Goodbye, Checkmate
4th February, 2010 at 10:24 am
Working on this chess game for a little less than three years has been a really fun experience for me. Back then I never really had a name for it and just called it “Chess”. Back then there were more bugs in it than a carcass in the middle of a hot, damp jungle. When I released it on an uneventful day somewhere around March 2007, I never thought I would invest so much time in it. One year later, 0.2 came around with plenty of bug fixes and a whole new structure. I then took an ambitious attempt at including networked play and today I am half-way there. So, some of you may be wondering, since I had put so much time into it, why stop now?
Mentioned in one of my old posts that got deleted by fate, the original aim of this project was to sharpen my programming skills. This project, I have to say, has done that tremendously well and my knowledge of programming is relatively better than before. However, deep down inside, I knew Checkmate was redundant, especially when there are existing projects such as XBoard that can do so much more than mine (albeit not as fancy in terms of artwork). I know very well that continuing would just be reinventing the wheel and that would definitely lead to frustration.
I guess you could say that my leap into network play prompted me. I was stuck on this section for a while and so I had a look at the source codes of other games, but reading through the code was stunning. It silenced me. Projects – like XBoard – were light years ahead of me. That project had so many people contributing to it as well – while mine was just a solo work. During the December holidays, I had time to rethink myself and decided, enough is enough. I have to stop this, now.
The fate of Checkmate is uncertain, but it would most likely end up in the archives, locked away in that remote hope that one day it might have some use.
Cheers