Announcement: Upcoming Closure of Chess Over Gemini
2024-06-04
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At the end of August 2024, I will retire Chess Over Gemini.
In late 2021, I decided to try my hand at serious CGI programming in my capsule. I wanted to build something users could do together--partially to provide something fun for Geminispace, and partially to practice user management and large amounts of data. The project I ultimately took on was asynchronous chess.
My first iteration of chess was written entirely in Bash and used flat text files to hold game data. The scripts were buggy, the service did not scale well, and it was difficult to add new features. The biggest issue, however, was that I had to calculate game states manually. This included checks, checkmates, stalemates, draws by attrition, and draws by no capture. At the time, my capsule ran on a Raspberry Pi, and the calculations were extremely slow. Connections would often time out before the backend finished processing a move.
In 2022 I sat down and rewrote the entire service from scratch, this time in Python. I used a SQLite database to store data, and I introduced many new features, including game feeds, PGN files, and private matches. Unfortunately, there were many bugs in my code, some of which were game-breaking and many of which I didn't catch for months.
Chess Over Gemini was never that popular, and to be frank, I really didn't use it myself. I never played a match with anyone else, and I only interacted with the service when I checked for bugs. Its myriad issues caused it to be unplayable for large parts of its life, and while it's pretty stable now, I suspect my efforts too little too late.
There are many features I've wanted to implement and some messy parts I've wanted to clean up, but these days I don't have the time or motivation to continue working on it. There are other tools on my capsule I want to prioritize, like the Gemini OEIS mirror--and other tools I use more, like my weather CGI and my todo.txt service.
I won't close down the chess service all at once. New users can continue to register until 2024-06-30, at which point I will disable user creation and the ability to create new invitations. If users begin a match before then, they will be able to play until 2024-08-31. Around that time I will close the service completely.
After the service is closed, I will share the source code for Chess over Gemini on my capsule. I am not a programmer by trade, so the source is pretty ugly. But I've already received one request from a fellow Geminaut who was curious about the code, so I will save it for posterity.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who's used Chess Over Gemini, everyone who's suggested improvements, everyone who's reported bugs, and everyone who's shared the service in Geminispace. Thank you all for your support!
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[Last updated: 2024-10-06]