This is a Chess plugin, to play with your RetroShare Friends & Contacts
put/clone RetroChess to RetroShare/plugins/ recommend
cd ${YOUR_DIR}/RetroShare/plugins/RetroChess/
qmake ..
make
Copy your RetroChess.dll to "Data/extensions6" (Windows) Then restart your RetroShare. You'll see a chess logo in your chat dialog's tool-bar or home's tool-bar.
Open Chess Players and add a player by GXS ID or from your RetroShare contacts. Past opponents are imported from game history once; new opponents are remembered when a game starts. Removing a chess contact does not remove the underlying RetroShare contact.
The list keeps offline contacts and shows a coloured icon plus a status label: Available, Playing, Busy, Checking, Unknown, or Offline / unreachable. Right-click an available player to invite them, cancel a pending invitation, or remove the contact. Existing invitations through chat remain supported.
Use My chess identities to enable local identities and select the identity for new connections. Until configured, the first local identity is used. Unchecking every identity disables new chess presence probes and responses. The Busy checkbox advertises that you are unavailable for a new game. Own identities cannot be added as opponents.
Presence uses versioned request/reply messages on the RetroChess GXS tunnel service, independently of chat. At most four probes are outstanding. Successful probes are repeated after 60 seconds, requests time out after 45 seconds, and failures retry with a backoff up to ten minutes. A tunnel alone does not confirm presence. Older plugins without the presence protocol may appear unreachable; they can still be invited through the existing chat action. Last-seen times are saved, but online status is checked again after restart.
The Rating column currently shows Unrated. Game history is saved, but an Elo calculation and rating exchange have not been implemented.
With the matching MinGW/Qt 5 tools on PATH, run python tests/chess-presence.py
and powershell -File tests/pending-invite.ps1. On Windows, use the MSYS2 shell
used for the plugin build. The presence test executes the production methods
against a fake transport and clock, covering reply validation, timeouts,
backoff, concurrency, self-exclusion, busy/playing responses, disabled
identities, contact persistence/removal, and preservation of games/invitations.
For an end-to-end check, run two RetroShare nodes with the updated plugin: enable a chess identity on each, add the other identity, wait for Available, toggle Busy, invite/accept/play, finish the game, disconnect/reconnect, and restart to check that saved contacts remain. Verify that removing a contact survives restart and that disabled identities no longer answer presence probes.
RetroChess includes a small standalone Qt application for reproducing and
debugging chess-rule problems without starting RetroShare, creating a tunnel,
or connecting a second player. It uses the same ChessBoard input widget and
ChessPosition rules/state class as the plugin game window.
The debugger supports:
- Click-to-move and drag-and-drop moves.
- Loading and copying complete FEN positions.
- Resetting to the initial position.
- Testing legal moves, castling, en-passant and promotion.
- A timestamped log of accepted and rejected moves.
- A deterministic SHA-256 hash for comparing positions.
cd plugins/RetroChess/debug
qmake ..
make Start the debugger with:
./release/RetroChessBoardDebug.exeThe debugger is independent of the RetroShare services and does not send moves over the network. To reproduce a reported problem, copy the FEN from a game/debug report, paste it into the FEN position field, select Load FEN, and play the move that caused the issue. The event log records the result and the resulting position hash.
The standalone debugger is an additional development tool. It does not replace or disable invitations, network games, game history, or the normal RetroChess game window.
based on: https://github.com/Texas-C/RetroChess
based on: https://github.com/chozabu/RetroChess