Star Chess

Star Chess is a neat little space strategy game that I wrote to experiment with turn prediction algorithms. It is free and comes with complete source code. Also available is a documentation of the computer player algorithms, including basic considerations concerning AI development for empire building games. It is not necessary to download and play Star Chess in order to understand the computer player documentation; however, playing the game or studying the source code may serve to better understand the described algorithms.

Screenshots, binary and source packages, and the computer player documentation are available in the Download section below.

Features

While playing a few games of Star Chess may be an enjoyable experience in its own right, the game was not written with the intention to compete with “real” space strategy games such as Stars! or Space Empires IV. Its main purpose is not as much to be played as to…

• demonstrate interface features (command undoing, game replay, history graph etc.) that no strategy game should be missing.
• demonstrate how to create a computer player for a game considerably more complex than chess, using a customised minimax algorithm.

The Game

Star Chess requires at least a Pentium class CPU and Windows NT 4.0 or higher or Windows 95 or higher, and a screen resolution of 800 by 600 or higher. Star Chess also requires HTML Help Viewer – please refer to the file readme.txt included with the binary and source packages for details. Complete source code is available for download.

The game’s features include:

• Absolutely no sound, almost no graphics!
• Turn-based gameplay for four human or computer players
• Manage fleets of space ships, planetary colonies, and two resources in a galaxy comprising 16 sectors
• Strong, adjustable, non-cheating computer players
• Show a history graph and replay the entire game at two speeds
• Convenient shortcuts, command reference charts, unlimited command undoing
• Access all information displays while a computer player or a game replay is active
• Take over a computer player’s empire, or have a computer player take over yours
• Comes with extensive online help (HTML Help format)

The Docs

The computer player documentation is provided as a separate PDF file. It describes the algorithms used in Star Chess but also covers some topics of general interest:

• Comparison of “empire building games” (e.g. Star Chess) to board games (e.g. chess): additional features, complexity calculations
• Creating computer players for chess programs: turn generation and evaluation, minimax algorithm, alpha-beta pruning
• Creating computer players for empire building games: request-based turn generation, request masking, omitting the prediction tree
• Implementation of the Star Chess computer players
• Summary of the Star Chess rules
• Several links to internet sites with fundamental information on chess programs

Download Files

Screenshots

Take a look at some screenshots showing a typical mid- game situation (745 by 595 pixels, 15.8 KB) and the history graph after Green’s victory (606 by 513 pixels, 6.60 KB).

Computer Player Documentation

The current edition of the computer player documentation is StarChess.pdf (143 KB, version 1.20). You can view it using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, available at the Adobe website.

Binary Package

The current binary package is StarChessSetup.exe (144 KB, version 1.25). This is the only file you need to play Star Chess. It is a self-extracting WinRAR archive containing the program file StarChess.exe, the help file StarChess.chm, and two preset saved game files. Execute StarChessSetup.exe to extract these four files to any directory of your liking.

Note: Star Chess does not change the registry or any other Windows files. Its initialisation and save game files are placed in the current directory. To uninstall Star Chess, simply delete the directory containing the game.

Source Package

The current source package is StarChessSource.zip (136 KB, version 1.25). This is a standard ZIP archive containing subdirectories and long file names. Extract the contents to any directory of your liking. You need Intel C++ 5.0 and/or Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 to recreate the Star Chess executable, and Microsoft HTML Help Workshop to recreate the online help. Please see the included readme.txt file for additional information. The sources are tagged for use with my source browsing utility Foldview – now discontinued and offline, sorry.

Version History

Computer Player Documentation

Binary and Source Packages