H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Nov 22, 2019 12:31 PM UTC:
That it takes so much effort even by seasoned chess programmers to create a rule-checking preset for a variant as simple as Symmetric Chess firmly puts us in the category of 'backward websites'. We really should have some kind of wizard for this, where people that cannot program at all would have no trouble to create such a preset. E.g. something like the Design Wizard for Interactive Diagrams I put in the article on those. Where you just have to take a minute or so to specify board dimensions and size of promotion zone, pick a preferred graphics theme, tick a number of pieces in a list of standard types (or, very rarely, pick an image and specify a non-standard move for it by hand), drag the pieces to their initial locations on an empty (a specified symmetry taking care of you having to do that for only one member of each type), and you are done.
If the wizard produces the usual game code, (just as that for the Interactive Diagrams produces the HTML), it will remain possible to take care of any features not suported through the wizard by editing the automatically generated game code later. But this should be needed only very rarely.
To catch more variants through the wizard it could allow a general input screen for specifying castling rules: the location of the castling partner, where it and the King will end up after castling, which squares must be empty and which squares must not be attacked. (And allow that to be repeated as many times as possible.)
That it takes so much effort even by seasoned chess programmers to create a rule-checking preset for a variant as simple as Symmetric Chess firmly puts us in the category of 'backward websites'. We really should have some kind of wizard for this, where people that cannot program at all would have no trouble to create such a preset. E.g. something like the Design Wizard for Interactive Diagrams I put in the article on those. Where you just have to take a minute or so to specify board dimensions and size of promotion zone, pick a preferred graphics theme, tick a number of pieces in a list of standard types (or, very rarely, pick an image and specify a non-standard move for it by hand), drag the pieces to their initial locations on an empty (a specified symmetry taking care of you having to do that for only one member of each type), and you are done.
If the wizard produces the usual game code, (just as that for the Interactive Diagrams produces the HTML), it will remain possible to take care of any features not suported through the wizard by editing the automatically generated game code later. But this should be needed only very rarely.
To catch more variants through the wizard it could allow a general input screen for specifying castling rules: the location of the castling partner, where it and the King will end up after castling, which squares must be empty and which squares must not be attacked. (And allow that to be repeated as many times as possible.)