🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Nov 22, 2019 05:09 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'.
That's alarmist thinking. Greg may be seasoned in C and C#, but he's still less experienced with GAME Code, which happens to be a very different language.
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.
Non-programmers can already create presets, and even with limited programming knowledge, someone can create a programmed preset for many games by copying code from others and making a few tweaks. Thanks to this, there are presets for over 1300 games.
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.
None of that was anything Greg needed a wizard for. The hold-up was in programming the Bishops Conversion rule, and in trying to do that, he learned more about how the language works. I already knew how to program it myself, but I intentionally left Greg the exercise of figuring it out, because I trusted he could handle it, and doing it himself would help him learn the language better.
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.
Like, for example, in Symmetric Chess, because the Bishops Conversion rule wasn't already programmed.
That's alarmist thinking. Greg may be seasoned in C and C#, but he's still less experienced with GAME Code, which happens to be a very different language.
Non-programmers can already create presets, and even with limited programming knowledge, someone can create a programmed preset for many games by copying code from others and making a few tweaks. Thanks to this, there are presets for over 1300 games.
None of that was anything Greg needed a wizard for. The hold-up was in programming the Bishops Conversion rule, and in trying to do that, he learned more about how the language works. I already knew how to program it myself, but I intentionally left Greg the exercise of figuring it out, because I trusted he could handle it, and doing it himself would help him learn the language better.
Like, for example, in Symmetric Chess, because the Bishops Conversion rule wasn't already programmed.