Comments by HGMuller

A remark that applies to all your recent submissions: don't you think 50x50 piece images are too large for these large boards? People that would want to play against the diagram cannot fit the entire board on their display. I seems much beter to use 35x35 images.

Thank you. I admit that of the armies I designed I like the Silly Sliders best, aesthetically. Unfortunately I couldn't do much testing, as my main PC broke down. I would really like to do some testing on the Onyx; in fact that piece is what gave me the idea for this army. I was looking for a non-colorbound version of the Bishop, for measuring whether the B-pair bonus would really disappear in that case. Because there is an alternative explanation for this bonus, namely that two diagonal slides on opposit square shades cooperate exceptionally well. Playing Bishops against Onyxes in pairs or singletons could decide this matter.

A second point of interest would be whether the penalty for a leap being lame depends on whether the square where the leap can be blocked is attacked by the piece itself, or not. In a sense all distant slider moves are lame leaps, but they cannot be blocked without exposing the blocker to one of those. Playing Onyx + Duck vs Bishop + Rook would be a 'low-noise' experiment for investigating this. Between them they have exactly the same moves, which can be blocked the same way, but the Onyx and Duck do not attack the adjacent blocking squares, while the Bishop and Rook do.

Interesting that the name Duck was used for FDD by Jelliss. This has a very similar footprint. Is it known which variant employed this piece? If i is imporant to keep the distinction between these pieces, I could  change mine to 'Lame Duck'.

The starting squares of the Scout and Cleric are not Brouhaha squares in the interactive diagram you included. They are not defined as holes, and consequently, when the piece leaves them, they become empty squares, which can be entered again.

Also, is it really the intention that the initial moves of Scout and Cleric can also capture?

There is a linefeed missing between King and Rook in the diagram definition.

The AI responds with knight to c6, ignoring the check.

OK, fixed. Thanks for spotting this. The problem was in the j prefix for indicating ski-slides. (The alternative definition gyafW did work without problems.) The Betza parser splits such a move into 2 legs, one to jump over the adjacent square, and a remaining normal slide. But it adapts the range of that slide by subtracting 1 (so that jR4 moves 2, 3 or 4 steps.) Infinite range is indicated by 0, however, and this was adapted to -1. Now the move generator of the AI (in contrast to that of the UI) did not interpret the -1 as an infinite slide, but as a slide up to half the board. I now changed the Betza parser such that it refrains from decrementing a range of 0.

Are you using the aliases as the piece IDs instead of the original piece IDs specified by the set file being used? If so, that will not work. You need to use the piece IDs originally specified by the set file, as the alias command only makes a visual change to the piece ID (it does not change the internal ID used in the code).

The Game-Code generator is not alias-aware. It just uses the piece IDs you specify in the diagram as piece labels. If you want to use aliases, it is up to you to edit the generated Game Code for adding the alias commands, and to decide whether you want to use the aliases or piece labels as piece ID in the Diagram.

I implemented some new parameters with the diagram for controlling its appearence:

• borders=0 can be used to suppress the black lines that separate the board squares. (Not recommended on uncheckered boards!)
• rimColor=#FFFFF can be used to specify a color for the rim around the board that holds the coordinates, where #FFFFFF (= white) is the default, but can be replaced by any valid HTML color spec.
• coordColor=#000000 can be used to specify the text color for the printed board coordinates, where #000000 (= black) is the default, but can be replaced by any valid HTML color spec.

I don't typically make it the primary diagram because different pages have different presentation styles (colors, etc) and I don't want them to all look the same.

I fully agree that the pages should keep their current character. But in many cases it should be possible to make an Interactive Diagram that looks exactly the same as the static diagrams they have now. These are often also based on piece themes like Alfaerie, Utrecht, etc. These can be used in the diagram too, and the square shades can be arbitrarily configured. This is what I usually do when I post diagrams in the comments. E.g. the three diagrams I posted below for Courier, Shatranj, and Makruk all use Utrecht, and the same piece representations as the original images in those articles, (even though I consider the use of a Queen symbol for the General in Courier rather dubious), and the latter two use an uncheckered, white board, while Courier uses the 'CVP orange' for the dark squares.

Of course in cases where the original setup 'image' consists of ascii art, it becomes a bit questionable whether it deserves to be preserved.

A more important concern is that we want the pages to be presentable (even if not fully functional) for people that have switched JavaScript off. To achieve that for my own articles (e.g. the recently submited Pink Chess), I use the following method: After I created the Interactive Diagram, I take screenshot of it, and upload that as 'membergraphics' for the article. I then include that image in the article within <noscript> tags, so that it would only be shown when JavaScript is off. To prevent the user gets to see the unprocessed definition of the Interactive Diagram, I give the <div> tag that contains this definition a style="display:none". The Diagram script will change this style so the section gets visible for each definition it processes.

Oops, I wrote the Q in the move field, instead of the id field, where I had intended it. Thanks for spotting this!

you cannot chase away werewolf with weaker piece, opponent can just defend and keep the werewolf

Well, if you chase it away with a Pawn, the opponent would lose the piece he defends with for a Pawn, even though he keeps his Werewolf. So it is not that easy. But it indeed upsets the usual assumptions on tactics; there is no penalty on using the most valuable piece first.

I fixed a bug in the diagram w.r.t. the pasting of games; the SAN parser was not recognizing the ID for the last piece in the list (usually King). I also made he parser somewhat more tolerant towards games that were not produced by the diagram itself, but had a slightly different formatting. In particular, it now no longer insists that move numbers are followed by a space. (Carlos and Kevin had posted a few such games for Sac Chess that wrote the move directly behind the period of the move number.)

I also implemented a new parameter moveList=... for the diagram. If this is set to a game played earlier with a similarly configured diagram, it will act like that game was pasted into it from the start. (Must be a single line of text! Wrapping is OK, but there shouldn't be any explicit newlines in it.) This makes it possible to post diagrams dedicated to viewing a particular game. (A proposal by Fergus.)

The Silly Sliders

I have an idea for an army themed on a class of pieces not often encountered in variants: lame ski-sliders. The Picket of Tamerlane Chess is such a piece: it moves as a Bishop, but must minimally move two steps. So it lacks the Ferz moves, but the more distant moves can still be blocked on the F squares. (Unlike a true Ski-Bishop, which would jump over these squares, ignoring completely what might be there.)

The idea is to turn all sliding moves of the orthodox Chess pieces into such a lame ski-slide, and compensate them for the lost moves by giving them equally many leaps in other directions. So the Bishop loses its F moves, but gets the W moves instead. This makes it a sliding version of the Phoenix (WA), like the Bishop is a sliding version of the Ferfil/Modern Elephant (FA). I will call it an Onyx. The Rook likewise loses its W moves, and gets F moves instead. It is the sliding version of the Half-Duck/Lion, and I call it a Lame Duck.

The compound of an Onyx and Duck would be a normal Queen, and is not suitable. To stay within the theme it has to lose all K moves, and should be compensated with 8 other moves. The N moves are the obvious choice for this. That makes the Queen replacement a sliding version of the Squirrel (NAD), and I call it a Squire.

The Knight isn't a slider, and its move is already in the game through the Squire. That leaves a lot of freedom in choosing a move for the Knight replacement. A totally symmetric 8-target leaper that (AFAIK) is not used in any of the other established armies is the Kirin (FD). This is a color-bound piece, but the Onyx isn't, so this doesn't seem to be a major drawback. A Kirin easily develops from b1/g1 through its D move, (and the Onyx from c1/f1 through its distant B moves), so that castling is no problem. I am just not very happy with the name 'Kirin', as it has no western meaning, and starts with K, which collides with King. In modern Japanese 'kirin' means giraffe, but that name is already associated with the (1,4) leaper. Perhaps I should call it an Egg, as its moves are a sub-set of those of the Half-Duck, and make a somewhat round pattern. This piece is called 'Diamond' in Jörg Knappen's 'very experimenal' army the Sai Squad, and since this goes very well with the name Onyx (and perfecly describes the move pattern) I will adopt that name here too.

Note that the total set of moves of the army is nearly identical to that of orthodox Chess. The same moves are just redistributed differently over the pieces. The only difference is that there is a D move on the Egg; if that would have been a W move (i.e. if we would have used a Commoner instead), the correspondence would have been perfect. (But there would not have been a color-bound piece then, and perhaps that is worth somethin too.) So I expect the army to be very close in strength to FIDE.

And as long as we are doing requests: I just submitted an article that is an index with internal links to the many interactive diagrams on the CVP that can be used for playing against the AI. Would it be possible to add (a link to) that article in the 'Play' section of the Home Page, just as there is a link to an index page for the Jocly games that are implemented here? We could use this logo:

I also think that a link to the Play-Test Applet article deserves to be in the 'Create column'. I also think the Checkmating Applets should be mentioned, but I am not sure where. My first thought was under 'Explore', but the other items there have a somewhat different character. Perhaps these applets are also 'Play' items? In any case I think they should be mentioned in the 'computer resources' section of the 'topic index' page. The many Jocly games we feature aren't mentioned there either. And the 'diagram editor with scalable graphics' also seems a useful resource worth mentioning.

I still hope we can implement a solution that allows members to do this without any editorial help. It shouldn't be that difficult to have a 'custom' option in the piece-set selector of Game Courier, and a text entry where the user can specify the directory where he uploaded the images.

I think the site would  also benefit from a more organized presentation of the available piece sets. There are may sets now that are hidden in membergraphics directories, which people who could  benefit from them would  never find.

I now removed the ability to always castle with a Rook (irrespecive of its location on the board). I originally added that to handle Omega Chess. But after the diagram supported jO this was no longer needed. So I changed the King's move to KisjO2 in the diagram I had posted for Omega Chess. I don't think there were any other diagrams that needed castling with a non-corner pieces, and were relying on this 'Rook exception'.

So you can change the Rook move back to R, now, without the diagram highlighting a spurious castling.

The way it works now is that the diagram locates the castling piece, and then, on the same rank, scans the board to the left and right until it reaches an edge or a hole. Then it scans back from there in the direction of the castling piece to find a non-empty square in the initial position ('farthest reachable piece').  This would be the castling partner for a plain O castling. If it should be the piece one square further inward, one should use jO.