Ratings & Comments

"Starts Off Board" would be a great addition! It'd make something like Short Sliders a lot easier to create. It'd also be a good step toward adding a "drop" feature later.

Well, it doesn't really make a lot of difference if you know how: in the old Applet all pieces would be participating when you used it for playing in the Applet itself. And for the purpose of generating HTML for a Diagram elsewhere, or GAME code, you could drag the other participating pieces from the table to empty squares on the board after you had pressed 'Start Position', before generating the HTML or GAME code.

The problem with a drop feature is mostly in the AI, that it enormously drives up the branching ratio, and that you only start to distinguish useless drops from sensible ones after two more ply of searching. (As all drops are non-captures, and in general decrease your positional score, because pieces in hand are more mobile than on the board.) With such a large branching ratio the AI would not be able to search far enough ahead to see the advantage of any drop. What would be needed is some smart method for selectively generating drops that might be useful (e.g. those that deliver check, or where a weak piece attacks a very much stronger one). This is not easy in a context where dropped pieces can have arbitrary moves. E.g. for check drops you basically need a 'reverse' move generator, which gives you all moves to a given square, rather than from one. But some moves that can be described with XBetza are very hard to generate in reverse. E.g. for a Griffon.

Well, I am sorry to say they mostly qualify as junk. The 100x100 images have a much lower resolution than that, and seem to be blow-ups of a 50x50 image. The Queen image is slightly better; even though it is not anti-aliased it at least really has full resolution; if it would be displayed at smaller size (which Jocly would), averaging the combined pixels would create intermediate colors as a poor-man's alternative for anti-aliasing. But the letter Q on the tile is of course much too small. (That also applies to DK.)

I don't really see the point of using shogi tiles for any representation other than traditional kanji pieces. The tile background hardly conveys any information on piece identity (even if the sizes are slightly different this is quite hard to notice), and take away at least half the area that would have been available for the distinguishing features of the pieces. Furthermore they are a very player-unfriendly method of distinguishing the side they play for; unlike noticing deviating color, for which the human brain can use parallel processing, recognizing orientation requires focus of attention.

So even if the image quality would be perfect (i.e. high resolution anti-aliased), I would still not be very enthusiastic about the design.

Would it be possible to have it so that you can switch back and forth between playtesting and editing?

That is exactly what stopped me before from culling the piece table; you would no longer be able to add new pieces once these have been deleted. But a solution for that occurred to me: the extra pieces are only troublesome if they have the same ID as participating ones. So on pressing Start Position I can simply set all IDs of the non-participating pieces to a dash. One can always assign a new, valid ID afterwards, if one selects the piece as an afterthought.

After pressing Start Position the Diagram is no longer in setup mode, though. This only affects automatic placement of color-reversed pieces, so perhaps this isn't a real problem. I suppose I could add a button to go back to setup mode.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cSkfAJcEivziYg9H9zpJr-piTqZsFrnw/view?usp=drive_link

Hello, the link above is for my google drive. That folder should have 1 png picture. About two weeks ago I asked about Jocely and Chu shogi. In particular the 2d pieces, and How I would like to make my own piece set. You gave me part of the java script code and a png file. The picture is my progress so far. I'm taking the CV chu set and enlarging it and adding color. The pieces will be 100px by 100px. I've only made a few pieces so far. I wanted to see if you think this is ok or a hunk of junk! My goal is to eventually get this in jocely so that the 2d pieces are less confusing to me. :) If I get the OK from you I will keep going an merge all the pics into 1 ribbon pic, just like the one you have right now. I dont see any advantage in appending these new pics into the existing 2d pic ribbon that came from wiki. (you suggested that I do that). So should I keep going in my direction?

"Starts Off Board" would be a great addition! It'd make something like Short Sliders a lot easier to create. It'd also be a good step toward adding a "drop" feature later.

That's not what Tamerlane II succession does. In Tamerlane II, as you already described, when the King is in a checkmate position the player may exchange the King's location with the Prince's. This is, basically, abdication in favor of the selected Prince; the King becomes a Prince, and may remain in play. What I described is the King being removed, automatically making the Prince into the King, kind of like what recently happened with Elizabeth II and Charles III.

Anyway, the Nightrider problem was a matter of me miscounting. It should be fixed now.

I think Shatranj of Troy would be good to feature.

I tried setting up morphs for pawns but it never used the pieces I chose. It would be good if there were a way to see the morph board for a piece after it has been set to confirm or change it.

No, with two Kings (as extinction royalty) you can ignore any check. Succession and the like only can ignore checkmate.

Well, currently the ID only supports Tamerlane II succession, which allows you to swap King and Prince in checkmate positions as a move. What it could support in the future is mainly dependent on how complex that is. Automatic promotion of Prince to King and removal of the latter as a side effect of moving in a checkmate position might be doable. It raises the question what would happen if you decide to move Prince or King, though. And King rescue would not be possible if the King disappears automatically on any move you do. So swapping would be closer to your original rule.

I am not sure what your motivation is for using such a complex rule rather than just taking the Tamerlane II succession, which makes it hard to propose alternatives.

For the Troll you can leave it out of the morphers array, and append to the Post-Move 1 section something like:

if #mover == TROLL and == 15 rank #desti and == 14 rank #ori:
  add DIREWOLF #desti;
endif;

and in the Post-Move 2 the corresponding code for black:

if #mover == troll and == 0 rank #desti and == 1 rank #ori:
  add direwolf #desti;
endif;

To HG: this Wolf's SVG looks a bit confusing when seen in small size on a big board. What is strange is the rounded lower side. Because the mouth can be taken for the ears or the horns of something else and the ears can be taken as a mouth. I would suggest that you make a straight horizontal line for bordering the head in the bottom (like for other animal's icons, horse, camel, etc.). I hope I am clear...

Per the description as an FO Fearful, the Fearless should have no retreating moves at all. I'd imagine it's a copy‐paste oversight or the like

There's one main thing left to fix, though it's probably Charles' error: The diagram for the Primate (WB, top right in the last block of diagrams) has a spurious sideways rook move, of a kind which isn't introduced until Alternative Fronts. Idk whether we consider that within the editors' remit though, esp. with Charles gone

Incidentally, the thing with the mathematical expressions (which you note here and also affects this page's degree signs ⟨°⟩) is the same problem as affected this page, among many others across the site. In principle worth fixing though it may be more difficult to do thoroughly, especially if people have edited affected pages in the interim

My apologies for those who might have already tried to use this feature: I changed it again, in order to simplify the code, and make it more efficient for other purposes the morph parameter has in the Interactive Diagram, namely confining pieces to a board zone. There are now no longer separate morphers and morphs array for each color, but they must be combined into one:

set morphers (X Y Z x y z);
set morphs assoc
  X ((All Q))
  Y ((R N B Q Q B N R))
  Z ((All Q) (All R) (All B))
  x ((All q))
  y ((r n b q q b n r))
  z ((All q) (All r) (All b))
;

The rule that the ranks should be listed starting at the promotion zone (so high to low for white pieces, low to high for black) still applies.

The idea is that a future version would allow you to specify the words 'barred', 'check' or 'win' instead of the label of the piece to promote to; this would then (respectively) ban moves to the corresponding square, treat reaching the square as a check to the opponent (so that he loses when he cannot remove the piece from that square in his next turn, but wins when he captures your King), or terminate the game immediately as a win (without having to worry about possible retaliation against the piece that reached the square, or your King).