Awesome Contribution

[Aldruun]

Sliding pieces and board sounds would make this Redesign perfect! Beautiful work!

[crkco]

Yes this is part of what I want to add next, thanks!

[Aldruun]

That's awesome!
I would like to donate my personal chess board sounds for your cause and really don't want any credit, as I cut them from a cc0 (totally free) audio file from freesound.org and edited them in Audacity to get rid of annoying parts. I use them in GUIs that allow for sound customization.

Here is a link so you can have a listen and download.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1N-3DeR3vANZ6H4OQCWQ5QCaFwUpUIwHL?usp=sharing

Anyway, if you need help with sound design, I'd be glad to help.

[crkco]

Thank you. I have added sounds to most chess moves. The audio is now also changeable under "Customization", where the drop down shows default and your audio files.

Cc0 is very good in case more people are interested. Right now all is copied from chess.com since this is mostly a personal project and for friends :). If that will be the case, then I will redo the images in order to comply with cc of chess.com. Next I will add sliding pieces.

Once again thanks for your contribution, if there are features that you think could be nice, I will look into it!

[Aldruun]

That was fast! Excellent work! Now that I know what board actions can have audio I might design and upload the remaining sounds for my set and let you know.

As for suggestions,

I have an idea, probably for somewhere in the far future. In Fritz GUI there is this game mode where the player can earn imaginary cash, which motivates to play focused and adds a bit of excitement. Before a match the player chooses the amount of "money" that he will lose or win. This alone could be an interesting feature.
During the match the engine and the player can double the amount when they think that they can win. But this would probably be too much for Nibbler and what it represents.

[crkco]

That is very interesting, but you are correct, this sounds like a feature for the future. After I implement my own initial ideas and optimize the ui / performance I will gladly look into some additional features as the one you mentioned. Thanks!

[Aldruun]

A solid plan. :-) BTW, If you need a German translator, let me know. I would be happy to help.

[Aldruun]

Here is another cute and relaxing sound theme that I recorded with a DAW during a few matches on CC "Nature" sound theme. Would fit a green board quite well. :-)

Just in case you want to add even more media, here is the Lichess Github repository. It includes most of the Lichess sound themes and piece graphics.

[crkco]

Thank you! When I have some time I will add some of that audio and graphical themes to allow more customization. As to sliding pieces, they are now implemented. It is looking good on my laptop and I didn't notice any graphical glitches when testing it. If you notice anything, I'm happy to fix it.

[Aldruun]

Perfect! Though the sounds are being played as soon as the pieces start moving. May be there is some sort of "OnPieceArrived" event that could start the sound?
The sliding really puts some energy on the board!

Which gives me another idea for your "may be" TODO list:
I haven't seen this yet on a 2D chess board, but as a former Unity game coder I swear that adding an arc to the sliding movement makes it look even more alive. I implemented this in a 2D game where creature sprites were boringly sliding around. After adding "hopping" it looked amazing! If you need easy to read C# snippets, I still have a few functions ready (max 2-10 lines) that you could refactor to Java.

Another cool thing would be an option for increased thinking time range for the engine to make it act more human-like. Plus the time it needs to calculate, to randomize it a bit.

[crkco]

Thank you. For any sliding piece the timing of the sound is now respecting the delay.

Arcs for the pieces sound interesting. My idea is to keep the default design as true to the original as possible, though I can add arced movement under customization. You can share your code if it roughly resembles the format of [x1;y1] -> [x2;y2] in a loop or a recursive function where the movement is devided into incremental steps. Then it is easiest to quickly implement it.

[crkco]

What do you mean with increased thinking time? Perhaps the node limit can be increased under Engine -> Limit - Normal / auto eval. I mainly use auto eval myself and am not too experienced with other parts of nibbler. Thanks!

[Aldruun]

Your effort is impressive! I'm trying to get access to my old DevOps repository and send you a link to the file after I have transferred everything to GitHub. I'm not sure if it meets the requirements you stated. All I remember is that these are functions that are supposed to run each frame in an Update function, in other words, dozens of times / second. :-)

Regarding thinking time. I prefer leaving the node limit at 1 or lower to make the bot play more human like. But an option to add some extra random seconds per move or increase the time spent on evaluation without increasing the strength of the engine would be cool and would make it feel more natural than an instant reaction.

Btw, in case you aren't testing on Mac, I'm using the Mac version of the Nibbler GUI (MacOS Ventura 13.2.1) and it runs perfectly with your Redesign!

[Aldruun]

Alright now I get what you mean with "x->y", since it is 2D. I think I converted it from 3D to 2D a few years back. I'll keep you posted!

[Aldruun]

I guess I only have the 3D variant, but it shouldn't be too difficult to rewrite:

Vector3 nextPos;
    void TravelArc(Vector3 targetPoint)
    {
        float dist = (targetPoint - _startPos).magnitude;
        Vector3 nextZ = Vector3.MoveTowards(transform.position, targetPoint, _speed * Time.deltaTime);
        float baseY = Mathf.Lerp(_startPos.y, targetPoint.y, (nextZ - _startPos).magnitude / dist);
        float arc = (_arcHeight) * ((nextZ.z - _startPos.z) * (nextZ.z - _targetPosition.z) + (nextZ.x - _startPos.x) * (nextZ.x - _targetPosition.x)) / (-0.2f * dist * dist);
        nextPos = new Vector3(nextZ.x, baseY + arc, nextZ.z);

        transform.LookAt(nextPos - transform.position);
        transform.position = nextPos;
    }

In case you want to have a look at the usage in code, here is a link to the file.