HotHandChess Changelog

Added the Gamestate class, a class for tracking information about the current state of the game, such as castling rights or En Passant target squares. Next we aim to implement legal move generation as well as solidify our implementation for making moves and generating them.

• Implemented FEN notation parsing and load positions into the engine from the command line using UCI commands.
• Various Bitboard utilities and loading functions.
• Updates to the general strucuture of the project.
• Created compilation script "publish.ps1" to compile engines directly into the engines folder.
• Removed debug log folders and engine executable folders from the repo.
• Fixed several non-critical warning messages that were appearing during compilation.

What's Next:

• Functions for making and unmaking moves.
• Move parsing.
• Legal move generation.
• Updated design documentation.

Our goal is to have a randomly moving agent working towards the beginning of next month assuming there are no large hiccups in development.

Project classes were defined in more detail, methods were skeletoned and basic UCI commands were implemented for testing.

• UCIInterpreter class created.
• Engine now responds to UCI startup handshakes and can return a predefined test move.
• Alpha engine executable built. It is not yet capable of full gameplay, but able to interpret standard UCI commands and respond correctly.
• Square‑based and piece‑based board representations implemented; piece codes defined.
• A new developer joined the project.

What's Next:

• Finishing UCI parsing.
• Developing piece movement and generation.
• Making a prototype capable of making random legal moves.

The scope of the project was defined and initial resources created. The overall goal of HotHandChess is to build a UCI‑compatible chess engine designed to work seamlessly with GUI applications, such as CuteChess or Arena.

HotHand Systems began development on HotHandChess, aiming to explore the world of chess programming and engine design.