Comments by ChessShogi

I would like the presets listed below deleted. All of them are mine, so you do not need someone else's permission to delete them.

The default preset for Hanten Shogi

The default preset for Gyaku-sama Shogi

In case you are wondering why I want them deleted, I have decided to delete their related articles from the Chess Variant Pages, as I have lost interest in them.

In making my own interactive diagrams, I decided to add functions for getting FEN codes from board positions and loading positions from FEN codes. They work pretty flawlessly, provided you use an ID w/ at least one letter for each piece. It even works w/ multi-character IDs, which are enclosed in curly brackets in the FEN code.

I also made functions for getting and loading game moves using a more specialized notation, w/ each element of the move separated by hyphens. Though it isn't standard algebraic notation, I have tested this system and it works very well.

If you would like, I can send you a text document w/ the functions.

They actually managed to get the site back up. I though Jocly was permanently down.

This page is now finished and waiting to be approved.

Game Courier presets for my larger games are theoretically possible. I have the tools necessary, and creating the PHP file shouldn't be that hard, but I am unsure how I would get that to work. The sets that Game Courier currently has either don't have enough pieces, have pieces which don't accurately represent the pieces in my large shogi variants, or have pieces whose names are too complicated for me to effectively implement them into Game Courier.

That's not to say I don't want to make presets for these games. If I could create the proper PHP files for the pieces and get them added to Game Courier, that would allow me to create presets for these games with proper representation of the pieces, which would be great. If you are an editor, perhaps you could help me with that when I finish the PHP files?

As for Hanten Shogi and Gyaku-sama Shogi, I am in the process of reviving them.

I assume all piece moves are the same as in standard Shogi?

I will have the blue coloration come back sometime, although I will probably reverse the colors to save me time if I need to update any graphics.

Kyoto Shogi style switchbacks could be interesting. But there is a problem: the instant a Pawn or Drunk Elephant moves, it would be forced to promote, which boosts defense early on and makes the game less interesting in my opinion. Of course, this can be easily solved by including exceptions to this rule for those pieces, and providing some sort of visual cue to match. But to me, the condition that promotion/demotion only happens on captures makes more sense, as you would need less visual cues for it.

You can find the preset for Hanten shogi in the Computer Play section of the notes.

I've been working on a side project of mine called the Universal Chessboard, a stand-alone application designed to support as many chess variants as possible, within certain parameters. It is somewhat similar to and inspired by these interactive diagrams - for example it uses the same general format for its presets as the format that is used to parse these diagrams (albeit with some parameters added/missing/different). Although it is still very much in its infancy (as it is currently at version Alpha 0.0), it already has many basic features implemented. You can move pieces with the mouse or with text, navigate through the game, undo moves. reset the board, load board positions, load game presets, etc.

You can check out the application in its current state as an Eclipse IDE project or a runnable .jar file here: https://github.com/amdewitt/Universal-Chessboard.

I have a new piece set file for my large shogi variants that I want to test out in Game Courier. Who should I contact to get it uploaded to the site and linked to the list of piece sets?

Are you using the aliases as the piece IDs instead of the original piece IDs specified by the set file being used? If so, that will not work. You need to use the piece IDs originally specified by the set file, as the alias command only makes a visual change to the piece ID (it does not change the internal ID used in the code).

I would like to request that the presets default2 and promotest for Suzumu Shogi be deleted, as they are excess presets and no known games for Suzumu Shogi have been found. (promotest was made to try and work around an internal bug in Game Courier, and default2 was made when I thought I would need to update the default preset for the game, only to find that it was safe to change the original).

@Greg Strong and Ben Reiniger - Since you two seem to be the one that I should contact for uploading set files, should I send my set file to one of you via email? Also, would having a plus sign (+) in a piece label cause any problems for Game Courier? It seems to work fine when I use code in the presets to change the labels, but I want to make sure the same is true when there is a plus sign in the label coming from the set file, as all the promoted piece labels have plus signs in them.

I will only be sending the first one for now, as I want to make sure it works as intended before uploading the other two.

This is a very nice index you have so far. However, I noticed that Ryugi was missing. While it is admittedly not my favourite game, it is just as simple for AI to play as Yangsi, if not simpler. If you can add Ryugi to the list that would be great.

Also, my larger Shogi variants have diagrams that an AI can play as well, though not including these is sort of understandable, as the AI would of course take a very long time to make a move. I actually had the AI play a game of Taishin Shogi (my largest game) for the first 60 or so moves, and in the worst case it took upwards of 9 hours for the AI to make a move due to the sheer size and complexity of the game, which only increased as more moves were made, although this would theoretically lessen as the board thins.

When I replied to this initially on the interactivce diagrams page, I should have posted it here...so here is my response in the proper place.

It's a good idea to think about. The main problem lies in describing very complex pieces such as those in Ko Shogi, but most variants don't have pieces that complex.

The main issue with implementation is where you would put the description. I would put it at the end, as a description is entirely optional. You will want to make a distinction b/w the pieces in hand and the description, though this is likely very easy to implement.

However, it is important to keep in mind that if the descriptions for the pieces are all kept within the diagram itself on a CVP article, then people might not know where to find the moves of the pieces, even when the text used to open/close the table mentions descriptions. This is why I always have, and always will, keep all piece descriptions in the Pieces section of my CVP articles, which is meant to fulfill this purpose. As a result, having descriptions in the table would actually benefit other sites more than it would benefit this site. Even so, the benefits of such a feature are worth considering.

Though you are right when it comes to implementation, it is possible to know whether I'll consider it, as this would technically fit into my philosophy of consitency between most piece moves across games, as Ryugi is my only game with Chess-style Pawns without a setup covering the entirety of a single rank. However, it might be some time before it is implemented in the diagram and Game Courier.

Also, I noticed a few mistakes in the set file I just sent you. If you could overwite the old file with the new one when I send it to you that would be great.

@Greg Strong I saw your email that you updated the Large shogi: Taishin Mnemonic set file, but whenever I try do do anything with the new set, the page becomes completely blank for some reason. Does Fergus need to update the sets.php file as well?

Edit: The set is working now. Now to check that everything in the new set is correct...

I did not mean to propose hiding the table like the piece legend for the diagram is hidden by default. Or even have the diagram generate it 'on the fly' in the client's browser. (Noe that the diagram can make the piece table appear anywhere on the page, in a place of your choice, through the satellite parameter.) The problem with the latter is that it would not work for people that have disabled JavaScript in their browser.

So I can see why you, and presumably many others, want such a list in your articles. So my proposal was actually: given the fact that the piece names / images / moves already have to be specified to create a diagram, couldn't we make life easier for the author by offering him as a free side effect the HTML for an (almost complete) table, which he just has to copy-paste into his article in the place where he wants it to appear? Most people would create the diagrams through the design wizard or the play-test applet, and would then copy-paste the provided HTML for the diagram into their article. They could do the same for a table with textual descriptions, which the design wizard would show in another text-box (or perhaps in the same box, after pressing a button "Piece Table".

And it doesn't matter whether the descriptions for complex pieces like Lions or Hook Movers would be inaccurate, clumsy or missing; there will be only few of such pieces, and the author can edit their description by hand after he copy-pasted the table into his article.

That is a genius idea. I would love to see something like that.

As to the format of the table - What I meant was this:  In the article above you use the piece names in the first column. E.g. "King", and then the text says "The King moves one step in each direction". Mentioning "King" twice here is redundant; you could have said "Moves one step in each direction", because people already know it pertains to the King from the first column. But I think it would be better to keep the piece name in the move description, as you had, and replace the name column by an image column. Presumably you did not do that because it is a lot of work to write all the HTML image tags with the URLs of the images. But when generated automatically that would not be an issue. It would also not be an issue to attach a handler to the table cells so that clicking on them would evoke some response (for those with JavaScript enabled). E.g. like opening/closing a normally hidden able row right below the one clicked, which by default would be empty, but which the author could use to provide a hand-made move diagram.

Actually, the reason I did the table the way I did for this game and Taishin Shogi rather than using the format I used for my smaller shogi variants (the piece images and the name in a column within the cell) is because of the size limit for the HTML editors. There is an actual limit programmed into the HTML editors on the site for how big a HTML script can get, and using the format for my smaller games exceeded that limit for both this game and Taishin Shogi because the piece list was so big. However, when I took out the images, it worked just fine, so I decided to just leave the images out. Automatic table generation is a good idea, but the size limit might make it unfeasible with images, depending on the size of the script.

I also wanted to keep the format between my Shogi variant pages as consistent as possible. Indeed, making the list is a lot of work, but a consistent format across pages makes it much easier by letting me copy-paste the text for each piece into the appropriate cell.

Also, the redundency may not actually be a bad thing. I've seen quite a few CVP articles by other people that have the piece name in both the image and the move description.

@Greg Strong I sent you an email containing the next set file I want to upload to Game Courier. This one is for the Shogi pieces with full piece names, but I haven't gotten a response yet. Did you get my message?

I wonder if there is an option in Game Courier somewhere to have pieces rotate 180 degrees when the board is flipped? This is not the $flip variable in the set file, as that swaps the values for lowercase and uppercase keys when the board is flipped Such an option could be quite useful for pieces that use mnemonic symbols to show piece moves, since piece moves are flipped when the board. Maybe the board does this automatically and I am just missing it (I know this is the case when I use my phone). However, as far as I know, there is no option in Game Courier that flips that makes pieces images rotate as the board rotates. If there is, it isn't documented in the developer's guide. Either way, I think the idea is at least worth considering.

Something is wrong with GAME Code. Whenever I try to load one of my large Shogi Variant presets, and by extension any preset that uses a similar stalemated subroutine, the last expression in for/foreach is calculated wrong. It evaluates to a single square, whereas before it would correctly evaluate to the array of board spaces.