty levels. advlt version... better stop right there bliviongate:

Moving pieces will have some sort of user-friendly method of selecting available moves. But I do want to label the rows though, as the moves will probably be referred to by the chess notation. Those number meshes are quite nice, now I'll just need to find alphabet meshes for the other axis.




I like that idea. And, the Dremora can be given robes to look more like bishops!




I was planning to include castling and pawn promotion. I'm glad you replied, as I wasn't familiar with en passant (I'm not very good at chess, lol). It seems doable, the tricky part will just be making sure it is only allowed when the conditions are legal for it.




The will actually fight. But the taking piece will be ensured victory...it will become invincible for the duration of the fight, most likely.




Based on artfact's idea above, I think the black bishops will be better when I get that done. Without resorting to NPCs, do any creatures seem suited to the look? Flame atronachs, maybe...but they seem more apt to be on the black side. Maybe a SI creature, I'll look at them later...I've not actually played SI yet, lol.




You are correct, the only reason for multiple creature types as pawns was to vary the attacks a bit. But if I make several piece sets, that would be a non-issue. Do you think the white side having goblins of different "ranks" is confusing, or is that more clear since they're all goblins?




Really, making patches for multiple piece sets will be trivial. So, I should be able to easily provide a lot of options here.




At the moment, the "AI" will be little more than some basic self-preservation and aggression. I would love to make it more advanced though. Looking at those chess engines I'm wondering if maybe I could either make an OBSE plug-in that would allow connecting to any standard chess engine (installed and running on the user's PC), or at least run the forward look-ups and evaluation faster than scripts in Oblivion? I'll look into that.




The moves will either be initiated by spell or by a menu system (like the actor pose mods use). So, there's no reason someone couldn't do them while flying or floating above the board. I currently don't have plans to implement a flight system, but I imagine mods that had spells or flying mount things would work in the chess world.




I've not tried Deadly Reflexes yet. Can the moves be done by creatures to each other? Minimally, I could surely slow time and spill extra blood on certain kills...or all of them.

This looks realy very interesting. The only thing I dont like is the color of the pieces. It would be realy cool if they had the color of the original creature, and you would just know what side they are on by what they are. So thats my two cent. I will most definatly be getting this when it is released, I hope it goes well.

Here's a question: How about Mud Crabs for pawns on the nature side? I can see a goblin taking on a scamp and winning almost 100% of the time(bloody scamps are nigh-useless), but a mud crab would make for some hilarity. That, and one could swap out the normal sided mud crab when fighting anything harder then a scamp for the giant mud crab. I mean, it's crazy enough that I'm suggesting that you offer the scamps fresh seafood when they win, but the fact that when the Xivi goes to smack the taking mud crab, and suddenly it vanishes and a giant crab comes in a mops the floor with it... It's got a certain flavor to it, I'd say.

I've done some fairly in-depth research into chess engines this evening. Partly because I'd really like the AI to be somewhat challenging, and partly because if I can "outsource" the AI it takes a large scripting burden off me.

And, I think I've found a fairly doable solution. Only drawback is that it will add another dependency to this (Pluggy), and may require the user to launch the "chess engine" app before launching Oblivion.

Basically, the way it would work is...

• Player makes a move in Oblivion.
  
• A specially formatted string containing the current chess board state is written to a text file via Pluggy. (The format is "FEN" and it looks like this "r2qkb1r/ppp1pppp/2n2n2/3p4/6b1/1PN1P3/PBPPBPPP/R2QK1NR b KQkq - 5 5")
  
• The chess engine listener sees the new text file and reads it.
  
• The current game state is recreated, and the chess engine determines its move.
  
• The move chosen by the chess engine AI is written to a specially named text file that Oblivion is looking for every few seconds.
  
• Oblivion reads the text file, triggers the move, deletes the text file, and stops looking for it until it is the AI player's turn again.
  
• Back to #1.

Assuming this all works as it appears it can, there would be some major advantages to it...

• A VERY intelligent AI player
  
• Multi-threaded move calculation (fast!)
  
• Possibility of loading and saving games, and having the AI keep up and adapt

The engine I want to use doesn't seem to have any license information with it though, so I'm checking with the author as to its usage. If it isn't allowed, there are others. I'm gonna hold off on testing all this until I know I have an engine I can use freely, so the time isn't wasted. So, back to landscaping, lol!



A couple responses...



The pieces are only marbleized when stationary. When they move or attack they fade back to normal coloring. I will probably be tweaking the shaders used to give them the marble look though. But since it is just a shader, it would be easy enough to disable it in a patch for those who aren't diggin' it.




I like the idea of some kinda humorous element to some fights. Like back on the old versions where the pawns would chicken out, knights get bashed into helms, etc. May look into this further.

What an awesome idea! You've got my support.

I know landscaping isn't the point of this mod. But as I've taken breaks from coding, testing things, and waiting on replies from various people I've had some fun with it.

Got some new screenshots to show what I've messed with. The rest is script...doubt anyone wants screenshots of that.

http://i39.tinypic.com/2ll20pe.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/nx9l6x.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/o0tq14.jpg

Liking this lots, I think most people who run advanced mods dont mind using combinations of OBSE and pluggy, especially if they want game changing/enhancing the immersion mods or good fixes like fastexit2. Just needs a Requirements brief in the description. Fingers crossed you get the permissions for the engine. Would the notation be able to send game setup info for difficulty levels?

Does pluggy or OBSE have the ability to call exterior engines when the player enters your chess world space from the oblivion folder, or a battle chess specific one in data?, and be able to close the process down when departing the world space? (Just to circumvent the player having to initialize an extra before loading oblivion, and keep memory/processor usage tidy until needed - People maximising use of their resources with things like Streamline and OSR for the normal in-game experience might not appreciate extra load while doing their normal oblivion thing, it might just break the balance)

I just got the marbling effect... didn't realise before the pieces would change to a life colour when battling, nice touch, sort of menacing, like a statue of medusa called back to life.
Can imagine the player wandering onto the chess board when the AI makes a move and suddenly has to get out of the way of the battlers .
Oh yes, would the pieces all have to be at ridiculous levels to stop the player killing off any of them? (would also enhance the run! moment, once the player dies after being accidently trampled on - and would the player dying have any adverse effect on the state of the scripts/notation), immune to magic? (but then if any of the battle animations use magical attacks... or would they all be physical?)

Also like the humour ideas from the original, this is going to be mint. I think it would probably divert my attention from the main game for days, and have so much replay value, if it was tied in with a quest challenge too this would be mean... beat the AI for goodies, better game level better goodies, new budding kasparovs (or many people throwing computers out of the window :gun: :brokencomputer: damned chess game )

Edit: Mid game saves to be resumed later I think would be necessary for chess :goodjob:

Quick update:

I've obtained permission from Russell Lambert to use his seriously awesome chess engine to drive this!




Got permission to use the chess engine. I'm not sure about difficulty levels. I think it may be partially adjustable by changing the amount of look-ahead it does. It might be nice for chess noobs like me, 'cause otherwise I'd have no chance of beating it! On normal difficulty Russell's engine beats me quite severely.




I don't know if I can trigger the launch of a program from Oblivion, but that would be nice if I could. Although, the currently planned method just involves starting up the chess engine before running Oblivion. If by chance the engine isn't started and you go to play chess, the AI player will just not move until the engine is started-up. It won't crash or break anything. The chess engine is very light on CPU usage when it isn't calculating moves, so having it run in the background shouldn't be a big deal.




During the moves the pieces will either be immune to player attacks or player movement will be restricted to prevent interference. I will probably restrict triggering a move if the player is in a position to mess with things.




I like the quest idea. Main thing will be determining if actually beating the AI is even remotely likely before I make doing so part of a quest.




Mid-game saves shouldn't be a problem.

Very glad you got the permission, nice engine, multi threaded too. Going to download it and have a few games.

This is certainly an unique idea, and looking at the screens it looks so awesome - I loved playing battle chess!

Think there may be a minor installation problem with the engine at least for windows 7 users (which will probably include windows vista users aswell), but it may just be a case of running the installer as administrator.. will try again later...

It works, though there are a few menus not operating due to the installer problem like selecting new game... quitting and restarting works for a new game... anyway will post back what I find about installer problems and edit this post - meanwhile first few games were not bad, and probably a good level for the purpose of this project

First game beat it in 30 moves
http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=1190363Untitled.jpg

Second game beat it in 28
http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=1684128Untitled2.jpg

I want to find if the level can be increased for more challenge, those two games I was just throwing pieces about and not going for the throat, but combined with a battle chess atmosphere its going to make a fun game and will be good for new to occasional chess players.

Edit: Hmm, cant resolve the installer problem on win 7, it fails trying to register msxml4.dll, the one with the package is old compared with the latest you can grab http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?msxml4, but still cant register this one either.

Problems it causes, along with the new game initialising problem noted above... the edit, view and help menus are un-available in game, so settings/preferences which I presume are in edit are not accessible. Tried installing to default location and in a different location on second partition - cant raise admin privileges on it either weird. Does the author know how to circumvent such problems for 7 (and presumeably vista)?

Problems with this part are a potential show stopper, considering a lot of PC game enthusiasts will have migrated to 7.

PS. Another link for easy referencing game rules for beginners - http://www.chess.com/learn-how-to-play-chess.html

Edit2: Just realised I may not be using the same engine, is there a public link or is it a more up to date privately shared version you will be using?, I am using this one http://vbdotnetchess.wikispaces.com/ from Russell Lambert

Edit3: Resolved the installation problem for win 7 - Needed to download this...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=00bcdf28-2299-4150-964d-88a601e25229&displaylang=en
then right click the msxml4-kb973688-enu.exe and Run as Administrator (If not it will not install correctly)

Whether that will help with any future issues I dont know but maybe useful to note down just in case.

Further games - Setup some 8, 10 and 12 move checkmate scenarios with one move less, then let the AI take its next move to see if it would stop the next checkmate move from me... It does, so its clever enough to spot those anyway. Going to have a dabble with that config file next and ramp up the look ahead, also want to find what capabilities it has for learning via adding to its database of moves.

Hi EvilTechie, friendly bump - wondering if there is any news?

Ooh, I was just thinking about how to incorporate this exact sort of thing into a future quest in WEPON (and no, I'm not going to give any more details about the idea at this time, at least not publically )

I too would love to find out if any progress has been made since April, and if so, if I could get permission to incorporate!
Additionally if I could do anything to help, please let me know. I've already tested 17 free chess engines for strength in anticipation of trying something like this. For those interested, the winners so far are "Critter 0.9" and "Houdini 1.5"... Fortunately both can be scaled down to decrease difficulty. At full strength I doubt even Kasparov could beat them!

Additionally, I could see more than two sets being set up. For example--
Monsters set:
King- Minotaur Lord
Queen-Spriggan
Rook-Ogre
Bishop-Troll
Knight-Land Dreugh
Pawn-Goblin

Undead set:
King-Lich
Queen-Nether Lich
Rook-Wraith or Gloom Wraith
Bishop-Ancient Ghost
Knight-Dread Zombie
Pawn-Skeleton

Daedra set:
King-Xivilai
Queen-Spider Daedra, or female Dremora (yes, there is one!)
Rook-Storm Atronach
Bishop-Clannfear
Knight-Daedroth
Pawn-Scamp

Animals set:
King-Brown Bear
Queen-Black Bear
Rook-Mountain Lion
Bishop-Boar
Knight-Timber Wolf
Pawn-Deer or Rat

SI set:
King-Mended Flesh Atronach or Gatekeeper
Queen-Replete Shambles
Rook-Grummite Deathdealer
Bishop-Verdant Gnarl
Knight-Scalon Brute
Pawn-Baliwog or Elytra

Order set:
King-Jyggalag
Queen-?
Rook-Obelisk (?)
Bishop-Priest of Order
Knight-Knight of Order (duh )
Pawn-?

Etc.

Last edited in April...don't think so.

Considering that EvilTechie was last on this forum April 18, I suspect you're right...this effort is dead, unless someone else is willing to pick it up.
I'd be willing to try to figure out how to interface a chess engine with Oblivion's scripting, so that the moves made by that engine can be translated into things such as "move Spider Daedra to cell A4", if someone else would be willing to figure out all the graphical stuff. Given that I don't know much (yet) about the common chess board interfaces - Winboard and UCI - I make no promises however

Hmm...no interest in bringing this one to life then?

I've been experimenting off and on with this.

To make my idea for the mod work, I would need Oblivion scripts to communicate with an external application, by sending and receiving command line text.
I have not seen any documentation on commands in the CS, or added by OBSE etc., that would allow such a thing. Is anyone aware of any way to do this?

This is currently impossible, nothing available to the modding community right now is even close to capable of hooking into another executable.

The closest you can get at this point is to write your own OBSE plugin specifically for what you want to do.

Heh, I was afraid that might be the case. I'm not sure which would be simpler - writing an OBSE plugin, or writing my own chess engine within Oblivion's scripts

If anyone else wants to take a shot at it, I'd appreciate it! This is WAY beyond my current skill set (though I am willing to learn). Otherwise, I'll put it on my project list after auditing OMOBS and updating WEPON...

this sounds like it will be great. cant wait to see a finished product

An OBSE plug-in interfacing between Oblivion and chess engine should be fairly trivial, provided the chess engine is reasonably well documented. And you know C++.

EDIT: Actually, well, your first OBSE plugin is never going to be trivial because the API takes a bit to learn, but the actual coding of the interface should be pretty easy once you've got the OBSE API figured out.

EDIT2: I'd be willing to discuss this in a PM; I can't really commit to writing this myself (I've got enough on my plate as it is), but I can help.

Thank you for the offer! While I can program (if you count QBasic and VBA as programming), and have done extensive scripting in Oblivion, C++ is new to me. Hopefully I can figure it out with your help

If anyone can point me to some documentation on how to write an OBSE plugin, I'd appreciate it. I did a quick search and came up empty. As mentioned above, all the plugin has to be able to accomplish is to send text commands to an external application, and receive text responses from the same. I can do the rest through Oblivion itself. (Though I am trying to think through how the chessboard user interface should work in Oblivion, or how to let Oblivion figure out what a player's legal moves are...eh, I'm getting ahead of myself.)