Show HN: Chess on a Donut/Torus and Deep-Dive

Posted by mannymakes 10 days ago

Hey there! I just finished a youtube video explaining our donut chess in detail: https://youtu.be/iRcfHCPFgkM

So I thought it'd be cool to show it off here too- it can be played around with at mchess.io/donut - you can also set up an AI or online game on the site.

This is all indie dev work from a couple friends and myself.

Comments

Comment by hazbot 5 days ago

It's fun to sit down and draw what the board looks like when you cut and flatten the torus before you watch the video!

Bonus points if you hit upon the other 2D projection that is useful (I didn't)

Comment by mannymakes 5 days ago

that'd be a fun puzzle!

Comment by SomeHacker44 4 days ago

Thanks for sharing!

Rotating the torus eventually hits singularities and I cannot continue the rotation. Maybe use a different mechanism for rotations that do not suffer from "gimbal lock"?

Would also be nice to rotate the torus along the circular axis. That is, rotate pieces/rows from inside the doughnut hole to the outside.

Comment by chedoku 5 days ago

Shameless plug. If you're into chess-themed puzzles, you might like: https://chedoku.com/blog/chessPuzzles

Comment by mannymakes 5 days ago

interesting puzzle collection :)

Comment by sparrish 5 days ago

My favorite torus game is Tetris on a Torus

https://www.benjoffe.com/code/games/torus/

Comment by mannymakes 5 days ago

very neat. I'd say this is kinda on top of a torus, and more of a cylinder from the perspective of the Tetris pieces. not sure how you'd play on the surface of a torus, since you need to wrap around vertically too.

Comment by marco_z 5 days ago

E.g the pieces from the rows you eliminate reappear at random at the top row.

Comment by wavemode 5 days ago

Took me a while to realize it was a 3D torus and I had to drag around to see the whole board lol

Maybe when the page loads the torus should rotate around a bit

Comment by mannymakes 5 days ago

hmmm good idea, maybe we should have an auto-rotate that stops when you interact

Comment by quuxplusone 4 days ago

Better than an automatic smooth continuous motion would be an "idle animation": after a few seconds swing the torus somewhat less than 45 degrees in a random direction and let it relax back into the original position. This suggests "the torus can move" without suggesting "the torus moves [only] in this specific way." You need contradict not just the user's intuition "Torus stationary" but much more importantly "Torus non-interactive."

Likewise, if someone thought the pieces couldn't be moved, you could idly wiggle the king pawn as a hint to pick it up.

Now, how anybody could look at a chess board and think the pieces were immovable, or look at a 3D torus render and think it was unrotatable, is beyond me. But if it's a real problem, I think idle animation is a good fix.

Comment by fryz 5 days ago

looks like the white king/queen aren't on the right colors (queen goes on her color) - confused me a bit when trying to map the space to a 2d board

Comment by mannymakes 5 days ago

ahha true, I forgot this was the case. we like the setup this way as it has rotational symmetry, which more naturally extends to supporting 3+ players