Chemkers

A live version of the app can be found here: https://tomszir.github.io/chemkers

Description

A Checkers game made as a university project (but mostly for fun).

Development & project setup

Installing project requirements

• Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en
• The Rust programming language
  • The project heavily relies on Rust to handle all computationally intensive operations.
  • Recommended cross-platform installer: https://rustup.rs/
• wasm-pack
  • A workflow tool for compiling rust -> wasm, otherwise it wouldn't be easily possible to use Rust compiled WebAssembly within the project.
  • Recommended cross-platform installer: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/installer/

The only tested versions of these are - [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. I can't guarantee everything will work with any other version.

Setting up the project

Clone the project and navigate to it

git clone https://github.com/tomszir/chemkers
cd ./chemkers

If you don't have Yarn already installed, install it using this command

npm install -g yarn

Use the stable version of Yarn and install all the project's libraries

yarn set version stable
yarn install

Try running a test build of the project to see if everything works

You'll know if it works if you don't get a million errors in your face

yarn build

Running a development server

If you're going to be working with Rust installing cargo-watch is a must. It will automatically watch for changes within the Rust sub-projects and rebuild the WebAssembly for immediate availability on the development server.

cargo install cargo-watch

Within the root of the project run this command

yarn dev

A development server should open to something simliar to http://localhost:5173

Note: The port can change depending on if the port is already taken or not

Project structure

This project uses Turborepo for handling multiple interlinked codebases.

Turborepo workspaces

Name	Description	Type
preact-checkers	Vite Preact front-end	app
wasm-checkers	Rust WebAssembly checkers engine library	package

Additional good-to-know things

1. Making rust-analyzer discover Rust sub-projects in VSCode

To make the VSCode rust-analyzer extension discover the wasm-checkers package, please create an additional file - .vscode/settings.json and specify the path to the Rust Cargo.toml file of the package within it:

{
  "rust-analyzer.linkedProjects": [
    "${workspaceFolder}/packages/wasm-checkers/Cargo.toml"
  ]
}

Note: This will only make rust-analyzer work if VSCode is opened on the root directory of the project. (You can also open the Rust sub-project seperately and it should work automatically)

2. Turborepo development server hangs the terminal

When running Ctrl + C within a terminal with an active yarn dev development server running Turborepo sometimes doesn't gracefully shutdown and hangs the current active terminal session. To fix this I reccomend opening another terminal instance.

Acknowledgements and research sources

This project wouldn't be possible without these online resources and articles.

• English draughts, by Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
• Minimax, by Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
• Alpha-beta pruning, by Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
• Checkers Bitboard Tutorial, by Jonathan Kreuzer
• Alpha-Beta Pruning and Checkers, By Dave Evans and Carl Sable
• Solving Checkers, by J. Schaeffer, Y. Bjornsson, N. Burch, A. Kishimoto, M. Muller, R. Lake, P. Lu and S. Sutphe
• How to play checkers and win 90% of the time. Win with 13 basic strategies and secrets., by WinningCheckers
• How to use Web Workers with React and Vite, by Francisco Mendes

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.