Sablefish is a free, open-source chess engine. Although currently under early development, Sablefish will be a top rival to Stockfish (maybe...)
Sablefish is free and distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.
Pre-requisites:
- Code Editor -- Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is recommended
- C++20 Compiler
- CMake
VSCode is the recommended editor for building Sablefish, as it is a lightweight alternative to Visual Studio and it can easily support the MSVC compiler and CMake.
To clone the Sablefish repository, open a Terminal window, navigate to a folder where you want your local copy to exist, and run the following command:
git clone https://github.com/corbin-phipps/Sablefish.git
A C++ compiler with support for C++ 20 library features is required to build Sablefish.
For Windows, the Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools will provide the necessary requirements. Under the "Individual Components" tab at the top of the Visual Studio Installer, select:
- C++ CMake tools for Windows
- MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ x64/x86 build tools (Latest)
- C++ Build Tools core features
- C++ core features
For Linux, g++ or llvm/clang can likely be used, although this has not been tested.
CMake is used to manage the build process for Sablefish.
For seamless CMake integration into VSCode, install the CMake Tools extension.
Once you have the CMake Tools extension installed in VSCode and the Sablefish repo cloned, open the VSCode Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+p and select CMake: Delete Cache and Reconfigure. This will produce a build directory with the necessary build files.
Next, select CMake: Build to build the Sablefish project. This will build all CMake targets with the Debug configuration.
Once the project is built, the project's executable (app.exe) and the project's tests (CTests) are available to run.
In a Terminal window, navigate to Sablefish/build/apps/Debug and run ./app.exe to run the project. For now, this simply prints a welcome message and an empty board.
In VSCode, open the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+p and select CMake: Run Tests to run the available Sablefish tests.