Loading and Saving Games

I added a much requested feature to Chess for Android: the ability to load and save games (other than just the one in progress). To use this feature, long-press anywhere in the notation window to get to a menu for exporting the game to clipboard as PGN or FEN or, the new feature, for loading and saving games as file.

As illustrated below, after pressing "Save Game to File", a pop-up window asks the user to pick a file. Initially files are empty, but after saving they get marked with the date and time of the last stored game. Simply pick a marked file to overwrite or pick an empty file, as done below for file 3. Loading a game is done in a similar manner.

Comments

Unknown said…
Chance of being able to load any file in future?http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1111173 for instance... http://www.chessgames.com/pgn/deep_blue_judit_polgar_1993.pgn?gid=1111173
Unknown said…
Great chess implementation for the Android. What is the reason for the (for me at least) seemingly arbitrary number of eight moves that you can undo? I would love to be able to undo all moves.
Anonymous said…
runaros seems to be complaining about the undo as a comment on the load/save feature. At first this seems misplaced, but actually, how do I navigate back and forth in my loaded games? I'm thinking the undo limit limits the usefulness of loading a game.

Per Patrick C, a start would be to browse to the SD card for games to load; then he could put the stuff from chessgames.com in his brorwser's download folder and you could browse to that (though a browser helper would be da bomb).
Aart Bik said…
All requests are reasonable and current restrictions are simply due to historical design decisions to minimize memory footprint and required permissions. I first focused on exporting games in PGN/FEN format and loading/saving games in my own format because this was most needed in the typical use case of my app, viz. playing a few games on the phone, and then later analyzing these elsewhere. Since users now also want to use the app for looking at other games, importing PGN files and supporting general forward/backward buttons are logical next requests.
Unknown said…
Hi aart,

I just bought my first Android phone and immediately installed your (bigjump?) chess program. It works great! Never beated it sofar.

Keep up the good work!
Stephan Vermeire
Aart Bik said…
Thanks Stephan. I appreciate your kind words!
Unknown said…
Art - seems to be a bug in chess for Android. Might be the UI, or the engine. See video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LoNXqR1VXA
Aart Bik said…
Hi Patrick,
This is no bug, but a valid chess move called en-passant. After white's move e2e4, black captures d4xe3 en-passant. Please also see my previous posting http://aartbik.blogspot.com/2009/11/en-passant-and-castling.html on this topic. Hope this helps.
Lee said…
Oh, yeah, one other thing. The bright green color is hideous. Could you tone it down a little, please 8-)
Lee said…
Thanks for your ongoing excellent work.

For me, a great feature is to be able to replay a game while being able to see the engine analysis. Maybe the top two or three alternative moves.

Also, during replay, I'd like to be able to play an alternate move for maybe a ply or two, and then back up to the main line and continue my study (or where I went wrong 8-).

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