Chess Gaming and Graphics Using Open-Source Tools

This paper explores the use of open-source resources to create a high-quality chess game with 2-D and 3-D graphical features. In our project, the popular open-source computer chess engine, Beowulf, is used as our chess engine. Beowulf is simple and straightforward to use but it is single threaded; we make use of the platform-independent SDL (simple direct media layer) libraries to make the engine multi-threaded so that it becomes more robust, and interactive and can handle multimedia features. Some recent developments in graphics including OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL), shadow casting, and texture mapping are used to enhance the graphical features of the game. In some cases, Blender, a 3D content creation suite is used to create some graphical objects in 3D Max format that saves an object as a composite of many meshes along with relevant information like lighting, camera position and UV mapping. A 3D Max object can then be easily parsed and processed by a C/C++ program by making use of the 3dslib library. Graphical objects are also created by the technique of surface of revolution, which makes the program more flexible and faster to run; display list is employed to improve the execution speed of the program.