Manim Chessboard

A Manim plugin that allows you to generate scenes with chessboards with minimal setup.

Installation

pip install manim-chessrender

Features

• Initialize Chessboard: Easily create and display a fully initialized chessboard.
• Move Pieces: Animate standard piece movements using UCI notation.
• Special Moves: Handle special chess moves like castling and en passant.
• Load FEN Strings: Load and display a board configuration from a FEN string.
• Play PGN Files: Load and animate moves from PGN files.
• Customization: Customize the appearance of the chessboard and pieces with different colors and image paths.

Usage

To render the examples, you need to run the script using Manim. Below are the examples included in this project.

MovePieceExample

This example initializes the chessboard and demonstrates moving a piece.

class MovePieceExample(MovingCameraScene):
    """
    Scene to demonstrate moving a piece on the chessboard.
    """
    def construct(self):
        """
        Constructs the scene by initializing the chessboard and moving a piece.
        """
        chessboard = ChessBoard()
        chessboard.initialize_board()
        self.add(chessboard.board)
        self.wait(1)
        self.play(chessboard.execute_move('e2e4'))
        self.wait(2)

PlayPGNExample

This example demonstrates playing moves from a PGN file on the chessboard.

class PlayPGNExample(MovingCameraScene):
    """
    Scene to demonstrate playing moves from a PGN file on the chessboard.
    """
    def construct(self):
        """
        Constructs the scene by loading a PGN file and animating the moves on the chessboard.
        """
        chessboard = ChessBoard()
        chessboard.initialize_board()
        self.add(chessboard.board)
        self.wait(1)
        
        games = chessboard.load_pgn("./example/example.pgn")
        game = games[0]
        for move in game:
            self.play(chessboard.execute_move(move.uci()))
            self.wait(0.5)

Running the Examples

To run any of the examples, execute the script using Manim. For instance, to run the InitializeChessBoard example:

manim -pql examples.py InitializeChessBoard

Replace InitializeChessBoard with the class name of the example you want to run.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.