Bevy 3D Chess

March 11, 2026 · View on GitHub

Chess UI

Version: 0.2 — 11 MAR 2026 Author: Dr. Stefan Salewski License: See source file headers for attribution of 3D models.

A plain Bevy 0.18.0 front end for the tiny Salewski chess engine, featuring:

  • Fully 3D chessboard and pieces
  • Mouse-based camera control (orbit, pan, zoom) via [bevy_panorbit_camera]
  • Piece hover highlights — pieces change color when the mouse is over them
  • Legal move highlights — click a piece to show all valid destination squares
  • Last move highlights — marks both source and destination squares after each move
  • Basic UI overlay with help text, turn info, time control, and next player
  • Engine integration — supports human vs. computer play with configurable time per move

📦 Requirements

  • Rust 1.78+ (2024 edition)
  • Bevy 0.18.0

🔧 Build & Run

git clone https://github.com/stefansalewski/Bevy-3D-Chess.git
cd Bevy-3D-Chess
RUST_LOG=off cargo run

🎮 Controls

  • Left-click — Select a piece, then click a destination square
  • Middle mouse — Rotate/orbit camera
  • Right-click — Pan camera
  • Mouse wheel — Zoom in/out
  • Keypad 1 / 2 — Toggle human/computer control for each side
  • Keypad +/- — Adjust engine move time
  • Keypad 0 — Start a new game
  • M — Print move list to console (initially for engine debugging)

🎨 Graphics

The chess pieces were created in Blender by Bhargav Limje and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. Board asset: Wooden Chess Board.

⚠ Known Limitations

  • Highlight cache is simplified — highlighted materials are recreated instead of fully reusing precomputed variants
  • Hover highlighting for pieces works, but legal move square highlights disappear when moving the mouse after selection (planned fix)
  • No coordinate labels, arrows, or other board annotations yet (future feature)

📦 Model Credits

Models are loaded from .glb assets under Creative Commons licenses:

📜 Project Status

Bevy 3D Chess started as a Bevy learning exercise — originally built for Bevy 0.14 and now updated to Bevy 0.18.0. The GUI code borrows heavily from Bevy example projects. GPT-5 assisted in updating the code and implementing highlight effects for both squares and pieces.

🔀 Alternative Implementations

The same chess engine code is also available with:

Older Nim, GTK, and blocking Egui versions are now deprecated and will be removed.

💬 Feedback

This is an intermediate release. Feedback from the Bevy community is especially welcome on:

  • Efficient material handling for hover/selection highlights
  • ECS patterns for updating squares and pieces
  • UI enhancements for move history, timers, and game state