Today I decided to release the next version of Knights 2, the KDE4 port/rewrite of Troy Corbin’s great chess program. For this release I have to thank Dave Kaye, who not only added, fixed and improved themes, but also bugged motivated me to support his new features in the code. Also, a thank you goes to Thomas Kamps and his rendered clock.
Markers and the XBoard theme
It can be downloaded from kde-apps or directly from Dropbox.
It took quite a lot of time to get here, because I had other obligations, but I hope you’ll be satisfied with the result. These are the main new features:
- Support for playing on the Free Internet Chess Server
- Markers on the board for legal moves, last opponent’s move and danger to your king
- Graphical clock display
- Several new fully-scalable themes
- Some animation changes, now it’s also possible to animate the entire board.
- Small fixes: victory dialogs, configuration icons, …
There have also been some more technical changes:
- Port to KGameRenderer, which is now an optional compile-time dependency.
- Changed element names in themes. Anyone interested in theming please take a look at some of the existing ones, for example the XBoard one.
Please test the new version, either against trunk (will use KGameRenderer) or with any other KDE version. The part about which I’m the most curious is playing on FICS, because I’m not a regular player there and don’t know what king of games are played there. Any input about it will be appreciated. If there aren’t any major flaws found, I will try to move to kdereview before 4.6 is released.
Share and Enjoy!
