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Game Courier Developer's Guide. Learn how to design and program Chess variants for Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Feb 17, 2021 09:20 PM UTC:

How to replace piece labels without using aliases

The Alfaerie:Many set uses many cryptic labels that include punctuation, and it would be best to avoid using these to represent your pieces in games. In the past, you could set aliases to avoid using these labels, but you would also have to meticulously make sure you used the aliases rather than the labels. Instead of doing this, you may now completely replace the original labels with new ones. Here is how to do it. This code has all been tested and saved to an example preset.

  1. Use the labels defined in Alfaerie:Many in your FEN code while designing the board. In my example, I used {.df}n{b$}qk{b$}n{.df}pppppppp32PPPPPPPP{.DF}N{B$}QK{B$}N{.DF}.

  2. Create two arrays, one for regular pieces, and one for flipped pieces. Depending on the set file, you may not need one for flipped pieces, but Alfaerie:Many does include some flipped pieces. So, you have to include it for this set.

set mypieces ();
set myflipped ();
  1. For the pieces that will remain unchanged, simply add them to these arrays like so:
foreach label (k K q Q n N p P):
  setelem mypieces #label pieceimg #label;
  setelem myflipped #label flipimg #label;
next;
  1. For pieces that will be relabled, assign the appropriate images to your new labels. These use the pieceimg and flipimg operators to return the images for regular and flipped pieces. It then replaces the old pieces on the board with the new ones that have more appropriate labels. It uses an array of all spaces for this task.
set sp spaces;
foreach pair ((.df r) (.DF R) (b$ b) (B$ B)):
  setelem mypieces #pair.1 pieceimg #pair.0;
  setelem myflipped #pair.1 flipimg #pair.0;
  replace #pair.0 #pair.1 all #sp;
next;
  1. Reassign values to both $pieces and $flipped:
setsystem pieces #mypieces;
setsystem flipped #myflipped;
  1. Update the value of $originalpieces:
setsystem originalpieces currentpieces;