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Wide Nightrider Chess. Chess on a 12x10 board with Nightriders, Champions and fast castling rules.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Jan 15 09:18 PM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from 08:45 PM:

I even created the Interactive Diagram that is in it! Metamachy also has such Pawns. And indeed, these are not in the table (which I suppose is why you mention them).

One doesn't encounter such Pawns very often, and with such a table one always have to strike a balance between including everything that exists under the sun (with as a result users will have great difficulty in finding what they need), and including only the most common stuff (so that people often don't find what they need directly). Because it is very easy to change the move of a piece in the table to another one (for those bothering to read those tiny 3 paragraphs that describe how to use the Applet, in particular the second), the balance often swings in the direction of not including alternative moves for an image that is already in the table. Although notation for Pawn moves is usually more complex than for other pieces, which might favor including duplicats in that case.

In this particular case I guess that the fact that Alfaerie has a special symbol for this kind of Pawn (the 'quickpawn'), but that this symbol initially was not available as PNG/SVG, swung the balance in favor of not including it. In the mean time this symbol was created, and added to the Alfaerie PNG set, though, which makes it automatically appear in the table as well. But this adds it at the end (where indeed you can find it), and the Applet cannot guess the moves of pieces it obtains that way. So it appears now without a move.

This is again an oversight: now that the symbol exists it deserves to be in the table predefined with a move, amongst the other Pawns, and then I would give it the move you referred to. But I just created the image because I needed it for some Interactive Diagram, without giving a thought to what consequence this would have in the Applet. And you should also keep in mind that for a very long period any attempt to change anything in the Applet led to its destruction; only recently I discovered that this can be prevented by switching the article type to 'Text' (even though originally it was posted as HTML). So now I could add the Quickpawn to the list of predefined pieces, and probably will do that soon.

It would be more useful to make the generated GAME code (or actually the 'include file' that interprets this code) support fast castling; as I said, it would be very easy to give the Quickpawn that is in the table this (or any other) move, and you could copy the XBetza notation for the move from the Colossus Diagram. Almost anytone here could do that. But no one but me is likely to create support for fast castling in that include file...