Comments by GregoryStrong

Hi James.  Thanks for the post.  If you had the issue, it is likely other will as well.  It is good to know an uninstall is required.  I will edit my annoncement post to add this note.  I wonder if I can modify the installer to do this automatically ...

I also do not subscribe to formula.  I've been here long enough to watch at least a half-dozen well-thought-out systems be disproven.  The killer is that, not only has it not worked for pieces (e.g., the Archbishop is significantly stronger than anticipated), but also because it depends on the entire army (e.g., the individual pieces of the Nutty Knights aren't that strong, but together, they are totally overpowering.)

Regarding Griffon vs. Queen.  I am firmly in the camp that the Queen is better.  The case has been made that the larger board favors the Griffon - which is true to a point - but the difference is microscopic.  The Griffon suffers more in the corner or the edge, especially if blocked at the key points.  The larger the board, the fewer squares are edges/corners.  But the difference is small and the Queen and Griffon are active, attacking pieces that aren't likely to be there anyway.  Far more important is the fact that, while the Griffon has 8 rays, they emerge from 4 choke points where they can be blocked.  This limits mobility measurably.  Additionally, the Queen can slide along all 8 rays while continuing to attack the ray.  The Griffon cannot do this at all.  If it attacks even files, and makes a file-move, it now attacks odd files.  Same with ranks.  The result is that the Queen can triangulate - if it wants to attack a square, and is threatened and forced to move, it has several options of other squares to relocate to while still attacking the desired square.  The Griffon has a much harder time with this - for squares outside short range there is no option at all.  Also, it has problems with asymmetry.  One Griffon can attack another and the other may not be able to attack back because they follow different paths.  These sorts of anomolies do weaken peaces to some extent.  FInally, a Queen cannot be attacked by a King because it attacks all adjacent squares.  The Griffon can be approached.

All that said, the Griffon has some neat capabilities.  In particular, in the endgame, the ability to attack two files (or ranks) and trap the king between them is pretty good.  A Griffon plus a Rook is deadly.  Get the King betwen the Griffon's forks and then move the rook in between and that is checkmate, even if the King is in the middle of the board!  (When is the King ever checkmated in the middle of the board?)  So maybe, just maybe, a Griffon can be better in the very endgame, but I'm not even sure that is clear.  (King + Queen vs. King is much easier to carry out than King + Griffon vs. King, which is kinda tricky although still possible.)

I don't know the difference in value - a pawn sounds like a good starting point - but there is no doubt I will trade a Griffon for a Queen in even trade.

That's right, that should work.  And the Variation of Play parameter can be set through the Winboard interface.

One of these pieces, the diagonal one (is that the Zanny?) was built in with the name 'Free Padwar' (a piece from Jetan.)  I am adding the other one as 'Free Warrior'.  It is possible to create it in the scripting language, but since the Padwars (both Free and Chained) are built in, the Jetan Warriors should be also for completeness.

Is the only change to Ten Cubed the addition of these two pieces?  What should this new game be called?  And who invended it?

Nice video!

To answer your question, sure, I'd like to have a version for mobile devices, but it would not be simple.  All the user interface code would probably have to be changed and I do not know anything about mobile development.  I could learn, but there are so many things I want to do.  (One of the next things I plan to do is support hexagonal chess - that I know how to do.)  It would be nice if someone who had experience with mobile development took that on.

I'm running analysis on the current Hanibal array now, then I'll try my alternate array.  This will take several days.  It requires a lot of CPU power, and at the moment the process is fairly manual.

I'm not sure how well it would work for really large boards or lots of pieces.  My guess is that the larger the number of legal moves, the more games it would take to differentiate between positions.  I don't really know yet just how many games are needed to drive down the margin of error sufficeintly.

If we do find a better array, I personally wouldn't change the name.  37 games of Opulent have been played and I'm changing the array.  I'll make a note in the game description about what the original setup was and why I changed it but that's about it.  I don't consider a change of array to be a new game.

Confirmed.  Thanks!

Some thoughts ...

The selection of pieces in this game make sense - adding another minor piece that is about the value of a knight but colorbound.  The game didn't seem to play all that well in my experience but I can't really say why.  I do think the opening array makes a huge difference and it is very difficult to evaluate the quality of one.  Chess works so well because the array is perfect - TONS of different openings that are playable.  Thousands, in fact, at least until recently when hundreds and hundreds of years of study has established many as inferior.  I had a thought about the array for this game that I meant to mention to you but don't think I ever did.  How about putting the elephants in the corners?  Then the center eight files are still the same as Chess, greatly increasing the chance that array is good.  The edge pawns would still be protected by the knights (although one does tend to develop them first, which would leave the pawn unprotected, but then again, the most common first move in Chess is p4 which immediately creates an unprotected pawn.)

Another posibility instead of or in addition to the previous thought - upgrade the modern elephants to war elephants (FADs).  Now your new pieces are about the same power as rooks, but colorbound.  If games are more likely to be popular with more popular pieces it might help.  Plus, on a larger board, it may be more appropriate to add rook-level pieces than knight-level pieces.

Finally, I'd say that popularity on GC is not necessarily a great metric of a game's quality.  If a game is very popular on GC, especially in games that don't involve its creator, that certainly is meaningful.  But the inverse, a game is not popular, doesn't necessarily mean much - especially if its creator is not actively promoting it.  There just aren't that many different players here and there are a ton of games.  The numbers are too small to be statistically significant.  Opulent Chess has had decent popularity including many games I wasn't involved with.  I also think it's a good game and its popularity is deserved.  BUT ... it has been around for 15 years, as have I.  If I disappeared shortly after submitting it, as so many of our active users of old have, would it still be popular?  Doubtful.  And what about Unicorn Great Chess?  David Paulowich did disappear almost completely fairly soon after its release, and it has been fairly popular, but I have been here actively promoting it, and David's games in general.  Otherwise?  Don't know.  Certainly we wouldn't have an ongoing GC tournament including both these games if I wasn't here :)  So don't get discouraged - at least not by one data point that doesn't have much statistical significance.

As an aside, for a long time I've been trying to use ChessV to determine how good an opening array is.  This informed the array for Opulent.  But my technique has greatly improved since then and now I am 100% certain that the Opulent array is inferior.  (I'll be officially changing it soon.)  I'll briefly describe the new approach here since the newest ChessV pre-release that I posted will give others the ability to do this too.

Basically, the technique is as simple as running lots of ChessV against ChessV games (only the beginnings needed) with the Variation of Play set to Small.  Save and analyze them and see how much actual variety you get.  The more variety, the better the array.

Without going into too much detail, the implementation of Small Variation of Play ...  The evaluation of a position is based on lots and lots of parameters.  One of the important ones is Piece-Square-Tables (PSTs.)  The is a bonus or penalty for each type of piece occupying each square (player specific.)  You can see the PSTs in ChessV by right-clicking on a piece and selecting Properties.  The Midgame and Endgame tabs will show the PSTs.  (Endgames might have different values than Midgame, obviously - the King should move out and become active in the endgame and pawn advancement becomes more important.)  These PSTs are calculated at the start of a game for each type of piece in the game based on the weighting of various parameters: is it in the small center?  is it in the large center?  how many small center squares does it attack from here (assuming empty board)?  how many large center squares?  how far forward has it moved?  The variation of play makes tiny random adjustments to the weightings of these parameters for the different piece types.  It also makes tiny random adjustments to the weightings to a bunch of other evaluation parameters related to development and other things.  The overall effect, however, isn't totally random.  I'm not just adding a random value to every position as many chess programs do.  And I'm not at all sure that the default weightings of all these parameters is optimal.  The tiny changes, at least when it is set to Small, is about as like to make the engine stronger as it is to make it weaker.

Ok, I have emailed him too.

if match old r b n m a c v s w:
setelem reserve old inc elem old reserve;
endif;

reserve is an associative array that is keeping track of the number of pieces of each type that is in reserve.  When a piece of one of these types is captured, the number associated with that type in the associative array is incremented.  This is for implementing the promotion rules where you are allowed to promote by replacement to pieces of yours that have been captured.

To make a Game Courier preset, just go into the Game Couerier editor:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?submit=Edit

Your preset is identified by the combination of the first two fields on the left, Game and Settings.  Game should be the name of your game and Settings can be whatever you want - it exists so that games can have multiple settings files (for different graphics, or because the rules change and you don't want existing games to break.)  Userid must, of course, be your user ID.

Rather than starting from the Chess preset, it is often easier to start by changing a preset of a game that is close.  You could open the Apothecary preset change the Game name and make any other changes you want and save it.

Carlos,

Thank you for your help testing.  We have been able to resolve three different bugs.  Releasing an official version with an installer is a pain so it is good to get these issues solved first.

Aurelian,

There have been three different issues.  The first, with the previous release, involved buttons on the main screen being the wrong size with certain display settings.  The second, with the previous 2.2 release candidate involved errors related to trying to load DLLs dynamically not being allowed on Windows 10.  (Not actually a Windows 10 problem, but a problem related to the fact that it was built with a newer version of the .NET Framework which had extra restrictions.)  The most recent, from last night, "Fatal Error. Directory of piece set graphics could not be found. Please re-install ChessV" was caused by an issue with the path.  I need to make that more robust.

That seems fair to me