I've not yet been back to your code to investigate the workings any further, but its an impressive achievement. The numbering of the pieces was of interest as far as any scoring or strength calculating thats done to decide upon the most suitable move to perform. Mine are simply numbered 1-6 (actually 2/3, 4/5, 6/7, 8/9, A/B, C/D when their Black or White identifier bit is added in) which is very very for indexing graphics data. Doesn't have to be, and they could be in any order actually.
>>>> you´ll need to figure that out when your start looking at evaluation. My method is not standard. As you may now most valuations look like P=1, N=2,5, K=3, R=5, Q=8, K= inf. (more or mess). In my case, I'm not doing tree search, therefore no need to analyze multiple captures, only need to know which is more valuable.
I did begin to look at the possibility of a simple interpreter to scan through your board and piece format and display it using my 3D engine. You use a 128 byte board, whereas mine is 64 bytes. I can quite easily adapt to the larger format, which is easier to use for various legal move checks. Only adds about 5 bytes.
>>>>> I´ve found 16x8 byte board very helpful for OOD detection, and also end of rank and end of board loop detection. Also it allows managing the board coordinates in a single byte with this format (0rrr0ccc), r=rank (0...7), c=col (0...7), which simplifies the tasks above.
I'm now at the point where for my own sanity I need to save the final 2 bytes just to give me that satisfying 512 bytes total size. 1 disk sector!
>>>>> That is awesome for a 3D interface.
Once thats done and I've fixed the board setting/ resetting routine, then it will be in its final release state. Then development and integration of the GUI aspects can be done, tested and finalised so that I can then move onto the game logic, some of which follows a similar route that you've taken evidently.
I'll be interested to see how you achieve castling, as I've not figured that one out yet.
>>>> you can find castling code in the code I shared (it's split in two places). Actually my code is a bit of a cheat, since it does not check for validity, only checks that the king is in the right place. For the rest it trusts the human player. Checking full castling validity involves keeping track of the king and rooks never having been moved, the king not being under check and none of the squares in between attacked. That would need me to re-write the whole thing. And only for the human player to use it. The "AI" in my program would never use it, it's not smart enough...
Keep up the great development, really impressive effort!
>>>> for the 3D interface, I´m not planning to make mine more complex, I would reduce it further if I could. Feel free to use any of my code in your program if that helps. I'd like to hear on any improvement, I think you mentioned something about that in other posts.
