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Pychess 0.2

Submitted by lobais on Wed, 2006-09-13 13:03. Bag of Software

Pychess is a chess application which aims to be both fast, beautiful and simple, but at the same time have features for both networkplay and adwanced chessanalyzis.

You can grab the fairly stable 0.2 release at
Homepage: http://pychess.googlepages.com/home

Screenshots: http://pychess.googlepages.com/screenshots

Why not CSBoard? Isn't one board enough?
Well, this question could be put to a fairly large base of free software application, take away those even starting "yet another".
While CSBoard is already somehow stable, it is written in C#, which might give patent issues in the future.
Some might say that this problem is already fairly solved, there is another major difference between the programs. CSBoard has no what so ever kind of builtin move validation/move-parsing etc. While this might not be a problem when writing a simple client, it will surely become more clearly, when the task goes to network play, pgn parsing, database search and analysis.

Some thoughts are also being though about merging with glchess, to provide an optional 3D interface, but nothing is yet decided.

Pychess is intended to replace xboard as the de facto standard chess program on Linux. (Well at is it written in gtk, we might not get all the KDE users, but such life)

We are (or I am) actively seeking developers familiar in python, and (less important) pygtk.
Also translators and perhaps most important, TESTERS will be very appreciated.

some criticism

Submitted by Anonymous George (not verified) on Sun, 2006-09-17 11:52.

You say pychess is going to replace XBoard, but - sadly - it seems there's still a lot of work to be done before it comes even close to supporting what XBoard is mostly used for - FICS support is an important example.
Given the technological advantages you have with respect to the XBoard's author at the time when it was developed, one could reasonably expect a definitely better, more stable program, with those advanced features the chess playing community always asked for (crazyhouse / bughouse support, pgn editing, better graphical effects, eye candies, etc...), but I feel like there's not enough momentum in this project to push it that far.
I don't want to sound irritating, but reinventing (and claiming to having improved) the wheel is sometimes more difficult than it may seem at first, so my advice is to join some other XBoard replacement project: there are many, much more mature and promising than yours.

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