1. New Chess class for simpler coding – needed to be done.
2. See taken pieces to the right of the game view
3. See who’s turn it is
4. Show last move on the board
5. swapping between active games
6. Proper visual game finish notification.
7. Player admin improvements – see games, reset password, create a new game,….
8. Other admin improvements
9. Some clean up in the language file
10. Fixing the phpchess installation and upgrade routine for other platforms (including xampp)

We are not sure yet if we will have a 3D client view. We are playing with it, but it is not a priority at the moment. ETA may be as early as this summer (2013), if everything goes well.

Let us know what you think?

source: http://xkcd.com/1112/

From: http://xkcd.com/232/

from http://xkcd.com/839/

Unfortunately we had a major bug in the promotion code for the real-time playing interface. Promotions were not possible in 4.1 – Thanks to Gunnar for spotting that one

We have updated the fix to include the fix to the fix (ouch!). You can either simply re-apply the fix, or if you wish simply replace the 2 effected files. The files to overwrite are:

File 1: realtime.class.js – Directory target: /modules/realtimeinterface/scripts (overwrite)
File 2:  chess.php – Directory target: /includes/cells/javascript (overwrite)

You can extract these files from the 4.1.1 fix. Thank you again for the active community participation to make phpChess a better application

We have added some new functionality including

1. Easier and more flexible upload of Avatars including dynamic resizing
2. Computer opponent for some games when noone else is online
3. Several fixes including language items, bug fixes, and so on.

We are very keen on your feedback for Release Candidate 2 (RC2).

Please note for anyone downloading version 4.1 for the first time, the fix should be applied after you have installed 4.1.0. Simply overwrite the installed files with the ones from 4.1.1 update. You can find the full version 4.1.0 here: [filebase:file:file=12]

You can find the update file here [filebase:file:file=14]

Thanks to all of you who wrote in to let me know the 4.1 demo server was down (apparently our server image got moved by our host, and we had absolute paths in the installation). It is fixed and you can continue testing it here : http://www.phpchess.com/phpchess41/

Thanks again

You can try 4.1 here try using user demo01 / welcome or demo02 / welcome

  [filebase:file:file=12:tpl=thumbnail] Download here

Please install this fresh (upgrade has not been tested). ALso note that the new release creates a havier load on database calls. not all hosts will permit this. It is worth asking this in advance. Post feedback here

The new release has some major changes and updates:
a) Tournaments (very simple – sorry)  is now working and actually generates games
b) jquery and javascript now active in the default skin
c) we have fixed some errors around check mate recognisition.

We are likely to have introduced a wealth of errors and a lot of text is still missing. Let us know what you find.

1. Near real-time playing interface as standard based on Javascript
2. Finally basic tournament capabilities (managed by the admin)
3. A near real-time home screen showing you who is coming online and what your games status is
4. Minor bug fixes

As a downside phpChess now needs a more capable web hosting as database query limits at stingy hosts can lead to complaints by the provider. Please make sure you discuss this with your hosting provider before installing it when it comes out. See below some screenshots of 4.1Near Real-time Chess Board for online play

Administration of tournaments

Near real-time home screen with all the information a player needs

The download of the language pack is availabloe from the download area