I am stuck

Ayy the opponent moves work as expected now. In last devlog I wasn’t able to capture opponent’s page because I accidentally didn’t filter the pieces, only moved the piece. Now the capturing system also works as normal. While talking about capturing pieces now the opponent can also capture pieces. If any of the player’s piece is on the destination of opponent’s piece then it will be captured. The main lesson learned here is to mostly use the previous data while changing the state’s value to avoid unnecessary bugs.

I’ve made the reset board function work. This was the point where I decided to rebuilt the code by removing the use dom manipulation and looking back I think it was a great decision by me. (Context: 2, 3 devlogs ago I found out my code was really trash while creating the reset board function). While writing reset board function I did run into some weird bugs. The board is reset by reconverting the fen to pieces array. The first opponent move happens when the opponentMoveIndex is 0 now. In the reset function the opponentMoveIndex is set to zero. I’ll add a animation to indicate that the user’s move is incorrect later.

For now I added the animation for the piece moving. I’ve learned that when moving the pieces by updating the state in react, the key of the element is what matters for animation to occur. If the key of the element is same and just the transform style has changed react knows that it’s the same piece that jumped from one place to another. Also now, the move transition doesn’t happen when the pieces are being place. Because the pieces are placed using the transfrom property, the same property used to move the piece. I took me a while to fix this. It seems that this was happening because the squareWidth was making the page re render. I’ve fixed it but I still I don’t completely understand it, which shows that I’ve a long way to go.

This one is small but crucial. Now the user cannot select the opponent’s piece during opponent’s turn. I’ve added a 500 ms delay for opponent’s move so that it doesn’t feel things are happening really fast. In that timeframe user is not able to select any pieces now.

I am now stuck at the part where I am trying to animate the pieces after checking the user input. Whether it’s correct or incorrect. I wanted to make the background green if the move was correct and red if it move user made was incorrect. Using states is proving to be tricky for me as they’re fully synchronous. My brain goes okay this will happen and that will happen but the code won’t have the updated data because of useState nature. Also I tried to change the background color same way I move the pieces. Now that I think I about it I just wasted time. I will try to do animations with gsap now but idk how to explain I can’t really think of a way to do it with these useStates.

Okay this was more that enough yap for 2hr 30 mins of work. Let’s see if I figure out a way tomorrow. If you’re reading this love you man 💖.