For anyone who knows perl and what gd is, this'll outrage you! I'm going to write an entire chess game application inside a perl script with a single gif output

So in essence the entire application of the chess game will be "inside" a gif, out there on the web

I'm going to use it to create my non-death chess version and see if it can work and become a working version of chess.

A game in a gif. I can make TONNES of gif games. So they don't have fluid motion, but they do have strategy! Brilliant.

Java will allow me to make games with fluid motion, of course.

The chess application would take about a day to write, I reckon. It's pretty simple stuff. Very few rules and pieces. So maybe a quarter of a day. Easy work. (But i've taken some advice from some perl wizards and I'm going to make this project my first proper oop perl... so it'll take a month or more instead... but don't worry, i'll bring it here... all opensource. practise for my future opensource projects, eg a.i.)

Gif hangman would be easy. And so many gif games. Interesting new game concept or what? Low-memory games. Low bandwidth games.

When you're done with it, I'll be happy to beat you at your own game.

I'm quite good at chess aswell. I play on chess.com atm sometimes.

I'm a long-term ICC member, and though my play has slowed recently, I'm still pretty strong compared to most players.

Do it!!

Guys and girls, do come play me at normal chess (but I like 1 move per 14 days, if you're gonna challenge me) - i'm at the said chess.com site too, you can find me on my realname (no spaces).

I've been thinking more about gd chess, and messin around with gd to warm up, and I have realised that a vital part of my new game environment (i'm going to make an entire game development suite for gd! here come the gif games) is the good old "imagemap"! Yep, that forgotten piece of technology no one give's a rat's bottom about these days - it'll be absolutely vital to the playing of my games! They have to have image maps because I need to know exactly what part of a gif a person clicked for me to respond correctly! Not bad, eh? Some pretty tricky i/o management, though. I mean I can't put a url on every pixel. Well, theoretically yes, but hey.

Anyway, slow and steady... that's the sailor's way (well no, the sailor's way is: round the world and home again).

this is where i'll start working - it may come alive with experimentation soon:
http://www.ukusers4u.com/cgi-bin/gd1.cgi

the code's here:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# This creates a Web GIF image on the fly
use GD;
$horizontal=1000;

print "Content-type: image/gif\n\n";

  # create a new image
  $im = new GD::Image($horizontal,1000);

  # allocate some colors
  $white = $im->colorAllocate(255,255,255);
  $black = $im->colorAllocate(0,0,0);
  $red = $im->colorAllocate(255,0,0);
  $blue = $im->colorAllocate(0,0,255);

  # make the background transparent and interlaced
  $im->transparent($white);
  $im->interlaced('true');

  # Put a black frame around the picture
  $im->rectangle(0,0,$horizontal-1,999,$black);

$im->rectangle(0,0,100,200,$blue);
$im->rectangle(300,300,500,400,$red);
$im->rectangle(500,100,550,150,$blue);
#$im->rectangle(horizontaltop,verticaltop,horizontalbottom,verticalbottom,col);

  # Draw a blue oval
#  $im->arc(50,50,95,75,0,360,$blue);

  # And fill it with red
#  $im->fill(50,50,$red);
#$im->rectangle(40,40,50,50,$blue);



  # Convert the image to GIF and print it on standard output
  print $im->gif;

NB I'm pretty sure that IFRAMES will be used to house the game space, in the final cut