Comments by FergusDuniho
That's now fixed. The condition for exiting with this message began with empty($SESSION) ||, which would always be true, since the variable name should have an underscore in it, and $SESSION doesn't exist.
In the test I did, the text I entered in the field showed up in the appropriate place. Can you give me an example preset where this is not working right?
This game has its rules described in a minirules file, not in the briefrules value. Minirules files precede the use of the briefrules field. I added the latter, because only editors could upload minirules files. Go to the /play/pbm/minirules directory to edit this file.
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Just testing to make sure nothing is broken after updating scripts for entering comments.
There was a tab character after the closing PHP tag. Redirecting works only if the script doesn't display any text. I deleted it, and it works now, though I had to refresh the page to see the results change in the menu.
This is clearly a labor of love, and giving the game its own domain shows your confidence in it. That said, I will point out some things. A trial-and-error process like evolution is not the same thing as a quest for a holy grail. To call this game an evolution of chess could mean one of two things. It could mean it is a mutation of chess, but so are most chess variants, and being a mutation is not a significant milestone of any kind. It could also mean that it is a time-tested accumulatíon of small mutatíons that have become widely accepted by a large community of players as a new standard. In this sense, Chess is an evolutíon of Shatranj. But since Qhesz is the new creation of one person, and it has not had time to catch on anyway, it does not count as an evolution in this sense.
It's not clear from the description of the rules whether castling with rooks is still part of the game.
The crescent moon and star is the symbol of Islam. Some Muslims might not approve of its use for a wizard type piece.
I read this on my new Likebook Mars, which uses e-ink, and the white text on a black background was making the ghosting more visible than usual. Also, it did not seem mobile-friendly enough. The links on the right had little space left, and they were overlapping a bit with the main body.
About Game Courier. Web-based system for playing many different variants by email or in real-time.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I added a week of time for the current player of every game that was interrupted. This will not show up on the Logs page, but it will show up in Game Courier.
Alfaerie Variant Chess Graphics. Set of chess variant graphics based on Eric Bentzen's Chess Alpha font.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I'm now beginning to see why David chose to use blue for the black pieces. I have been looking at the site with my new Likebook Mars, which is an e-ink Android device, and the reds appear very dark or even black, which obscures the detail of the red pieces I've made. But the blue Alfaerie pieces look just fine on its e-ink screen. This is relevant, because David is color-blind, and if I recall correctly, he has difficulty seeing red. I'm going to have to recolor some things so that they are still visible in e-ink and to color-blind people.
Pieces could be recolored when rendering the board as a single image, and in table- or CSS-rendered diagrams, script URLs in place of image files. For simplicity's sake, it might be best to do it all through a script that shows individual pieces in specific colors. This is assuming that GD can load an image from a PHP script. But this should be done only for solid-color pieces. So, it would be best to do it with new sets or to adapt some pre-existing sets to handle changes in color.
Testing new script.
I was finally able to preserve transparency when resizing. This script works with bitmap images, not with SVG images.
I have never worked with SVG files, and the GD library, which is what this script uses, does not support them. Plus, I don't yet have any SVG files to work with. Once I get some, I could look into how they could be used.
The GD functions are not accepting script URLs as valid image resources. So, I'll have to handle the recoloring of pieces differently for the GIF, PNG, and JPG rendering methods. I'm thinking I'll add two new parameters. I was going to call them wcolor and bcolor, but bcolor is already used for the border color. Maybe color1 and color2. If left blank, the default color would be used. If non-empty, it would override the color for sets using solid color pieces. For the table and CSS rendering methods, it would convert the image URLs in $pieces to the scripted URLs, and for the GIF, JPG, and PNG methods, it would change the color as it worked with the images.
If you have your own VPS, what's stopping you from installing the software you need on it?
Do you have an .htaccess file in your cgi-bin or home folder? It might be set up to rewrite or redirect any URL to cgi-bin to a particular script.
I'm guessing that GitWeb was supposed to be installed to something like /cgi-bin/gitweb/ instead of to /cgi-bin/ itself, because it appears to be designed to monopolize the directory name as though it were a script name. I would recommend uninstalling it and reinstalling it to its own directory.
I watched this show before I was into Chess variants. The pieces are Renaissance set pieces. I have a set of those myself. This looks like a very crowded game with a full Chess set on each level. I can clearly enough see the Kings on the top two levels, and it looks like I can see parts of the White King on each level.
It could be that each is just a separate game of Chess to be won or lost on its own terms, and they are playing four games at once, because that is the kind of challenge their intellects need.
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since the site was down for a week, I added a week of time to the players whose moves were interrupted by this downtime. But this works only in Game Courier itself. To repeat accurate calculations for each log, the Logs page would have to load each log, which would multiply the work it has to do. Instead, it relies on the value of the Deadline column in the GameLogs table. This is a fixed value that was not updated when I added code to Game Courier to compensate for the time lost by the site being down. Since this value may be mistaken, the Logs page no longer updates logs or the database when time has run out. In this case, it is mistaken, and you should simply continue your game.
Alfaerie Variant Chess Graphics. Set of chess variant graphics based on Eric Bentzen's Chess Alpha font.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The SVG pieces are looking good. When you have finished making them, I'm hoping you could put them into a zip file and make it available for downloading. I could then work on making use of them with Game Courier and the Diagram Designer.
It is good to be able to put more than one piece on the same space, but I'll point out that Game Courier uses the hyphen for non-space, and you might want to do the same if you plan on handling boards that are not completely rectangular. In that case, you might want to come up with a different way of including multiple pieces on the same space. Since Game Courier encloses longer names in braces, what I'm thinking of is to place multiple comma-separated names between a pair of braces.
I copied them to this site. This is just to test that they show up in the browser:
On my PC, the image showed up on every browser I tested: Vivaldi, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera. Its aspect ratio was distorted in Safari, so that it was too short or too wide. But this is probably because the latest version of Safari that runs in Windows is old. It appeared fine in Safari on my iPad. Based on this, I expect SVG images to show up in any modern browser.
I used CKEditor's WYSYWYG mode to post the image, and it turns out that it set a size for the image without me realizing it. I am switching to Source mode to control the HTML.
Here it is without any size specified:
Here it is with 50x50 size:
Game Courier selects a new seed for each game, and it keeps the same seed throughout a game. To test this, you need to make sure you are playing separate games each time. You could issue invitations to yourself, try it out on different browsers, or start each game in a new private or incognito window. If you go back to your preset's menu between games and refresh your cache, that should also work.
Alfaerie Variant Chess Graphics. Set of chess variant graphics based on Eric Bentzen's Chess Alpha font.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
That's what it did. With this GIF, it used the actual size of the image.
Likewise with this PNG.
Maybe it chooses something like 150x150 for excessively large images.
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The western style pieces you mention are not circular or wedge shaped, and they are missing some of the images I can see on the page for the font, such as the circular arrow piece, but at least they do include images that can be used for Shogi and Xiangqi, and it would be possible to add these images to the appropriate shapes to make piece sets out of them.