Create semi-transparent Chess pieces

Dec 21, '04 01:39:00PM

Contributed by: t3hl33t

You can rotate the board in Chess by clicking and holding on the edge of the board while dragging. This may seem obvious, but I have used Chess for ages without noticing it. And now for the semi-transparent pieces. Backup your Chess app before you try this. Now, control-click on the copy of Chess and choose "Show Package Contents." Open Contents -> Resources -> Styles -> Metal. You can use any other style; just look out with grass and fur, as fur can only work with chess pieces and grass can only work with the chessboard. Then open Piece.plist. I used PropertyListEditor from the Apple Developer Tools; you can use TextEdit if you want, but things will be slightly different.

You should see six key/value pairs:

Change BlackAlpha to 0.4 (or something else if you want -- 1 is fully opaque and 0 is fully transparent; invisible chess pieces, anyone?), and do the same with WhiteAlpha. You can also change the shininess and specular values if you want; they edit the shininess and specularity properties of the chess pieces. Save and close.

Now go into Board.plist. Change BlackAlpha and WhiteAlpha to 0.4 again. Save and quit. Open Chess and go into Preferences. Set Board and Pieces to Metal. Do you like your new chess pieces?

Note that you can also duplicate an existing look (Metal for example) to create a new look (Metal Transparent, perhaps), and that will add a new entry in the surface menu in Chess' preferences. If you're particularly adventurous, you can also edit the various .rgb files in GraphicConverter (or any other app that supports SGI files), and edit the chess pieces' textures.

[robg adds: This worked, though I found .4 to be a bit too transparent; .8 was more to my liking. This hint is particularly nice with this earlier hint about creating a floating chess board (note that this revised hint with a simpler method didn't work for me in 10.3.7).]

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