Knuckle Cracker

For example, what will the interface be? That has processing implications. Obviously, click on a piece to select, click again to move. But there are some interesting challenges in that. Do I want it to calculate beforehand which moves are valid? That way, I can just have it spawn clickable cores on those squares - click one, move the core (or more likely, simply set the initial location's Square.crpl's piece variable to "1" and the new location's variable to "WhitePawn" or whatever piece it is. That way, if all goes as planned, I can call "piece" 0 GetCoresWithVar to get all occupied squares since strings evaluate to 0, and then I can use StartsWith to determine their color. Though I'm not sure that will work.)

On the other hand, if I do that, it has to do check calculations on every potential move, which is... unpleasant. On the other hand I could just not display valid moves to the player - just select and it tests if the square being moved to is valid. However this would not provide instructions to those who don't know how to play chess, which would be especially terrible for 3D or 4D variants.

Besides, even if I did that, I would have to run a checkmate/stalemate detection at the end of each turn. So then why not just run through each piece on each turn, compile its possible moves, and store them in a list. If, at the end of doing this, no possible moves were found, test if the king is in check. If it is, checkmate, if not, stalemate. Sounds easy, right? It's certainly within the realm of possibility for my own limited coding expertise. But doing it with less than 1,000,000 opcodes? Less sure. If I do some black magic involving execution order (which is based on UID's) and splitting the calculation between multiple cores (each piece calculates its possible moves once a certain variable is set to true, then sets that variable to false, then the game controller core determines checkmate once the variables are all false again). Slightly annoying making pieces not selectable until the calculation is complete, but not impossibly complex. I've had a few more ideas on how to do it just while writing this.

Thankfully, the 3D chess board I want to use is the same size as the 2D chess board (4x4x4 vs 8x8) and the 4D one is only 4 times that size (4x4x4x4) so those won't have too many more potential moves to look at at once... in theory. Though more dimensions would mean more directions to look at for check. Blah.