Comments by Fergus Duniho
Smess. British name of Smess, a Parker Brothers game in which arrows on squares determine the directions pieces may move. (7x8, Cells: 56) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]This isn't showing up well on any browser or OS I've seen it on. On my iPad, I see the arrowed board both above and below the blank 7x8 board with the pieces, and the one above is tiled. On Android and Windows, the tiled board is not appearing at the top, but the pieces are still not appearing on the same board as the arrows.
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]You did not get the point. Does the preset say 'check' when you check with any other piece than an Advancer? I think it doesn't. So then this has nothing to do with the piece being an Advancer.
I dug back into this thread to find the preset he was talking about. He linked to a particular game in which neither Advancer checked the opponent's King. Continuing this game by choosing Annotate and then Move, I played some moves to get a White Flying Dragon to check the Black King, and when I did, it said "check!". After moving the King out of check, I tried to move White's Advancer, but no legal moves are being highlighted on the board for it. However, its legal moves do show up in the Moves field, and when I tried one, it worked. At the top of the Moves field, I see the legal move "A e1-#to; A #to-b1". I think this is not a properly formatted move, and it may be interfering with the ability to recognize the Advancer's legal moves. Also, when I entered it, it did not recognize it as legal, and it gave the error message "#to is not a valid square".
Here are the moves to the position in question so that you can see what's going on.
1. P f2-f5
1... p f9-f6
2. P e2-e4
2... p e9-e7
3. F i1-h3
3... f i10-h8
4. P i2-i3
4... p d9-d8
5. B h1-i2
5... c g10-f7
6. C d1-f3
6... f b10-c8
7. C g1-e3
7... c d10-f8
8. K f1-i1
8... p g9-g7
9. P b2-b3
9... c f8-e5
10. P d2-d4
10... c e5-f8
11. B c1-b2
11... a e10-h7
12. F b1-e2
12... p i9-i8
13. P g2-g5
13... c f7-e8
14. P g5-g6
14... a h7-f9
15. P c2-c4
15... p b9-b6
16. F h3-g2
16... c e8-d7
17. P d4-d5
17... f c8-d6
18. F e2-h3
18... p c9-c7
19. C f3-e6
19... c d7-e6
20. P d5-e6
20... p j9-j8
21. B b2-a3
21... b c10-a8
22. B a3-d6
22... p e7-d6
23. R h1-f1
23... p j8-j7
24. F g2-d3
24... b h10-j8
25. C e3-g1
25... f h8-i6
26. P j2-j3
26... p d8-d7
27. P a2-a5
27... p b6-a5
28. R a1-a5
28... b a8-b9
29. P e6-d7
29... f9-e8;@-d7
30. C g1-a7
30... f i6-h4
31. C a7-d8 // - check! -
31... k f10-f9Just click on Annotate for Butterfly Chess and paste these in to see the same position.
Yes, I originally would have thought when an Advancer made a move that threatened a King, an enforcing preset would automatically announce check.
However, maybe the Advancer, being an Ultima-like piece, does not actually make a check in an Ultima-like game (which Butterfly Chess is not)?
So I now ask, is that the usual assumption that Applet generated preset code makes for every CV put through the generating process?
I don't know how a generated preset works, but the checked subroutine I use in the fairychess include file normally checks for captures by displacement by checking if each enemy piece on the board can move to the King's position. This would not normally work with Ultima pieces, which do not normally capture by displacement, but I have managed to use this subroutine with Ultima without modifying it. First, let's look at the subroutine:
sub checked king:
my from piece;
local movetype;
set movetype CHECK;
if isupper cond empty var king $moved space var king:
def enemies onlylower;
else:
def enemies onlyupper;
endif;
for (from piece) fn enemies:
if fn const alias #piece #from var king:
return #from;
endif;
next;
return false;
endsub;The key to working with Ultima is that it sets movetype to CHECK. With this in mind, I have written functions for Ultima pieces like this:
def Black_Withdrawer fn join "Black_Withdrawer_" var movetype #0 #1;Depending upon the value of movetype, it will call either Black_Withdrawer_MOVE or Black_Withdrawer_CHECK, which I have defined separately and differently. Thanks to setting movetype to CHECK, the checked subroutine will use the *_CHECK functions for Ultima pieces. Instead of going through a normal move, one of these functions will check whether the piece at the first coordinate can capture the piece at the second. For example:
def Black_Withdrawer_CHECK
empty where #frm - file #frm file #to - rank #frm rank #to
and == distance #frm #to 1
and not near #frm I 1
=frm =to;This first makes sure that the piece is not next to a White Immobilizer (designated as I). It then verifies that the two spaces are adjacent. Calculating the direction away from the piece at #to, it checks whether there is an adjacent empty space in that direction. If there is, it returns true.
Crossroads. Members-Only Crossing the diagonals generate figures. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
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Game Courier. PHP script for playing Chess variants online.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]You need code in your Post-Move sections to control what is allowed on the first turn. Setting legal moves in the Post-Game section is not enough, because these will only be used for which legal moves are highlighted for the player. They will not control which legal moves are allowed.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The only thing I am still in doubt about is whether the current betza.txt include file on which the PTA-generated code relies tests for a move being the final one in a safe and reliable way. Because it uses mln for the test rather than turn.
I have just added thismovenum and maxmovenum. These will return $mline[$mln]->movenum and $mline[$maxmln]->movenum. It's likely that maxmovenum will be returning the same value as movenum, which returns $movenum, but using it will add clarity to your code.
About Game Courier. Web-based system for playing many different variants by email or in real-time.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]You're using k/K for the general, but the code you copied is using g/G. So kpos and Kpos are not being updated.
Your link is missing a query string.
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The print color scheme now has its own small logo too. Since the big logo included 19th century black and white artwork of Chess pieces, I chose a more retro style that displays fairy pieces by changing the orientation of Chess piece images. According to a section of Anthony Dickins' A Guide to Fairy Chess, the inverted queen is the grasshopper, and the reclining bishop is the unicorn.
I have changed forpersonid to author in the link, and it now works.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]if == 0 $mline[$mln]->movenum:
That is mixing GAME Code with PHP. GAME Code does not support classes with properties or write out array elements with brackets, and it doesn't provide read access to $mline. But you can use the value of turn with your knowledge of which side you're concerned with to determine where you are in a game.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I am not familiar with this technique, but a problem could be that it is not just about positioning the images, but also about translating mouse clicks to cell coordinates. (Which must also work for empty cells, for entering non-captures.) In the table version I have attached event handlers to the cells for this.
With grid, you would use a <div> tag instead of a <td> tag for each space, and you could attach event handlers to it just as easily. What I have done in Game Courier, though, is place a transparent image over each empty space, as I have attached event handlers to the piece images.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]set all == mln $maxmln; // indicates last moveNote there is no $ there, so we might be talking about different things, and this one might be a legacy variable.
This operator just outputs the value of $mln.
I cannot image how this would work if mln was not the current move number.
It works because you are comparing mln with its maximum value. When there are comments, $maxmln will be greater than any move number, but it will be no higher than mln will eventually reach.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The I.D. represents the board through a HTML table,
Game Courier used to use HTML tables for hexagonal boards, but I gave up on this in favor of using either CSS with a board image or drawing the board image. This reminds me that I was working on getting CSS to work with a generated board image so that you could view each position of the game without reloading the page, but I haven't completed that. I think I had two different approaches and wasn't sure which one to go with. I either wanted to change how I generated the board so that the image would be perfectly symmetrical, or I wanted to modify the code to work with the asymmetrical boards I was already generating. I lost sight of what I was doing when I got caught up with other projects.
in theory it should be possible to create a table with a masonry-like tiling, shifting each subsequent rank by half a cell.
I imagine this would be easier to do with CSS grid, because, as far as I know, table columns remain vertical.
I have tried this, though, and it works to some extent. But for reasons that I do not grasp yet it also changes the height of the ranks in a way that I could not control.
Using grid would probably help you avoid this problem too. With grid, you should be able to make one column or row diagonal, though I have not yet tried using grid with hexagonal boards. My CSS code for hexagonal boards uses absolute positioning, as grid was not yet part of CSS when I wrote the code. Anyway, absolute positioning is another alternative to using tables.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I think the variable 'mln' gives you the current move number in the Post-Move sections.
It does not. I have made that mistake too and had to correct it. To use $mln to get the move number, you need to get $mline[$mln]->movenum. $mline is an array with a separate entry for each line of the movelist, but besides containing actual moves, it contains comments. $mln is the index that a line has in this array, but when some lines are comments, it will go out of sync with the move number.
GAME Code has turn, which will return $mline[$mln]->turn, but it doesn't currently have anything returning $mline[$mln]->movenum.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The Official Glinski Coordinates preset has CSS rendering which isn't working right for hexagonal games
The board image it was using had two separate elseif clauses dealing with it in a long series of elseif clauses in image_dimensions.php, and changes I was making to the second one had no effect. But when I noticed that it had two and combined them into one, I was able to set a value for $offy that worked for the board.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Is it possible to make an Interactive Diagram use a hexagonal board?
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I may make a logo for it with some of Tenniel's black and white illustrations from Through the Looking-Glass, though I'm open to other ideas.
I have now done that except that I cropped and divided one illustration instead of using two separate illustrations. Also, most of the small piece images I used are based on characters Alice encounters in Lewis Carroll's books.
Featured Chess Variants. Chess Variants Featured in our Page Headers.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Glinski's Hexagonal Chess is the featured variant for May, 2024.
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Thanks to GAME Code being an interpreted language written in another interpreted language, it is not as quick at things compiled languages would do more quickly, and it will sometimes exceed the time limit that PHP imposes on script execution. This makes optimizations and short cuts more important, and in hand-written code, I have done this. See my previous comment about how I handled the spotting of check in Ultima as an example.
In automatically-generated code, it might be harder to get in the optimizations needed for particular games. So I would suggest a compromise between your quick method and your reliable method. Flag pieces that can capture a piece without moving to its space, and use your reliable method on these while just checking if other pieces can move to the King's space.