Dalek Chess V 0.1 (Aridius) Concept Doc
Last updated: 2-21-00
Purpose of this Document
The purpose of this document is to provide a basic description of the Aridius Dalek Chess
theme and set the goals for the 0.1 version of the Dalek Chess battle chess engine.
This is NOT a design document. Although I have a rough design in my head on how this should
be written, I am not yet ready to put that design on paper.
Aridius is a stepping stone release of the Dalek Chess game. It is meant to provide a
simple, playable game which can function as a starting point for writing the more complicated
end result. There will be several such stepping stone releases until the final goal of
a truely themeable game with sound, animation, and MPEG animation clips is achieved.
Description of the (Aridius) Dalek Chess theme.
The game pieces for Dalek Chess will all be various forms of Dalek technology. The black
side will feature Renegade Dalek technology while the white side will feature Imperial
Dalek technology.
|
Here is how the pieces will be assigned.
|
|---|
| Classic piece name.
| White
| Black
|
| Pawn
| Imperiel Dalek
| Renegade Warier Dalek
|
| Rook
| Imperial Dalek shuttle craft
| Black Dalek space ship
|
| Knight
| Imperiel Dalek on hoverbout
| Renegade Dalek on hoverbout
|
| Bishop
| Imperial Spider Dalek
| Renegade Spider Dalek
|
| Queen
| Imperiel Special Weapons Dalek
| Renegade Special Weapons Dalek Dalek
|
| King
| Emperor Dalek aka Davros
| Black Dalek Supreme
|
Some of these pieces have already been modeled in POVRAY and examples can be found in the
Dalek Chess test image gallery.
The board should have some sci-fi look to it. However boards will also be themeable so new
boards will be loadable.
The control panel should have a Dalek-ish look to it with big buttons that are easy to press
with plunger like arms.
Basic Dalek Chess engine dynamics
The Aridius engine will feature a single perspective. The perspective I have chosen is the
top down perspective where the viewer is directly over the board. This simplifies initial
redraws since no game piece can be in front of another and all can appear to be the same
size. Although this is a boring perspective, other perspectives will be added in future
stepping stone releases.
The engine will reserve an area for the board to be mapped and off to the side an area for
controls to be mapped. Much of the control board space is reserved for future features
such as an about indicater describing which piece is chosen and what capabilities it has.
The game will play by the player selecting a piece and then selecting the square he wishes
to move the piece to. This move will be fed into GNU Chess and if GNU Chess concurs that
this is a legal move the piece will be moved. Taking a piece will simply result in the
taken piece disappearing and moving a piece will result in the piece reappearing in the
new square. In the future stepping stone releases, this process will be animated.
The specifics about what files contain bitmaps for which pieces, where to pick up the game
board, and the size and orientation of the squares will be stored in an embedded SQL
database. At this time I am leaning toward using Berkly SQL because the license is open
and the database we need should be light weight and truely embedable.
The interface to the graphics hardware will be done through SDL. Earlier attempts were
tried with XWinAllegro, but they proved to be too slow and load intensive to work for a
game of this planned complexity.
Comment about this concept document's state
This is a living document. As more solid work is done on Aridius this document will be
updated with new information as to how the engine and theme will conceptually work.
Until then this is about the best I can do.
Have questions? Drop me a line.
cory@users.SourceForge.net
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