Ok so more progress and a UI question.
*** having some issues with vimeo so no video for now ***
Might not look like much but notice that only valid moves are shown!
UI question is this, select piece with left mouse then left mouse again to move it, right mouse to cancel? Second left mouse will only be allowed if valid move selected. OR hold left mouse during move and release to make move?
Making moves can be a tad awkward as you have to be able to see the square you want to move to and also have a clear line of sight to the piece you are moving so during the game you may have to walk around the board to achieve this. Is that ok do you think? The alternative is to have a raised platform above the board and play from there (in my videos the player is on a small hill).
Next step is to figure out how to actually interact with the chess engine to make moves, as you can imagine it's not exactly the simplest of code!
@GraPhix, the more I think about it the more I'm inclined towards a single mesh object which can be any piece with two texture sets for black and white. Then we just have one fpe file for each piece for static use (i.e. the fpe for a pawn names it "White Pawn" or "Black Pawn" and specifies the animation value for a pawn) that way GG only has to load a single mesh object and two textures, the rest is all done by the scripts.
Hopefully one day Lee will add a way of loading multiple copies of an entity in one go, e.g. have a 'quantity' parameter in the fpe so you can drag in a single 'chess piece' entity and have it cloned 16 times automatically.
Been there, done that, got all the T-Shirts!