Comments by GregoryStrong

A promoted colorbound piece may not be placed on the same color as the promoting player's remaining piece of that specific type.

Can we please remove this rule?  It needlessly complicates the game needlessly IMO.  (Similar to recent discussion on Great Shatranj.)

Pieces such as the Grant Acedrex Griffon step or leap and then slide. Is anyone aware of games with pieces that do the opposite - slide first and then finish their move with a step in a different direction?

Hi Christine,

Thanks for checking it out. I think the must be an error your end. It downloads ok for me, as does the Grand Shatranj Zillions link which you are also having trouble with. When you click on this link, what happens?

And, yes, 2.3 is not lised on the ChessV page because this is a pre-release. I'm just hoping to get a few members of the community to give it a test drive before I build the install package (which is a pain in the butt.)

Game Reference Documentation

ChessV is designed to allow easy creation of new games through the customization of existing games. Unfortunately, documentation has been sorely lacking. I have now posted reference pages for the predefined games:

These games are organized into a useful hierarchy with many extension points. Hopefully, browsing through these pages will provide some insight into the inner workings of ChessV. Please feel free to post any questions you might have!

In apothecary chess classic the knight does not get it's extra moves (it is a NmZ)

Thanks for pointing this out.  It will be corrected in the official release.  In the meantime, you can play with an include file like the following:

Game 'Apothecary Chess Classic (fixed)' : 'Apothecary Chess Classic'
{
    AddPieceTypes
    {
        Knight.XBetza = "NmZ";
        Knight.MidgameValue = 425;
        Knight.EndgameValue = 425;
    }
}

ChessV 2.3 Release Candidate 1

It's been over a year, so time for a new release! This is a pre-release of upcoming version 2.3. It should be fully functional but I am posting a Release Candidate first to give the community a chance to give it a test drive. Since it is not an official release, there is no installation program. Just unzip to a new directory and run ChessV.exe. The official release will contain an install program.

This release has lots of improvements:

• Anti-aliased graphics for both alfaerie and abstract sets where available – some less common pieces will still result in the game reverting back to bitmaps.
• Support for bent riders. Grant Acedrex, for example, is now supported.
• Support for imitators. The Apothecary Chesses are now supported.
• Continued improvement to the capabilities of the scripting language. New pieces can now be defined with XBetza in most cases. An XBetza expression tester is provided under the Tools menu.
• Many more games have been added. We are up to 138 variants supported, with 44 of those defined via the scripting language.
• Many bug fixes and improvements to playing strength

Download here:
/programs.dir/ChessV2.3 RC1.zip

Please let me know if you run into any issues. Enjoy!

Based on the error, it looks like the name of the file begins with a space, which is probably not allowed. I would try renaming the file.

I think in part this class deserves a quickly found list because it's so common to want to include the compounds; it may help new developers understand the prior art in this area.

Ok, yes, this is a good point

For pieces, I like the other approach we are taking - the new tables to allow an index of pieces and cross-reference them with the games they are in. This is powerful and I think it is most likely what people will want. There are questions posted form time-to-time asking about previous uses of specific pieces.

OTOH, the tags for groupings of pieces feels like a kludge that offers very little value if the other approach is available... Which reminds me - is the table of piece types and their IDs/internal names finalized? If it is, I can start populating the piece<->game mappings. I have the data to populate this for about 135 games in a fairly automatic way.

I think rebuilding from the ground up with a cohesive strategy makes sense. I'm not sure, though, that everything needs to be done with tags. I think it also makes sense to have some integer parameters that can be searched. Number of players and number of board cells as searchable parameters makes more sense to me than tags for 'multi-player' or 'large' or 'small'.

I would also personally use 'Geometry' rather than 'Board'. It's a bit more general. 3-D, for example, is a geometry. And a game could be both 3-D and Rectangular, or both 3-D and Hexagonal ...

A lot to think about here. Thank you for posting this for feedback first. I will consider and reply with my thoughts later today. But my first thought is that we don't need to do it all at once. We can apply tags corresponding to the more obvious categories first. Tags and categories can coexist for a while.

Ok, good. This is better. I had concerns about the other approach.