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H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Mar 28, 2023 09:16 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Mon Mar 27 09:55 PM:

It was using a lowercase prefix, yet the code includes these lines:

whitePrefix=W
blackPrefix=B

I am confused. Which code was containing that? I don't see those lines anywhere. Not in betzaNew.js, and not in the JavaScript embedded in the page. (Except in the buttons, but this is executed only when the buttons are pressed.)

At page load the color prefixes are set to the values specified in the definition of the Diagram, with lower-case w and b as defaults. Anyway, using the piece theme with the inverted Rook seems the right thing to do, as I recall that the original diagram in the article used that representation too (but using the small Utrecht set).

Btw, why is the squareSize in the Diagram's initial specification set to 52, while all the sets seem to need 50x50? The resizing that occurs because of this makes the images appear less crisp than they actually are.

I doubt the wisdom of offering so many different sets through buttons. This could be done in almost any variant, even those that only use orthodox pieces. Offering too many choices will just confuse the reader; standardization is a good thing. I think we should leave it to the author of the page to decide what representation he prefers. So I hope we are not going to do this in every article.

In the case of Ultima there does seem justification to show an alternative: the inverted-rook representation is how many people might be used to playing it 'over the board', but some people (including myself) will find it very annoying to use orthodox piece symbols to represent entirely different pieces. But the original article already does propose an alternative piece set.

I also think we should somehow get rid of the button for choosing between burners and tramplers. This is not something we should bother people with who only want to learn the rules of Ultima. I put that button in the comment, because that comment mainly served the purpose of showing the newly added capabilities of the Diagram, and give people an opportunity to judge the different move-entry methods. I think everyone would agree that for Ultima it is much better to treat the pieces as burners (i.e. all side-effect captures fully automatic, without the need to click any victims). So we should just make the Diagram in the Ultima article always do that. Problem is that the Diagram is not smart enough to judge whether treating pieces as burners would cause ambiguity of the entered moves. So the treatment as burner would have to be requested in the Diagram definition, (and otherwise default to shooter/trampler). And I have not implemented a method for doing that yet.


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