Comments by ChessShogi

I decided to rename Futashikana Shogi to Dai Shosu Shogi. I would like the game's corresponding pages, https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/futashikana-shogi and https://www.chessvariants.com/play/futashikana-shogi changed to https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shosu-shogi and https://www.chessvariants.com/play/dai-shosu-shogi, respectively. I would also like to have the Game Courier presets for Futashikana shogi deleted. I have already transferred their code to presets for Dai Shosu Shogi.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed Yangsi. I'd love to see a CVP article on your Heavy Shako game - it sounds like a very interesting concept.

The 12x12 Yangsi idea could be interesting, but I think Gross Chess kind of already has that covered.

Also, what is Ai Ai? I've never heard of it before.

My one issue is that the Demon is so weak in the Suzumu family of games that the flavour of Tenjiku is mostly absent; Tenjiku is almost defined by the terrifying presence of the Demon, much like the Lion in Chu Shogi. If the Demon were powered up to something in between the original and this one, I think this game would be even more interesting.

When designing the Suzumu Shogi pieces, I wanted pieces with moves representable in XBetza Notation, less brutal than those in Tenjiku, but in line with the original theme. Also, I wanted to make sure that the piece moves didn't create weaknesses in the start positions of any of these games. It's a difficult balancing act, I know.

All in all, though, I think I did pretty good. The range jumper's moves definitely fit in with the theme while also being sufficiently powerful, even in Taishin Shogi. The Fire Demon was much more difficult to design though. I went through a bunch of iterations with its move before settling on the current one. Giving it the burning ability from Tenjiku Shogi would kind of ruin the theme, not to mention be impossible to describe in XBetza Notation. I did try giving it the ability to burn one neighbor after moving (not when stationary) but that ended up being a mess both in terms of the XBetza move description and the legal moves display in the interactive diagram (which had question marks everywhere, making it kind of difficult to see what was really going on).

Do you think giving the Fire Demon the ability to slide in all eight directions (like a Queen) in addition to its other moves would help?

After thinking about it, I decided to cancel the renaming of Futashikana Shogi. Please delete both presets for Dai Shosu Shogi.

@Eric Silverman @H.G. Muller I think I found a real winner for a new version of the Suzumu Shogi Fire Demon and the games it appears in. The new Fire Demon has a novel burning ability instead of the Lion's double King step. This new moves allows it to optionally shoot (capture without moving) an enemy piece a King's move away from its final destination. This ability only activates when a Fire Demon moves.This makes it much more powerful then the previous iteration, but it's still weaker than the Tenjiku Shogi Fire Demon. This should make these game much more interesting while still being less brutal then Tenjiku Shogi.

This change will also necessitate changes to the starting positions for all games that the Fire Demon appears in to eliminate any exploitable weaknesses to the new ability in the starting positions, some more drastic than others. Each will be designed to protect from normal captures, double captures of all kinds, and the Fire Demon's new burning ability.

Mitsugumi Shogi/Gyaku-sama Shogi will introduce the Horned Falcon and Soaring Eagle from Suzumu Shogi/Hanten Shogi in adittion to rearranging ot some of the original pieces. Suzumu Shogi/Hanten Shogi and Chushin Shogi will rearrange the side/vertical soldiers and side/vertical movers (and in Chushin's case, the side/vertical chariots as well). I am not sure what Taishin Shogi's new starting position will look like, but it will likely be changed drastically.

Now the only question remaining is how to implement the new burning ability in Game Courier.

P.S. In case your wondering what the Fire Demon's XBetza string looks like, it's this:

BympacabBympacabBsRsympacabRsympabcabRKaKaaKmabKmpacabKmpabcabKmampacabKmampabcabKmamampacabKmamampabcabK

I love the new behavior for parentheses. For complex pieces (e.g. Suzumu Shogi's new Fire Demon) it can be a real lifesaver.

The Game Courier presets named Dai Shosu Shogi are still there. They can be deleted as they are basically clones of the Futashikana Shogi presets.

Thanks for catching those typos. They are now fixed. Yes, both the Left General and Right General promote to Shogun.

I noticed that for the PNG, JPG, and GIF image rendering options that the hitboxes for the squares were off center compared to where the image was, with the effect being least at the upper left corner and increasing as you go towards the lower right corner.

The ii modifier (or something similar meaning the same thing) is a genius idea. For the burning, there may be some merit to having something to determine certain specifics of the burning move (i.e. whether the move is passive as well as active, and if it is, which piece has priority in a conflict b/w the burning pieces) with diagram parameters. XBetza wouldn't necessarily be able to handle those specifics on its own.

The hitbox positioning is much better. The images may be slightly off center, but that isn't much of a problem.

Is there a way to detect suicide moves in Game Courier (form XY- or @-XY)? I'm trying to figure out how to implement the new burning ability for the Fire Demons, and I think suicide move are the best option to keep things simple. But I'll need to know how to do the following in order to use suicide moves to execute burns:

• Detect a suicide move on the board
• Detect whether the value of thismove is a suicide move

Once I successfully implement the new burning moves I can carry that over to the other games in the Suzumu family.

I guess I worded that wrong. What I meant to say was the the highlights for empty squares are slightly off center.

I've added the implementation in the Interactive Diagram. Still need to add it in Game Courier though.

Edit: Apparently by happy accident, the Game Courier preset had this implemented already without me realizing it.

This game was a bit neglected on my part for a while, partly because of my interest in large Shogi variants and the long process of experimentation with the Suzumu Fire Demon's move. Now that those are out of the way, I have decided to give this page a facelift. I have added an interactive diagram to this page and updated its images to keep its style in line with the rules pages for Yangsi and Ryugi, and I did some double-checking to make sure the rules were in line with those of Yangsi and Ryugi. I also fixed a few typos in the ruleset references for the Hectochess and Ryugi presets.

Now all that is left is the difficult tasks of implementing the Suzumu Fire Demon's burning move in Game Courier, implementing the Lion Dog in Game Courier (for the larger games in the Suzumu family), and figuring out how to implement Cannon Shosu Shogi in Game Courier (The hopping moves make it impossible to use the code I used for Shosu Shogi and Futashikana Shogi).

Since it sounds like your Fire Demon piece is making a multi-part move, you may want to break down the whole move and analyze it step-by-step. You will find examples of this in multi-move variants like Marseillais Chess and Extra Move Chess.

Hmm. Perhaps the step-by-step approach would be better. After all, the Suzumu Shogi preset is essentially on a more restrictive form of the other multi-move presets with more pieces.

So the tentative process would then be the folowing

Do a regular move

• Normal move
• Normal capture
• King step (capture)
• King step (non-capture), pass (double move)
• Single King step (non-capture), return to origin square (double move)

Then I would need to assess whether or not there are pieces available to burn (which should be easy thanks to the burn subroutine in my Tenjiku Shogi preset). If so, after the move, do an igui capture or pass.

Or it may be simpler to simply always give the player to optionally shoot any enemy piece a King step away after moving.

Another possibility for detecting a suicide move is to store the board position before the move into a variable, then compare the new position after the move to the stored position and see what differences there are.

This could potentially solve the problems of detecting a suicide move if I knew how to do it.

Since I am already writing this, would the system used for the multi-move variants be able to handle moves with three or more parts (i.e. that of the Lion Dog in Maka Dai Dai Shogi)? This will be important for my larger games with Lion Dogs, Furious Fiends, Kirin Masters, and Phoenix Masters, as well as if I use the move breakdown method for the Fire Demon's burns.

Should be fixed now.

This preset of yours for detecting captures is huge. The fact that it reliably detects where the suicide occured means that I can use it to test whether the suicide is a King's move away from the moving Fire Demon and ensure that no suicides are done when a non-Fire Demon moves, which should solve the majority of problems with coding the burning move. If something similar could be used to detect the type of piece affected by the suicide, that should be everything I need to enforce the burning rules using suicides, at least in theory. Best of all, I can just ask players that haven't made a burn after moving a Fire Demon rather than worry about displaying legal moves on the board.

You could adapt it. For the multi-move variants, there are usually the same number of move parts each turn. So, it makes sense for these games to do the multi-part analysis globally for all pieces. But for games that include pieces with multi-part moves, you may want to reserve the multi-part analysis for specific pieces and tailor it to each piece that needs it.

This is what the original Suzumu Shogi preset (and all presets using the same general codebase) does, which is largely thanks to its isdoublemove subroutine. So, I guess I could use integers instead of booleans and sub ismultimove instead of sub isdoublemove to keep track of which part of the move suffices. The only major problem is that I'm not exactly sure how to enforce rules for the third part of a three-part move. Perhaps I am overthinking it though. Perhaps just copy-pasting and tweaking the code for the second part of multi-moves will be enough. This requires testing, but thankfully, the Taishin Shogi preset (which is fully coded, at least for enforcing the old rules) affords just such an opportunity.

Edit: I figured out how to detect the type of piece that committed the suicide. Now we should be all good.

I finally have the new Fire Demon fully and correctly implemented. Now I just need to carry the changes over to the other presets that use it.

Bugfixes for all Suzumu family GC Presets: The Fire Demon's double move option now only triggers if the piece moved to an adjacent square or there are enemy pieces adjacent to its destination, making it more user friendly. I also fixed some bugs with the Queen and Reverse Chariot not being able to promote and the promoted Queen not being given the option to make a double move when it was able to.

The Edit Comment scripts aren't working properly. Whenever I try to edit a comment it fails. Posting comments still works though.

Is it just me, or is the latest version of my Taishin Shogi GC preset overloading this whole site? Whenever I click on my settings file to play it, I get nothing but 524 errors for a while.

I will admit that the thing is one of the biggest GC presets out there in terms of file size (if not the biggest) since there are so many piece types, as well as special promotion rules (i.e. contagious pieces), and all manner of multi-part moves, but I haven't had problems like this before.

Edit: I found the problem. It was a tiny syntax error in the isdoublemove subroutine. Everything works fine now.

What if there was a two player version? Or I could just make one myself...

When I reverted the Futashikana Shogi pages back to their original form, they also reverted to pending editorial approval. This game has already been approved before. If an editor could fix this that would be great.

An influence display like the one in the ShogiVars program would be a really nice feature to add, especially for the really big games.

I think mobile devices are suffering from a similar misalignment problem to the one I pointed out earlier. Whenever I load a GC preset that uses an image format on a mobile device, the hitboxes are misaligned, and the image is much smaller than normal. However, whenever I clear my browser cache everything looks fine the first time I load the preset page.

The Raven in the diagram can also move from c2 to a3, but this is not shown in the diagram.

Banner Xiangqi is ready

Hectochess now has a diagram with playable AI. I also made a new variant, Banner Xiangqi, which has its own playable diagram as well.

I would like the following presets deleted:

betzatest (Yangsi) - This preset was accidentally saved during a test of H. G. Muller Game Code Generator for his interactive diagrams, and is no longer needed.

default2, promotest (Suzumu Shogi) - The promotest preset was made in an attempt to resolve the server-side multi-move promotion bug, and is no longer needed. The default2 preset was made during the final phase of experimentation trying to find a good starting position for Suzumu Shogi, and is no longer needed now that the starting position is finalized.

There shouldn't be any game logs using these presets, as they redirect to the correct presets, so they should be pretty easy to delete.

This page is ready

This page is ready

I would like to have the abstract preset for Dragon Chess deleted.

The triple capture ability for Lion Dogs works perfectly, at least in regards to executing the moves. There seems to be a problem when highlighting destination for the third leg of a triple capture move. The possible destination squares (aside from the one travelled to via the second leg) generate in all directions where there is a piece on one such square in said direction.

Edit: Also, the moving piece isn't deselected if it can't move back to its starting square when the diagram generates the moves for the next leg. There also seems to be a problem with contageous promotions not taking effect if you make a three leg move to an empty square

Banner Xiangqi is ready

I am having a problem with the promotions in my Taishin Shogi preset. The problem occurs when I make a triple move with a piece with Lion Dog powers where all three parts move the piece to different squares and the third square is empty. The preset will exit with an error message stating that the promotion is illegal when it should be legal. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The problem is happening in the bpromote and wpromote subroutines. The relevant errors have also been numbered to aid debugging. Also, the setup has been rearranged to allow quick access to moves that generate the error.

Indeed, using the original pieces would be ideal, but I do not know where the pictures are located. However, I can get pretty close to it using the path for Alfaerie pieces provided by the Interactive Diagram Designer.

If I can get the path of the directory for the Alfaerie for Metamachy set, that would allow me to use the intended piece graphics.

@H. G. Muller Question: What would the moving piece promote to in the scenario below?

A piece with Lion Dog powers captures a deva on the first square in a given direction, captures a dark spirit on the second square in that direction, then retreats to the first square.

The -|-|-|-> symbol may mean slide or move as Lion Dog (from the smaller Shogi variants) in the direction the arrow points, which I got from this article by Eric Silverman: Shogi variants: translation notes (I) | Dr Eric Silverman

I also have a question of my own: just to clarify, a Dark Spirit or Buddhist Spirit capturing a Deva or Teaching King, or vice versa, causes it, like other pieces, to convert to its victim? The notes clarify that, as expected, one of them would disappear, but don't make clear which one, and one could make a case imo for contageous pieces being immune to contageon themselves.

Yes, contagious pieces turn into the promoted form of their last contagious victim. So DV/TKxDS/BS results in promotion of the DV/TK to BS, and vice versa.

What happens if such pieces capture multiple contagious pieces is left unclear though, thanks to the situation where multiple contagious pieces are captured at once, which is not elaborated on in the historical texts. I assume the result would be the last contagious piece captured (This is what a Japanese Chu Shogi Association official said about the issue.

Thankfully, I managed to fix this by excluding forced promotions from the move string.

I cannot access the Edit script for the Taishin Shogi preset to fix a problem that has popped up.The error that shows is the following:

Syntax Error on line 1157

The case includes whitespace in it. Are you missing a colon after the case label?

There is a double space in between +fy and rd on that line. It should be a single space, but I cannot access the preset editor to fix the error. Any help would be much appreciated.

Edit: The same error pops up in the Hook Shogi preset, albeit on a different line.

I am making an experimental GC Preset for Cannon Shosu Shogi. Everything seems to be working properly, except for the fact that the Kings are unable to move. The Black King is only able to move on the first turn. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It seems the new handling of case is interfering with the display of the Preset Editor, at least for me. The link below is an example.

Edit: Taishin Shogi on the Chess Variants Game Courier

There is a double space in the case statement on the line where the error is.

Heavy Shako is ready

After 3+ years of experimentation and headaches, I have finally finished the ruleset for Suzumu Shogi. Now the only thing that could still be unfinished is deciding whether the Fire Demon (and by extension the Heavenly Tetrarch) should be able to slide in all 8 directions or not. Regardless, I am very happy with what I have come up with.

This page is now ready for approval.

Buffalo icon has been changed, and Rules section has been simplified.

Heavy Shako is ready (again).

So...yeah. This game has had its ups and downs - so much so that I decided to take a break and invent some billiards variants (my favorite of these is Snookerpool). I think the headaches were due to wanting to make the game layout identical to Tenjiku Shogi's. Now that I have gotten over that. I've decided to revive this game with a slightly different setup compared to Tenjiku, and go from there.

Suzumu Shogi is ready

Fergus, you might want to update your hyperlinks, especially the link to the GC preset page for this game. Right now, it is not working because the page was moved.

Whenever I try to use a GC preset on a mobile device with a small screen (at least for Android) the board is excessively small, and in the case of images is misaligned. The presets work fine, but the fact that the boards are so small makes them nigh unplayable. The effect gets worse as the board gets larger.

The GC preset is no longer up to date. I still need to work out the kinks of the contagious promotions.

I cannot delete a submission that I want to delete, even though said submission is empty. I temporarily revived it (the old Mitsugumi Shogi page) to get something for the new page and then tried to delete the former, but the delete script doesn't work.

Edit: Now it is impossible to update a submission to an empty page, which is a requirement for deletion.

I've been working on reviving this game (and Mitsugumi Shogi), and pretty much everything is done, but I am not sure how I should handle trading of the Fire Demons in these games to keep them exciting. Such rules don't really matter in Tenjiku Shogi, as the Tenjiku Fire Demon burns every adjacent enemy piece every time it moves, and even on the opponent's turn, so you can easily get several pieces for the price of one. In Suzumu Shogi (and Mitsugumi Shogi), the Fire Demon moves like a Free Boar with an additional area move and can optionally shoot one adjacent piece, either without moving or after it stops, and has no passive burn (XBetza: shQshympacabQ(a)2KmcabK(a)2mpacabK). In other words, the Suzumu Fire Demon's burning move is much weaker, potentially requiring rules to conserve it until the very end of the game.

I thought about implementing Chu Shogi-style rules for this, but they don't really work for a piece like the Suzumu Fire Demon. I then thought about implementing Maka Dai Dai Shogi's contagious promotion rules as well, but I worried that it would make the Fire Demons too survivable.

Right now I have a more limited contagious promotion rule in place which only affects direct captures of a Fire Demon or Heavenly Tetrarch from pieces that are not (potential) royals. I also gave the Suzumu Fire Demon's burning ability to the Heavenly Tetrarch. The former ensures that at least one Demon/Tetrarch survives, and the latter makes the Chariot Soldier more dangerous to make up for the weakened burning move. I think these changes work quite well, but I still want an outside opinion on this to make sure I am dealing with this issue the right way.

Quick question: Does the diagram AI take into consideration the highlight restrictions from the BadZone function? I was thinking about reviving Suzumu Shogi and adding a rule forbidding pieces that burn from burning each other, and I have successfully defined a BadZone function to enforce it in the move highlights, but I worry that it won't be take into consideration by the AI. I tested it on my own interactive diagram, and it seems to work.

What should I use if I want to test for past and potential captures and have captures of certain pieces always return false in a function definition?

I know how to do it for general captures.

cond empty #0 capture (not empty #1)

Perhaps this?

cond empty #0 (not match old FD +WB +CS) (not match space #1 FD +WB +CS)

I think there's a problem with the current preset. The knights aren't able to move sideways or backwards.

Thanks for catching that. I will fix that right away.

I've decided that the contagious promotions made the Fire Demons too survivable, and instead went with a rule that prevents Fire Demons and Heavenly Tetrarches from burning each other. That way trades can still happen, but it's not super easy to do so. And because of the high number of pieces that promote to these two juggernauts (4 Chariot Soldiers and 2 Water Buffalos per side), and the fact that they start in very survivable positions, there will likely be at least one such piece left when the board is depleted enough that said piece can take advantage of holes in the opponent's defenses.

Recently I revived Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi and added a rule to them forbidding burning pieces (Fire Demons and Heveanly Tetrarches) from burning each other. To enforce this in the GC presets, in theory all I need to do is, on the burning move, make sure that the capture (past and potential) doesn't equal those pieces in the relevant function definitions.

If I need to test for a general capture in this situation, that is pretty easy: cond empty #0 capture (not empty #1). By extension, for ensuring a burning piece isn't captured I would, in theory, need to use cond empty #0 (not match old FD +WB +CS) (not match space #1 FD +WB +CS) in the part of the piece function used for the burning moves. The "FD +WB +CS" part is the ids of the burning pieces.

The second output for the cond statement works fine, but the first doesn't. I think what I need is something that will return the value of old at the time the function is called.

Here is the preset link for Suzumu Shogi in case you need to look at the code: Suzumu Shogi on the Chess Variants Game Courier

For some reason, when promoChoice is set to + for Shogi-style promotions, the piece names in the table don't show the promoted version when clicked a second time.

Edit: This is only true for the table that shows the selected piece.

Apparently, the site will not allow you to have an empty submission, which is required for the deletion script to work.

Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi (Rules pages and GC preset pages) are ready.

The Heavy Shako GC preset page is also ready.

Mitsugumi-Shogi (Note the hyphen!!!) can be deleted.

That's what the Revisions page is for (in the top menu, Edit -> N revisions). Click the revision you want to select, press Ctrl-U to view the source code. You can then copy the relevant HTML sections into the editors in the Edit Page form.

I hope triple captures besides those of the Lion Dog become a thing in the future. Perhaps by using two additional variables ex2 and ey2? It shouldn't be too hard, at least for updating the functions that use the variables for the move coords to use the and updating the code for highlights, though I could be wrong. If it becomes too complicated for the AI there's always the enableAI=0 option.

Now that triple captures other than those of the Lion Dog are supported by the interactive diagram, I am currently testing a new version of Suzumu Shogi, with burning pieces (Fire Demons and Heavenly Tetrarches) that can burn (or capture without moving as in igui) up to two adjacent pieces at once.

One other question: how will the new move generation affect the pieceZone and piecePromotion functions (and other functions that use parameters representing move coordinates)? The new code does not appear to use the old variables that keep track of a move's coordinates. Instead a clicks array is used to store the coordinates for every clicked square in one variable. For obvious reasons, the old parameter list for pieceZone and piecePromotion wouldn't really work all that well.

Also, you should consider adding a section about the user-defined functions so people don't have to read the comments to figure out what they do.

I have finalized the double burning version of Suzumu Shogi, and by extension, Mitsugumi Shogi. I might reintroduce the ban on burning pieces with burning moves in the future, but the current version of the diagram does not have the tools needed to do that.

The GC presets are no longer up to date.

Mitsugumi Shogi is ready

It seems that the new move handler isn't updating the part of the diagram that shows which piece is selected.