Comments by HGMuller

I think that all that is needed is to make the 'row' loop run from 0 to NBROWS, and remove the -NBVHND from

this.cbView.boardLayout[NBROWS-NBVHND-row-1][col]

 And then putting the extra hand ranks in the boardLayout defined in the game's view file. I don't think there are any other games yet that use extra hand ranks. I implemented that feature with Wa Shogi in mind.

The paintCells function is not involved in drawing the grid.

I had already looked at the sources, by looking at the chu-seireigi-view.js of the compiled version. Since you build Jocly without uglification all used source files are in there unmodified.

I guess the drop model still needs some tweeking. The square painting on the hand ranks should be the same as that of the other hand squares. Now there seems to be no coloring at all, so that the rim texture shines through. I suppose the logical way to do this is that the square-painting array that has to be defined in the game's view file should include the extra ranks.

It is also not clear to me why the 'counter piece' in the lower-right corner is larger than the others.

[Edit] The array boardLayout defined in the view file is accessed in two places in grid-board-view.js, inside nested loops over rows and columns. The loop over rows was modified to skip the extra hand ranks. I suppose this was a bad idea; especially in the 'paintCells' function it should have run over all ranks, requiring the boardLayout to also specify how the cells in these extra hand ranks should be colored. There is a second routine 'paintInCoordinates' that also loops over all cells, which does more complex things and might need more subtle modification than just changing the loop limits. But it seems this function is not normally used.

The handLayout[-1] in the view file appears to have a 16 where there should be a 17, which causes misplacement of the 'counter piece' on 15 rather than 16.

No, you have to write something like

Model.Game.handLayout[1] = [0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,30,46,62,...];

if you want the first 8 'hand squares' for white to be at the bottom, and the rest along the right edge.

Note that it is possible to control the way the captured pieces are placed next to the board by defining arrays Model.Game.handLayout[color][handIndex]. This array should contain the square numbers where you want the first captured piece of the given color (1 or -1) and hand value to be placed. (A second piece will be placed at sqr+color, and after that counters will appear between the two shown pieces.)

Currently the default assignment is used, which places the white pieces on the first 'file' on the right of the board, the hand number equal to the rank number (which starts at 0). By defining a handLayout you could also use the ranks under or above the board to place pieces, thus requiring fewer extra ranks.

E.g. with a single extra rank (instead of the 4 you have now) you could place 6 white pieces below the board, and 14 white pieces to the right of the board.

I suppose that would heve worked, if you did that as first thing in the Post-Move sections. But I have already changed the betza.txt to use different arrays for the capturer and the victim. So now you have to put in Pre-Game:

set protected (T t);
set restricted (EA T ea t);

As the matter of fact, why don't you update that page "Play Chess Variants with Jocly" which was listing all available games until last year?

The problem is that it is a matter of taste what 'available game' means. The Jocly applet itself allows you to select any game that is implemented, through the 'other jocly games' link. But this applet is not able to show rule descriptions or credits, which are also available for most of these games in the Jocly source package.

Therefore Fergus created separate HTML pages for individual variants, which embed the Jocly applet preconfigured to run the corresponding variant, with a rule description. The overview page you refer to contains links to those individual game pages.

In general the reason for there being no link to a certain variant in this overview page is that there doesn't exist such a separate HTML page for that game yet. Someone would first have to create those pages.

Apparently the jocly.game.js was still the original one from 2017. The addition of LetsTwist (to make the Mersenne Twister random generator available to the game-specific code) is the only modification I ever made in the Jocly core. I have now replaced that file with the one on my website; this should make it work.

I have made an attempt to support fast castling in the betza.txt GAME-code include file. I could not test it in the context of your preset, though, because there seems to be a mismatch between the labels used in the I.D. that youconverted, and the piece set you use in the preset. So it still crashes because of an unknown piece 'E'. I suppose you would have to use the custom set as the PTA suggests it to make it work.

Anyway, to try the fast castling you should replace the lines

2 99  1  0    88
   1  9  0    25
2 99 -1  0    88
   1 -9  0    25

at the end of the legdefs array by

1 -3  1  0 FastCastle
1 -3 -1  0 FastCastle

This uses the existing mechanism for invoking dedicated routines for generating piece moves. But the routine FastCastle, which is invoked by this, is already supplied in the betza.txt include file.

I still have to adapt the PTA to generate these lines automatically, when encountering a fast castling.

You also have to add a line to /play/jocly/dist/browser/jocly-allgames.js to make Jocly notice the files that you placed in /play/jocly/dist/browser/games/chessbase/ . I think Fergus exempted the Jocly files from CloudFlare caching, so you should see new games immediately after flushing your browser cache. To do that I sometimes have to access the modified .js files (including jocly-allgames.js) directly with the browser.

Unfortunately the wikipedia-fairy-sprites.png file on CVP is not entirely compatible with the one that is now in the source repository.

link?

I get this error:

Cannot make a diagram with 0 pieces on an 8x8 board!

It probably means that you copy a lot of invisible stuff together with the Diagram definition; the line below the quoted error message makes an attempt to show you what you actually pasted. If I copy-paste directly from your latest comment into the PTA, I also get the error message, and for the pasted text it says:

<main><article id="maincontent"><div class="commentgroup"><div class="Comment"><div><table><tbody><tr><td class="line-content">satellite=megalo</td>...

So there is an enormous amount of HTML garbage prefixed and interleaved with the actual definition, and the PTA chokes on it. What exactly corrupts the Diagram definition might depend on your browser. I made the PTA resistant to the garbage that is added by copying from a FireFox Page Source (but you might have to flush the browser cache to benefit from that?)

Anyway, the safest method is to first paste the Diagram definition into NotePad;this will cleanse it of most invisible stuff. Then you can copy-paste it from there into the PTA.

Strange that it doesn't work for you. When I copy-paste the I.D. definition into the PTA directly from the Page Source (from the line satellite=megalo to the line king::KispO9::k1) I do get a 16x16 board with the Megalomachy setup. It doesn't look very well, because even the specified squareSize of 33x33 is too large to fit it on the PTA page, and the I.D. in the Megalomachy article uses the 50x50 alfaerie pieces. Because it also uses betzaNew.js it automatically shrinks those images to fit the squares, but the PTA still uses betza.js, which doesn't do that, but clips the pieces instead. But that should not affect the generation of GAME code.

You must only paste the name=value and piece lines, which normally are between HTML <div> and </div> tags. The script line is not part of the Diagram definition; it specifies to the browser what script to run to create an I.D. on  the page. Something the GAME code would never have to do.

I think it did, at least partly. But it is not obvious, because the I.D. does pseudo-legal highlighting, and the capture restriction on Terrors is a context-dependent rule that results in some pseudo-legal moves to be illegal. If I set up a position where the AI can gain a Queen by trading Terrors (TxT, QxT, BxQ), it does not capture.

The I.D. in the article had configured the rule the obsolete way, though, through a protected=32 parameter. This could not specify the 'asymmetric' version of the rule, which forbids Eagles to capture protected Terrors, but not Terrors to capture protected Eagles. I changed that now by using the captureMatrix for specifying the forbidden cases by marking those with a % sign.

The betza.txt include file currently also doesn't support asymmetric anti-trading; the I.D.'s anti-trading through the protected parameter is implemented there by initializing an array

set protected (...);

which lists the labels of all pieces mentioned in protected parameters. But it then bans all captures of the mentioned pieces by each other (when protected). So if both the Terror and Eagle go in there, T x protected E would also be forbidden. I suppose I could fix this by having the betza.txt include use two attays, 'protected' and 'restricted', and then ban only the captures of a piece mentioned in 'protected' by one mentioned in 'restricted'. When the PTA translates an I.D. that contains protected= parameters to GAME code, it could then define both arrays with the same pieces in them (where it now only defines 'protected' in the Pre-Game code).

More precise definition of what can capture what will have to wait for full implementation of the captureMatrix in the generated GAME code. But in most case (including Megalomachy) such a temporary fix would be sufficient.

[Edit] I now modified the betza.txt include file to support these changes. So in Pre-Game you would have to define an array 'opaque' with the flying pieces and those that can shoot them down, an array 'protected' with the Terror, and an array 'restricted' with Terror and Eagle.

Might it work to use the generated code for most of it and manually define the pieces that wouldn't work?

I suppose this would be an option; the 'Custom Pieces' section of the 'Wizard for GAME-code generation' article described how to add pieces that would need explicit programming. I think the Terror would not be problematic for the automatic conversion; it is the flying pieces that would need separate coding, in particular their jump-capturing moves. I suppose you could define thir moves in the I.D. as QK, RW and BF, and then replace the K, W or F moves by a routine for generating jump-captures in the described way.

But it might be simpler to clone the betza.txt file, and modify the move generator there with some dedicated code for this variant. And then use this modified version instead of the standard betza.txt in the preset. All that would have to be done is to insert some code at the point where it now is decided that an encountered piece can be hopped over by a test whether both pieces belong to the set {bat, eagle, raven, archer, spearman}, and abort the generation of that hopping move when they do.

Since this code would only be invoked when a hopper move hits a potential mount, it would not slow down the move generation very much, and I could even insert that in the standard include file. Then all what would have to be done is defining the pieces that cannot hop over each other in the Pre-Game code, like

set flying (...);

where the ... would be the list of labels of all the pieces (of either color) to which this applies.

Don't count on automatic conversion of the Interactive Diagram to GAME code, though. There are some aspects of this variant that are not supported yet by the betza.txt include file that powers such GAME code. In particular the captureMatrix, which is used to make the flying pieces block each other.