PawnStorm

PawnStorm is a robust, headless chess game engine designed for seamless integration with user interfaces and game api servers. Whether you're developing a visually appealing desktop application or a responsive web interface, PawnStorm provides a solid foundation with its comprehensive game representation and manipulation capabilities.

While the primary goal of PawnStorm is to offer a dependable backend for chess applications, a significant part of the project's joy comes from its performance optimization. The engine is fine-tuned to excel in performance tests, particularly in calculating perft benchmarks. While it cannot compete with compiled engines, in this hobbyist's opinion, it is pretty darn fast for Javascript. Benchmarking shows that PawnStorm generates legal moves 3x faster than Deno Chess and 4x faster than Chess.js.

Features:

• Game Engine
  • Legal move generation
  • checkmate and draw detection
  • FEN/PGN parsing and generation
  • Variation navigation
  • Game Clock with Increment and Delay
• Interfaces with popular chess engines:
  • Stockfish
  • Ethereal
  • Rustic Chess
• Console Application
  • Play against your favorite engine
  • Watch engines battle other engines
  • Add engine evaluations to PGN

Road to 1.0

• Polish Game API

Documentation

• Game Engine - For UI or Game Server
• Engine Interfaces - Communicating with locally compiled engines
• Console Applications - Included console applications. Can be used for fun or as an example of how to use the API.
• Tests and Benchmarks - How the engine is tested and benchmarked

Usage

• deno task play - Play against an AI engine or watch engines battle each other

Installation - (Development and Testing)

1. Install Deno
2. Clone the repo
3. Run deno task postinstall

Dev Tasks

• deno task postinstall - installs git-hooks to run unit tests and generate test coverage reports.
• deno task benchmark - runs benchmarking comparing perft speed with other engines
• deno task stats - displays test coverage and benchmarking statistics
• deno task test - runs all tests
• deno task test-unit - runs unit tests
• deno task test-integration - runs integration tests
• deno task test-coverage - runs unit tests and updates test coverage
• deno task test-coverage-html - launches browser window displaying Deno-generated static HTML page with test coverage details

CI Pipeline Rules

• pre.commit (all branches) - must pass unit tests and update test coverage