Comments by FergusDuniho

Since a centaur is part man and part horse, I think the one on the left, which has a helmet and four horseshoes, works better than the horseshoe piece on the right.

Or we are several people designing Staunton-like 3D pieces for printing. Importing a .stl into Meshmixer we could make very nice 2D images.

Those are suitable for going on individual Piececlopedia pages if someone would like to take charge of that. I'm not the one to do that, since I don't have a 3D printer or know anything about the image formats.

I nominate Jean-Louis. ;)

I don't think he is interested. Would you be interested in doing that? As the person who has made the most pieces for 3D printing, you would be more qualified than the rest of us to handle this. If you're familiar enough with HTML, I could set you up as an editor and give you the ability to update pages.

I am a Chinese video uploader, and have been interested in chess variants for about 10 years. As far as I know, the name 弩 has been used for a translation for vao since 2014

Since that year coincides with the beginning of your interest in Chess variants, I am wondering if this usage actually began in 2014 or if that's simply as far back as you're personally aware. My own use of 矢 goes back to 2001, but I am not Chinese.

I made a couple changes to the dark theme logo.

1. I replaced the Knight/Camel piece, which had represented the Pushmi-Pullyu, with the new Ram/Ox image for that piece.
2. I removed the stuff hanging around the waist of the fairy princess. In an earlier version of the image, this had been long hair. Thanks to some changes I made to a source image I used to produce new images, she became short-haired. The stuff around her waist could be interpreted as cloth hanging from her sleeves, but it seemed a bit weird and out-of-place.

I just want to point out that replying to messages from different people in a single comment loses information on who you are replying to and may give the impression that the person whose message it is said to be in reply to wrote all of the text you are replying to. For the sake of keeping proper track of who said what, it is best to limit each reply to one comment or at least comments by one person.

Until the CloudFlare cache gets cleared

I have now cleared it of the medusa and gorgana pieces in alfaeriePNG/.

I think it would indeed be better to slightly demagnify the Ram part (so that it can be squeezed less, as the width seems OK). It is not just that it is in front, but the size of the images is not really to scale; in real live a Ram is much smaller than an Ox.

That is in fact what I already did. You may need to refresh your browser cache to see the change.

(Let's hope we never need a Spider-Elephant compound...)

Since Spider is another name for the Alfil-Dabbabah compound, it's not very likely to happen.

The SVG for the Gorgona was derived from that for the Medusa, and apparently it inherited the characteristic that prevents its rendering by fen2.php.

For what it's worth, showpiece.php produced PNGs for both of these when I ran it on the SVGs a few days ago. However, pieces with these names should show a woman with snakes for hair rather than a target with lines or arrows coming from it, which seems to be based on how a particular piece moves instead of its name.

If you’re referring to Taurus on the Greek zodiac, I happen to be there too (11 May)

While all three of us are Tauruses, I specifically mean the Aries-Taurus cusp. Hans was born on it, and by some accounts of its range, so was I. David was born close to it. My birthday is two days after Hans and two days before David.

In fact, my birth year (1961) happens to also have been a Chinese Year of the Ox.

That makes you just a year younger than Hans. On the Chinese zodiac, I happen to have the sign of the other animal in this pair, as 1967 is the Year of the Ram (a.k.a. Sheep or Goat).

Okay, I fixed that. They're all now in the same span.

Okay, I fixed that.

I'll need to get a copy of the actual novel, but the Wikipedia article on it describes it as a "gazelle/unicorn cross" for the book; the Rex Harrison film uses the double-llama adaptation.

I never read the book or saw the movie. I just looked up pictures on the internet. Too bad there is no gazelle piece in the Alfaerie set.

I include the last part of that, realizing that you're referring specificially to the Alfaerie SVG.

I was. It has the most realistic and distinguishable animal pieces of any set.

You're posting the wrong images. Did you notice that the second pair you posted are called wbadger2.png and bbadger2.png? Look at the first two pairs in my previous comment. The first pair is mine, the second pair is yours, and they look the same. You posted the second pair and the third pair, which I never said looked alike.

A Knight-Camel chimera seems a very odd choice for a Push-Me Pull-You, which neither moves like a Knight nor a Camel.

A Push-Me-Pull-You has a head on each end, which this piece is used to illustrate. Two opposing llama heads would be most accurate, but I don't think we have any llama pieces. Someone has made a Push-Me-Pull-You piece that combines two images sometimes used for the Withdrawer and the Advancer in Rococo, but no one has made an SVG version of this piece.

I was talking about SVG pieces. So far these were only used as input for rendering scripts.

That's no longer true. Game Courier can use SVGs directly.

The browser on my tablet wouldn't render them if I used them directly (as I did in one of the Comments below).

Yes, some browsers do not support SVGs, but modern browsers on up-to-date devices do. That's why Game Courier has started to allow their use.

That is not the correct thing to do, and will alter the image.

Here are the badger PNGs I made:

And here are the ones you made:

They look the same.

To figure out what these invisible strokes are, I replaced 'none' by #ff0000, and then I get:

By replacing every remaining none with the fill color, I get these:

By replacing every remaining none with #000000, I get these:

In my opinion, the first ones look best. So I don't think I made any mistake here.

Since no one else did it, I have now created wknightcamel.svg and bknightcamel.svg by removing the zebra stripes from wcamelzebra.svg and changing the color for the black piece. I also converted these to 50x50 PNGs in /graphics.dir/alfaeriePNG50/.

I finally got all my size 50x50 PNGs to display correctly. One of the things that was stopping me from seeing any progress was that it had cached the images I had created previously, and it was giving me those instead of creating new images. I got around this by adding a uniqid to the query string for showpiece.php.

I then saw that bknightferz.png and bknightgeneral.png were white. Checking the SVG files, I found them using #ffffff for the fill color. So I changed this to #f9f9f9 for the white images and #5984bd for the black images and uploaded them. After redoing these, the PNGs looked correct.

The one remaining issue is that desertferz and desertwazir each have a gray piece, though maybe this is intentional. So I left these alone.

So what did you replace, and by what?

I replaced "fill:none" with "fill:#5984bd" in bbadger.svg and "fill:#f9f9f9" in wbadger.svg. I uploaded both corrected files and used them to generate new PNG files.

I have replaced the yellow boxes with DETAILS tags, since they were providing technical details.

I found another point where I could divide global.css into two files. So now "Point Count Chess" has front4.css, and "Quantum of Advantage" has tail4.css.

I found only one game of yours that ended in the past week, and it ended in checkmate. Were the other games private? Or did they end over a week ago?

Since you moved the pieces from alfaeriePNG50 to alfaeriePNG, I used the alfaeriePNG50 directory for my own conversions with showpiece.php. The main difference is that the images it produced are palette images instead of true color. However, they still have varying alpha values for the edge pixels, and in many cases, they may appear identical to your pieces. After downloading and examining the individual pieces, I found that some black pieces were not recolored properly. These include

• bbadger.png, which looks grainy in its coloring.
• bcamelrook.png, which has a white rook.
• bcamelrookferz.png, which has a white rook.
• bchancellor.png, which has a white rook.
• bchancellorferz.png, which has a white rook.
• bchancellorrider.png, which has a white rook.
• bforwardchancellorprince.png, which has a white rook.
• bforwardrookbackwardsprince.png, which is white.
• bkingrook.png, which has a white rook.
• bzebrarook.png, which has a white rook.

Since it's consistently the rook part that is white in most of these, I'm thinking there is a problem with the SVG files. However, when I checked some of your conversions, I did not find the same problem. And when I checked the SVG code for some of these, I couldn't spot where a different color than #f9f9f9 was used for the fill color. So I'm not sure what is causing this.

Okay, I removed the only other CSS that could be causing the problem from global.css and globalindex.css, and I created a new copy of global.css called globaltest2.css, which I linked to in "Personal Variations". Try the homepage again, refreshing the cache if you need to, and this page.

When chess meets witchcraft. I am against the idea of turning chess players into witches and wizards, but here we are.

This page makes no mention of witchcraft, witches, or wizards. Whether you think of clairvoyance as witchcraft, a psychic power, or fantasy depends on your worldview. The creator of this game is a science fiction and fantasy author, and he mainly frames what players are doing in this game as guessing or predicting. Predicting your opponent's moves is in fact a common practice in Chess, though typically based on deduction rather than clairvoyance, and all this variant does is gamify that aspect of Chess.

Sadly, there are lots of similar games that use spells, magic, and predictions.

I don't know any Chess variants played by means of actual magic. My own Magic Chess employs spell casting, but it's as pretend as Monopoly money.

Why do we even call them chess variants?

Whether something is a Chess variant is not determined by the theme given to the game. Aikin could have given his game the more prosaic name of Prediction Chess, or I could have framed Magic Chess as a science fiction game called Advanced Technology Chess without changing any of its game mechanics.

I removed what I think is the offending code from global.css and globalindex.css, and I purged these from the cache. So try the homepage again, and bear in mind that you may have to refresh your browser cache. Also, I have used globaltest.css on "Summary of Part 1". This is a copy of the updated global.css under a different filename to guarantee it is not using the old version.

The important thing for you to know about PHP is that it is a server-side language. That means it runs on the web site, not in your web browser. Game Courier uses forms to pass data to programmable web pages. These pages run their code on the server and send only their output to your web browser. While Game Courier is enhanced by JavaScript, a client-side language that does run in your browser, it does not use it to entirely redraw the board.

While you don't need to know how to program, it is basic computer literacy to understand the difference between server-side and client-side scripts. Server-side scripts produce web pages, and bscause they run on the server, they can output the same web pages to any web browser. Client-side scripts run on web pages. They rely on your browser knowing the language, and because of differences between browsers, code that works in one browser might not work in another.

That's curious, as the new css is mostly in the first one. I'll try to narrow it down further tomorrow.

I don't see how I can do otherwise. I go to Rendering box, I get a menu. I select CSS instead of Table, then nothing change with the diagram.

Of course nothing changes. This is an HTML form that calls a PHP script to redraw the board. If you reload the page, it will just reset the form, which is the opposite of what you are trying to do. For the values in the form to do anything, you must submit the form.

I see no special button to "submit" or something like that, so I reload and the diagram has still small icons and the rendering is back to Table.

Yes, you do see the submit button, but you are overlooking it because it doesn't say "Submit". It is the same button you would use to submit your move. During the course of playing a game, this may be "Preview" or "Move". When viewing a game, it would be "View".

The pieces are about 1/3 in L and 1/3 in h compare to one square dimensions.

I'm looking at it on a small phone, and I see what you mean. While the code I added will fix the display on my desktop, it doesn't fix things when the squares are greatly reduced in size.

"I just told you in my previous comment"

Where?

"Are you using Alfaerie pieces with the Table rendering method? To stop borders from expanding beyond the space a piece is in, this method will now reduce pieces in size just enough to make room for the borders. For pieces with optimized dimensions, such as Abstract, Magnetic, and Motif, this affects only the largest of pieces. But since Alfaerie pieces have uniform dimensions no matter how big the visible image is, they are all reduced in size. If this makes pieces too small for you, you can switch to the CSS rendering method, which does things in a manner better suited for piece images with uniform dimensions."

Since reducing the size of a piece does not work well for spaces that are already reduced in size, I have turned off this behavior when the board is already being displayed at a smaller size. I tested this on the small phone, and the pieces became appreciably larger.

I originally got an iphone 11 (since has been updated to be 15, I think).

To check whether the version of iOS might be the problem, I charged up my iPad 2, which runs iOS 9.3.5. Since the iPhone 11 starts with iOS 13 and supports up to iOS 17.4, it is well ahead of my old iPad in what it supports. Using the iPad 2, I tested whether I could reach the site with Safari, Chrome, Opera Mini, Dolphin, and Edge. I could reach it with all of them except Dolphin. In case it was something on the page, I also tried the Ralph Betza page, the hi page, my personal website, and my blog. Of these, only the blog worked. I suspect there is an issue with the DNS server it uses to resolve domain names, though I found no way to change it. When I entered the server's IP address into Dolphin, it did go to the Chess Variant Pages homepage. The only issues with the other browsers were that they didn't recognize this site's HTTPS and required me to confirm that I wanted to see the site, and Dark mode didn't work.

On my mobile, Samsung, the piece icons on Game Courier on ongoing games have become very small. Barely visible. I think it was not like that before.

Are you using Alfaerie pieces with the Table rendering method? To stop borders from expanding beyond the space a piece is in, this method will now reduce pieces in size just enough to make room for the borders. For pieces with optimized dimensions, such as Abstract, Magnetic, and Motif, this affects only the largest of pieces. But since Alfaerie pieces have uniform dimensions no matter how big the visible image is, they are all reduced in size. If this makes pieces too small for you, you can switch to the CSS rendering method, which does things in a manner better suited for piece images with uniform dimensions.

Since the Ralph Betza link worked for you, I have modified the first three links on this page to test what might be wrong.

First, go to https://www.chessvariants.com/d.betza/pieceval/index.html

The "About the Author" link has the header.

The "Introduction" link has the footer.

The "Early Attempts at Deriving These Values" link has the CSS file.

Following the link to each of these files may help narrow down where the problem lies.

What I saw happening in the first example is that many images were broken. While they were invisible on the board, I could see the broken image icon littering the Captured Pieces area. This is because I had replaced GD's imagetruecolortopalette with my own imagetruecolortopalette2, which I noticed I had written to do the same thing while preserving the alpha values of individual pixels. But I had forgotten and didn't notice that these two functions took different parameters. So, just changing the function name broke the script whenever it was called. When I also filled in the correct parameters, it worked. I downloaded one of the images it produced, and when I examined it in Ultimate Paint, I could see that individual edge pixels had different alpha values, which makes the piece look smoother, and it was a 50x50 palette image with a smaller file size than the 48x48 true color image it was based on. When I checked the second example, there was no longer any problem.

I got Brave browser next. Could get NHL Scores. Upon searching for chessvariants dot com the engine acted like it was in an endless loop. I hit the back arrow and brave said it had a '500 Internal Error', whatever that means. When I tried the http address for CVP homepage, the engine eventually stopped searching without giving any result, after not too long.

I installed Brave on my iPad and had no problem reaching the site with it.

Do you know of any other browser(s) that are free on Apple phones at least, Fergus?

Firefox is the browser I do most of my website development on, and it is run by a non-profit organization.

Since you were able to reach the Ralph Betza page with no headers or footers on it, I would recommend trying different pages to see what works. Here's a selection of pages that are different enough from each other that maybe something will work.

• https://www.chessvariants.com/alphabet.html
• https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?order=DESC
• https://www.chessvariants.com/index/tags.php
• https://www.chessvariants.com/who/panther
• https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/sac-chess
• https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/
• https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php

Currently, when I have changed the appearance settings for a game, after I confirm a move or if I cancel a previewed move, the appearance reverts to the default settings.

The Cancel button is on its own form, and it will cancel everything except the comment you wrote. This includes any changes to the appearance.

The Confirm button was being missed by some new code fixing another problem, because the value of the Confirm button is still Send, and I was checking for a value of Confirm. When I changed it to check for a value of Send, it worked.

What is the exact wording of the message you get?

if you could take a glance at that when you have a moment and pick out any problem symbols (the Berolina would be a leading candidate), and hopefully suggest alternatives, I'd appreciate it.

No, I don't have the character sets memorized, and I don't think it is a good idea to go beyond ASCII for piece notation.

I made some further modifications to the fairy princess image. I got the wings to look much more like butterfly wings. To do this, I copied some butterfly wings from an image that was otherwise too different from the original. I also edited out the pedestal so that it wouldn't be part of the image. Using this rough patchup job as my source image, I generated some more images and found one I was satisfied with.

I think the trick to making them appear smooth is having edge pixels with varying alpha values. The images I produced had fully opaque edge pixels. As a test, I made a palette version of bknight.png in Ultimate Paint. When I loaded the palette version, the edge pixels no longer had varying alpha values. As a second test, I saved a 24 bit true color version, and it also had lost the varying alpha values on edge pixels. Finally, I saved a 32 bit true color version, and when I reloaded it, it retained the varying alpha values. I also tried the latest version of Paint.net. When I selected the option to save it with an 8-bit depth, it offered the option to set the Transparency threshold, and it said "Pixels with an alpha value lower than the threshold will be fully transparent." So, I'm thinking that having varying alpha values is available only in true color images, and that provides a reason for keeping these as true color images.

Clearly one argument against expanding beyond ASCII would be disagreement over which letters to include! My preference would be where possible to stick to non‐precombined characters; thus we'd both be ok with ⟨Þ⟩ or ⟨Æ⟩, but I'd avoid ⟨Š⟩ and ⟨Ä⟩ whereas you'd (presumably) take exception to ⟨Ƿ⟩ or ⟨Ꞵ⟩ (assuming those even show up for you).

When Ralph Betza first came up with his funny notation, I believe the purpose was for communicating piece movement capabilities in a brief notation that could be easily read by another person. In contrast, H. G. Muller's xBetza notation has become more of a programming language, and it already comes across as an obfuscated one at that. Personally, I don't use funny notation or xBetza, because it is already too complicated. I prefer to use English for communicating with other people or a full-fledged programming language, such as GAME Code, for programming how a piece moves. One question you should ask yourself is why you want to expand xBetza. If it's to easily communicate more types of piece movement to people, I think it's going to reach a smaller and smaller audience as you add more characters to it. If it is to more easily program types of movement not already supported, I think it would work better to allow the use of longer names through some kind of bracketing, sort of like Game Courier's FEN allows longer names within braces.

Almost all PNG images are 48x48, though. Only a few that I recently made (mostly compounds done by fen2.php) are 50x50. I produced many of the SVG from which these are derived, but I think Greg had a script that he used to 'bulk convert' the SVG to PNG. He must have used 48x48 in this script. Why he picked that size is unclear to me, as amongst the GIF images it is virtually non-existent.

Maybe he was considering that Game Courier highlights spaces with image borders and wanted to leave some space for the border. However, the borders used are larger than one pixel in width, and the Square Table method will now keep borders from growing too large by reducing the dimensions of the image, whereas the CSS method puts borders around an empty space of a fixed size. So, even if making the images smaller than 50x50 once had some utility, it no longer does.

Should I try to re-render all the alfaeriePNG at 50x50? I suppose I could make my own script for that, at least for everything that we have as SVG, and not compound or post-edited (to apply crosses and such).

Since Game Courier is able to copy an SVG to a GD image that will be saved as a PNG, I should be able to modify showpiece.php for conversion from SVG to PNG. Then I could make sure that the PNG is also a palette image with green for the transparent color.

Both appear to be fixed now. I had to color the new image green before copying the original image to it. Otherwise, some pixels in the original image might match the background color of the new image. Taking out the lines for filling it with the transparent color after copying the image fixed the problem with the PNG King's cross being partially transparent. What I needed to keep were the lines for identifying the transparent color in the new image.

So, the padding works like this.

1. If the image is true color, it gets converted to a palette image.
2. It identifies the transparent color in the original image. It first tries imagecolortransparent, then it looks for pure green, and if neither of those work, it assumes the color at (0,0) is transparent.
3. It changes the RGB values of the transparent color to green (#00ff00).
4. If either dimension of the image is below the value of $size, it creates a new $size x $size palette image.
   1. It colors this image green.
   2. It copies the palette of the original image to the new image.
   3. It copies the original image to the new image at a centered location.
   4. It recalculates the new image's transparent color in the same manner as before.
   5. It copies the variable for the new image to that of the original image.
   6. It destroys the original image.
5. When it outputs the image, it assigns the transparent color to what was previously calculated to be the transparent color.

I see the logo (with archbishop) closer to the right in your comment only when I switch to the Dark Colour Scheme - unfortunately some other parts of my screen I find (at least initially) unpleasant to look at, on my laptop. The Light and System Colour scheme (if there is a difference) both show the logo on the far left, i.e. with the blue unicorn, again when on my laptop.

That's how it should be. The Princess is the same piece more commonly known as an Archbishop. The System color scheme uses the color scheme set in your browser settings. This is Light for you, and it is Light for those who have never set it, but some people have set it to Dark.

I have an iphone I use occasionally at my local bar and grill for visiting CVP site a bit, but I do not see the full CVP site when viewing CVP on it

To save on bandwidth, mobile pages do not include the comments. But you can read them by clicking on a link.

As I imagined, it's a dragon wearing a kimono.

It should be visible in the top left corner of each page, and it should look like one of these images:

By header, I mean the header script, which is included on each page. So the code for it is right in the source code for the page, not in some CSS file. As long as you aren't looking at a cached copy of the page, you should see it. And if you're reading this on the comments page, you should see it on that page. Note that which logo you see will depend on your color scheme, and you will have to switch color schemes to see the other one.

In your example, the black outlines were also appearing around the pieces in the Captured Pieces section, and this uses the same code no matter what the rendering method for the board. So, it's not the CSS rendering method that's at fault. This black outline is happening because the CSS rendering method is displaying them with the showpiece.php script, and the pieces in question are not in the proper format to work with this script. The pieces in use here are from the alfaeriePNG directory. The reason they are being displayed with showpiece.php is because they are 48x48 instead of the expected 50x50. So that smaller images do not get disproportionately enlarged by a background-size of contain, it runs smaller images through showpiece.php to pad them. However, the image I tested turned out to be a truecolor image, and the transparent color used was black (#000000) instead of green (#00ff00). Because of this, it could not determine and keep track of the transparent color, and instead of coloring the padded border with the transparent color, it colored it an opaque black. To fix this, there are three changes you can make to these images.

1. Make the images 50x50 instead of 48x48. This will stop the need to pad these images when the squares are 50x50.
2. Make them palette images, not truecolor images. Even with the image I tested, it had only 141 colors, which is within the capacity of a palette image. So, there was no reason to make it truecolor.
3. Make the transparent color pure green. This is a convention adopted from Zillions-of-Games, which provides a means to detect the transparent color when other means are not working.

[UPDATE]I added some fallback methods for getting the transparent color, and now the pieces show up without the black border. However, there is an issue with the cross on the king. So, I still recommend modifying the pieces to work better with this script or to even not need it in this circumstance.[/UPDATE]

The Dragon Horse in your last picture is fearsome looking, although somehow it reminded me of a raptor dinosaur (though not saying it's not okay).

I imagine dinosaur bones helped contribute to the belief in dragons. The Dragon Horse differs from the raptor by having dragon wings, having its forelimbs lower down its body, and having a more serpentine appearance.

Click on the Appearance controls, then go where it says "Render as:", change the rendering method to either Table or CSS, and then click Preview.

There is a large difference between chess sets intended as tools for playing chess games, and sets intended for display by collectors. The latter are actually not chess sets at all; they are works of art inspired by chess.

While I agree that some Chess sets are more suitable for playing the game than others are, this wasn't the pertinent issue. The Chess variant pieces flanking the logo are not Chess pieces, and they will not be used to actually play Chess. Instead, they serve the decorative purpose of conveying the idea of Chess variants, and this purpose has its own criteria.

First, they should bear enough of a resemblance to what people commonly think of when they think of Chess pieces. For this purpose, resembling Staunton pieces works best, though the reason is for the strong association between Staunton pieces and Chess and not for the superiority of Staunton over some other design. Despite being anthropomorphic, the current Fairy Princess bears enough resemblance to the Staunton Queen for someone to spot the similarity. In the same way, the Tenniel illustrations of the Red Queen on the 404 page also resemble a Staunton Queen. Despite being more fully figurine, the Dragon Horse resembles the Staunton Knight enough to look like some kind of Chess variant piece.

Second, they should differ from the Staunton pieces in some significant way. The Dragon Horse has enough dragon features to tell it's not an ordinary horse, and the Fairy Princess has butterfly wings. These features help evoke the idea of being different from the usual Chess pieces we are normally familiar with.

I add the caveat that my suggested values are tentative

That should be fine. I usually ignore estimates of piece values anyway, because I don't expect them to be gospel truth, and when playing a game, I rely more on my own ability to understand and compare different pieces. But piece values could be of more interest to someone who is trying to get a program to play a game better. As someone who is programming engines to play Chess variants well, it makes sense that HG would have a keen interest in this. I recall when Steve Evans and I were working on a better Shogi ZRF together, and one thing we did, which I think was more his idea than mine, was to add code to adjust the values Zillions-of-Games assigned to different pieces.

But on the bottom, too bad that we don't have a true xiangqi piece, a true shogi piece , maybe a janggi one, along with some of the selected ones you have put.

Since between the two logos, pieces from Eurasian Chess and Storm the Ivory Tower were represented twice, I changed the Eurasian Cannon in the light logo to a Big5 Chariot, and I changed the Ninny in the dark logo to a Korean Elephant.

I updated the CSS for this page to display better in the Dark color scheme and to conform more with global CSS rules.