gophergala / go-llama

##Go-Llama Internet Chess Environment (and AI proving ground)

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###Gopher Gala 2015 entry (48 hour programming challenge)

This project is a complete internet chess server written in Go for players to be matched in real time with other players and AIs from around the world.

Its purpose is twofold: Firstly, to provide players with the ability to play chess through the internet through their browsers; and secondly, to provide a fully-featured API that developers can connect their own front-ends and (more excitingly) their own AIs to.

Thus, the project is first and foremost an API server written entirely in the Go programming language. To showcase its abilities, we provide a demo javascript frontend that players can use to play the game on. The API and server is represented by the intchess package. In addition, we provide the chessai package, which is a basic framework for players to define their own AIs on without needing to worry about boilerplate API development.

In order for these two packages to function, a third package called chessverifier was designed and built. This package's sole function is to validate chess moves, which proved to be a more complex task than we initially thought.

Our demo Javascript files can be found in /static. It was constructed using Bootstrap, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Marionette.js, Require.js and jQuery.

The Internet Chess server depends on a number of publically available open-source Go libraries, including:

• Gorm
• Websocket
• Bcrypt
• Mysql

The details of the API can be found in /static/chessapi/index.html

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##Screenshots

Video of gameplay available on YouTube (or open the video in the screenshots directory)

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##Google Cloud Configuration

The Internet chess environment is set up utilising multiple resources:

• web01 - Google Cloud VM running Go Server (chess.maycontainawesome.com)
• Google Cloud SQL for MySQL storage utilised by web01
• ai01 - Google Cloud VM running AI

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##Running locally

To run locally, go get the libraries, specify a database connection string in connstring.go, and build.

First run with the -makeDB command.

It will introduce two users, test / test and test2 / test as well as build your database tables.

Finally, run again - you can specify a -addr :port to change from port 8080 (default) to a port of your choice.

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##Developing an AI

To develop a custom AI, see the chessai package.