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Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Jul 24, 2020 02:32 AM EDT:

Umm, there seems to be a mismatch between the naming of the scalable (SVG) pieces used in the Applet, and the fixed-size 50x50 (GIF) bitmaps in the alfaerie directory. E.g. the wazirknight does not show up because for the alfaerie bitmaps it is actually called knightwazir. The Archbishop / Chancellor / Amazon are my own fault; the SVG renderer used by the Applet creates such compound images 'on the fly', by referring to them as knight--bishop, knight--rook and knight--queen, while in the 50x50 alfaerie set they are of course called cardinal, chancellor and amazon. I should have had the Applet script replace those names when it dumps the design as a diagram using the standard image set.

Thank you for reporting this; it will certainly be fixed one way or the other. For now you can work around it by editing the Diagram description to replace the faulty filenames of the missing pieces by the correct ones. An alternative would be to keep the names, but change the graphicsDir from /graphics.dir/alfaerie/ to http://winboard.nl/my-cgi/fen2.cgi?s=50&p= and the graphicsType to an empty string (just graphicsType= ), to get the same anti-aliased images as the Applet uses (but 50x50). But then you would be using off-site images, and that is really against CVP policy.

For the editors:

In connection with this, it is perhaps a good time to bring up the following issue: wouldn't it be a good idea to improve the availability and/or quality of piece graphics on CVP? The rather ragged-looking alfaerie 50x50 GIF bitmaps in /graphics.dir/alfaerie/ are still the site's standard piece set. Isn't it time to replace those with anti-aliased PNG images, or at the very least provide such a set next to it (e.g. in /graphics.dir/alfaeriePGN/)? I suppose it would be easy to copy the same index page on alfaerie to that other directory, to showcase the pieces.

I would also be happy if there could be a 35x35 alfaerie image set; for the Applet I am currently using an off-site SVG renderer. Of course I could upload a set of 35x35 images myself, even defvote a member-submitted article to them, but then they would be hidden in /membergraphics/MSalfaerie-33 (say), and no other person but me would ever find them there. To get good use of the graphics we have, they really should be provided as options in places where people could decide to use them.