I am currently writing a chess program for a school project so I need to make a simple interface (showing the board and moving the pieces mainly), I looked some openGL and directX tutorials but they seems pretty complicate so I was wondering if there's an easier way to do it, considering that I only need some simple 2D graphics.
I am using a 64 bit version of windows 7 right now, but I can also use linux if.it.makes things easier.

Thanks in advance for your help!

if you can write a chess engine I assume that the interface mechanics are a piece of cake. You are probably wondering how to display/manipulate bitmaps on the screen?
PS: please post the engine. Is it bitbased? If you make it UCI compliant (via stdin/stdout) you can use one of the many GUI out there like arena.

So, you're coding Chess game in FASM? or C?

I'm assuming that alessandro is coding it in fasm because it is easier (and because this is a fasm forum).

Gdi+
As far as I recall it is bit based also.

Basic 2D stuff can be achieved with the usual setpixel, moveto(ex), lineto(ex), polydraw, bitblt gradientfill etc and friends. Depends if you've got images or drawing "raw".

I was a bit in a hurry when I wrote my previous post (and I'm not a native english speaker) so let me explain a bit better:

I decided to write a chess engine as a school project which is something I've never done before, but there's plenty of documentation available and I have some experience with similar stuff so I didn't find big problems understanding how a chess engine works.
What is troubling me is the graphical part, because I have never coded any GUI, since I've never been interested in it, I know that openGL (and directX) are widely used so I thought they could be the right place to start from and I looked at some tutorials, what I meant isn't that I cannot understand the basics of openGL but that they look complicate enough to wonder if there's an easier solution since I don't need very complex graphic.

@AsmGuru62: I have no restiction from my school on the language I should use, but I was thinking to do it in FASM, also because my knowledge of C is pretty bad.

@tthsqe: I haven't started to code the actual engine yet, I've only been playing with move generation and such in Lua (because it is the least verbose and fastest to code language I know without worrying about the actual implementation, which is good if I only need to understand concept without caring for speed), so I haven't decided the details yet, I was planning to focus on making a working engine first and optimizing it later (I have time until June), but I'll be happy to post and discuss the code as soon as I have something worth posting!
Arena sure looks nice, but doing the GUI by myself was part of the "challenge", I'll look into it anyway.

@cod3b453: I mainly need to plot images (bitmaps?) so typedef's suggestion seems to be what I was looking for, but I have to read the docs now and see what can I do with it!

thanks to everyone by the way!

alessandro, I wouldn't waste time on writing a gui. It is not very interesting, and there are many out there that are much better than anything one could cook up in a few weeks. The gui will be hard at first but then quickly get boring. The engine, however, will not be subject in this way to diminishing returns. I would concentrate on writing the engine as a 64 bit console app that follows the UCI protocol. Then, you can hook it up to your favorite gui and have it play against other engines (like stockfish).

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@alessandro95:
I am great with GUI, but I have no idea about the chess engines -- never tried to write one.

tthsqe thanks for the documentation, I didn't know about the UCI protocol, I'll read about it carefully next week (winter holidays), also using a pre-existing GUI doesn't sound bad since it is the least interesting part to code by myself

alessandro, take a short look here: http://www.madwizard.org/programming/tutorials/mosaic/

this is the wonderful masm32 assembly programming tutorial where you are creating a mosaic game. chess board is not that far away from mosaic (just a little bit bigger) - I guess you can grab a lot from that project to make your chess gui.

good luck!
fatygant

How is this project progressing? Have you implemented all of the rules? Move generation? Search?