GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 372647
glchess should provide more feedback to the user
Last modified: 2008-07-20 03:26:38 UTC
To improve the usability of glChess, I have these suggestions about giving more feedback to the user during the game: - Feedback about the game state, such as messages indicating who won or lost. - Give errors messages when user tries to perform illegal moves, such as "Can not move the queen because the king is under attack from a horse". - Indicate the currently active player somehow. - Mouse cursors indicating 'waiting for AI', 'illegal move' etc.
And probably there no sense to have "End game" button and "End game" state. Then toolbar will have place to fit everything including bottom toolbar-like buttons.
I agree with both the initial bug and Nickolay's comment. The new game button should automatically overwrite the current game, rather than having 2 games open IMHO. Who plays 2 games of chess at once? And I am never sure if I have been beaten... I used to click each piece to see where it could move and when none could move I knew I had lost. Then I realised you can check it in "AI Information"... but a pop-up saying "LOSER" would be much better (can you tell I haven't won yet?).
If this bugreport something which can be fixed before the string freeze begins? In particular, it's pretty important to show a message when the game has been won or lost. PyChess already has this feature, which code probably can be borrowed from.
I have committed some strings to indicate check and checkmate. It seems that glChess has no idea if a game ends in a draw?
Note that this is only a temporary solution. In the next version, I think it would be nice if the user could choose between algebraic chess notation, and regular human-readable status messages on the statusbar.
The sourceforge version of glChess now has support for human readable, SAN and LAN move formats. Will port for 2.18.1
The human readable format would have to be - committed to SVN now, and announce the string and UI change - committed to the 2.19.1 version, after 2.18.x has been released. The 2.18.1 also has the same freezes as 2.18.0, such as a string and UI freeze forever. So you can't port it to that one. See: http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen - 2.18.0: "Hard Code Freeze ends, but other freezes remain in effect for the stable branch." I think this would be pretty useful, and could probably be committed now.
Created attachment 82308 [details] [review] Enables user selectable move format and notifies game end
OK I've added the patch. It seems to work fine (I can't build gnome-games properly anymore as something has changed in the build process). I would commit it now but the release schedule requires release-team approval (since there are UI changes). I don't have anymore time to work on it today so if your happy Andreas it meets the release schedule then I suggest you commit it. I think it gives a lot better feedback to the users.
(I can do it during the week but we'll need l10n team approval from tomorrow)
Delaying this until 2.20.x, because the release-team haven't responded yet.
Audio notifications (and/or some kind notification pop-ups) would allow players to switch tasks while playing, and switch back to glChess when the computer had made a move. This has meaning when someone plays with a time-limit set.
State of this bug: - Feedback about the game state, such as messages indicating who won or lost. FIXED - Give errors messages when user tries to perform illegal moves, such as "Can not move the queen because the king is under attack from a horse". The move highlighting hints at this - Indicate the currently active player somehow. - Mouse cursors indicating 'waiting for AI', 'illegal move' etc. See bug #443449 Closing.