Chess Position Trainer

Project Description

This is an application designed to improve your chess piece position recognition. When you click "Train White" or "Train Black", the board flips to the correct orientation and a coordinate will appear on the right. When you click on a square, it will turn red and tell you what its coordinate is. If you get it correct, the yellow bar on the right will jump up. If you get it wrong, the bar will move back to the left. As time passes, the bar will slowly move to the left, so speed is necessary. When the bar makes it all the way to the right, "You won!" will appear, and you can click "Train White" or "Train Black" to continue practicing.

Development

This is my first personal project in Rust. After going through Nathan Stock's Rust Tutorial, which I would highly recommend, I attempted to use this new language to build something I could do in Java. My goal was to create an application that could be run without downloading the language, and luckily Rust was designed for that.

I used the fltk-rs library for the graphics. They have a similar structure to the Java JFrames I am used to, so it wasn't too hard to understand. However, due to the safety measures built into the Rust language, I found it hard to pass variables into the graphics loop and methods and continue to change them. This made it extremely difficult and frusturating to draw things that I want the user to interact with, like the board and buttons. My solution to this problem was to include many unsafe{} blocks.

In future Rust projects I hope to not use this work-around, as it undermines the sound nature of the Rust environment. It worked for this project and helped me ignore one issue in my Rust skills as I practiced my fundamentals. Rust is a very fast and useful language, and I definitely will use it more often.

Download

If you want to try out this project for yourself here is a download link. Unfortunately, it is currently only available as a windows executable.