If you have ever wondered how to program a simple chess app for yourself, this tutorial is the right starting point.
We are going to explore the mechanics of the game, how to maintain and display the gamestate, and how to find a good next move.
After working through this tutorial, you will not only have a running chess app, but also be proficient in playing chess at an amateur level.
- clone the repository
- change to your local copy
- initialize the build system with
cmake -B build - change to the build directory and execute
cmake --build . - start the app with
./ThinkChess
You will need to have the following components installed on your machine:
- a decent C++ compiler (any of the major compilers will do)
- the git tool
- the cmake tool
- the required system packages for SFML
On Linux, all those components can be installed with your systems package manager (e.g. with apt-get on ubuntu).
For Mac OS, just use the included clang++ compiler and install missing components with
homebrew: brew install git cmake sfml
This repository has several branches, each dedicated to a chapter of the tutorial.
If you want to follow along the tutorial, check out the code for that chapter, e.g.
git checkout chap1, and start working on the code from there.
The tutorial itself comes as a html file and is located in the docs directory.
If you have pandoc installed on your machine, you can also build
the documentation with pandoc -dhtml from that folder, which will produce
the tutorial up to the given chapter.