Check out Balbo's Chess, our featured variant for October, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Jul 17 04:49 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 03:40 PM:

For the specification of a number of squares (e.g. the starting squares of the pawns) I support a shorthand I.D. where you only have to specify the lower left and upper right corner of a rectangular board area, separated by a dash. That doesn't help much in Smess, but for Xiangqi a0-i4 would give you the entire area below the River, and d0-f2 the white Palace.

Still, having to fully write down the list of coordinates for nearly all board squares is probably more cumbersome than using a FEN-like notation for the entire board. That would require the property of the square to be encoded by a single character, though. But that character could encode an index in a table of the properties. Like

a: R; b: BvR; c: BsR; d: fRrRfrB; ...

acabcbaca/bdbcacbdb/...

(Just a move assignment I made up on the spot.) For irregular patterns like Smess there is no way to avoid specifying all squares explicitly, but regular cases one often encounters are homogeneous ranks, alternating squares on a rank, identical ranks or pairs of ranks. This is acually a problem that is very similar to coloring of the board, so the solution you use in the Diagram Designer for that should be applicable here.

 


Edit Form

Comment on the page Storm the Ivory Tower

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.