Putting in some deep brain power into the mechanics of the game with this release.. Here’s some of the upgrades:
- The King thinks a lot harder to get out of check. Now other pieces can block the threat and even sacrifice themselves if they have to, or give up if there’s no way out.
- Defending pieces can look for more ways out other than simple move, like a safe blocking piece or a sacrifice of lesser value piece, and prioritize best move based on piece points and other available moves.
- Random moves, defending moves and attack moves now check if the king is put in check by moving out of the way into a check.
- More hypothetical look-aheads to find optimal moves, with a lot of error checking involved. Was a lot of work there.
- Searches for safe threatening offensive move after 12 rounds in and 25% of the time. (got annoying when too aggressive)
- If it can’t find safe move after many tries, will now allow for a random bad move, because sometimes we have to accept it.
- When all pieces on a quad side are dead or there’s no movable pieces, automatically skips turn.
- Added Practice Mode of AI vs AI to just watch computer play against itself as a demo or for learning patterns.
- Each time new Practice Game started, randomly picks Quad colors and Chess Sets.
- Fixed screen scaling issues to adapt to different screen resolutions to keep UI at a comfortable size.
- Fine-tuned all the set colors with new textures and shaders to look just right in 3D and 2D mode..
- Adjustments to 2D pieces, like the dynamic black outlines, shape of the pawn, and continuing animation if switched during a jump.
- Added even more Board textures (now 42) with my own hand crafted art for a real smooth finish.
- Expanded the navigation zones, so can move around table better when zoomed in.
- Added Version Checker on startup to notify you when an updated version is available, and takes you to the download page.
- Now saves User Profile info to WP account, can register and store personal data, can sync Profile Settings and Preferences.
- Keeps track of MultiPlayer Wins, Loses, Stalemates, Abandons on Game Over, and stores total Move History list to review later.
- Can Pause/Resume a Practice game easily by pressing Spacebar (Select key on gamepad). Added button ui on bottom right. In Multiplayer game, Spacebar is used for voice chatting toggle or push-to-talk.
- Added Randomize button to Change Practice Players screen to shuffle the Sets and Colors. Also can press single-quote to shuffle.
- Press ” double-quote to randomly shuffle environment settings of Board, Table and Ground, or single-quote in online game.
- Lots of other little tweaks to the code, cleaning it up and making more efficient and error free.. So much fun…. and so close to done.