Schakert, a variation of the dutch word for playing chess (schaken), is a chess engine written in Java. Although I am aware of the fact that Java probably isn't the best language to write a chess engine in, it does help me to get a better understanding of the game. While using an Object Oriented (OO), you learn a lot about common misstakes when writing such a complex piece of sofware.

Currently, Schakert is in its infacy. Somewhere below is a list of features that are currently supported / implemented. Also new features which are planned to be implemented are shown.

• Comes with own GUI
• When a chess piece is selected, all the possible legal moves are shown
• Game navitagation buttons enable the user to undo and redo moves
• FEN strings can be exported and loaded
• Detection of stalemate, check and checkmate
• A very basic AI, which will definitely be improved in upcomming commits
• When a pawn promotes, the user is able to select the new type of the pawn
• Perft divide
• Negamax search
• Piece-square tables

If you want to build the application yourself, this is very easy.

1. Make sure you have installed Maven

• Make sure you have set your JAVA_HOME environment variable to your JDK installation (e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_101)
• Clone the project, extract it to a folder and navigate to this folder with the command prompt
• Now run Maven with the following command in cmd: mvn jfx:jar
• The jar-file will be placed at target/jfx/app

Note that the tests are skipped by default. To actually run the tests, run the following Maven command: mvn install -DskipTests=false.

This project is correctly setup for the Netbeans IDE. Although any IDE should suffice, you can easily clone the project into your Netbeans IDE and you are ready to go

• Pawn promotion

  

• Check detection

  

• Checkmate detection