Yes, I reconfigured how the selection of pieces works, causing moves that were previously legal to become illegal.

@Fergus,

Hello,

Should I delete the games I have started before your corrections were  made as they now give errors out of the bat?

Musketeer Chess seems to be working now, though I have not tested it out thoroughly. After extra pieces move to the board, there is a problem with displaying it as a GIF/JPG/PNG image, though it displays okay as a table. Regarding this, I'll look into the code for displaying boards as images.

I really apreciate it, please keep us up to date!

I am working on fixing Musketeer Chess today. I am doing it step-by-step, and it is not fixed yet.

Metamorph chess does not seem to work either :(!

Musketter chess does not seem to work yet. As black when I try to place the pieces on the fake back rank (the 9th!) it gives or sort of error. Moves seem to be banned but the proper move (2 legged move with ; in between) does not seem to be allowed either :(! Please help :)!

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Rococo+with+Pushme-Pullyus&log=wolff-cvgameroom-2017-24-856

This game was drawn a long time ago.  For some reason, it just appeared as a lost game for me on time after we had finished.  

Give me an URL or a log to look at. When I looked over the logs of Gross Chess, I didn't see any you were playing.

the first game of gross chess doesn't appear and instead just asks you what you wanna promote to.

It should work now. I had to escape some characters in the regular expression it uses to check whether an email address is well-formed.

I copied a long regular expression for checking email addresses from another page, and I didn't check it against this address. It's surprising that it should not allow it. I'll look into it.

Hi guys,

On game courier, I can't create an open invitation to play wild kingdom due to their being a fatal error and something to do with the email address for the games room. Is this something I can fix?

Anemic Chess is now fixed, too.

Thanks! I have just made my moves.

I need the name of the game each of these logs is for. I found one of the logs and uncovered the error. I copied the fix from the chess include to chess2 and chess3 without considering that these two use the checked subroutine instead of individual attacked functions for each side. I have now corrected them to use the checked subroutine.

Fergus:

Please take a look at the following two logs that are broken, I can't make any move.

log=sxg-cvgameroom-2017-150-680

log=sissa-sxg-2017-168-829

Thanks in advance.

The problem with sending personal invitations was with email addresses, not with userids. I modified it to look up an email address and convert it to the corresponding userid if one is available, and if a string that is not an email address is not a userid to look it up as a personid and to return the matching userid. Any email that is not in the Person table will remain an email.

Hi,

There seems to be a bug with the game courier personal invite. I think José mentioned it a few weeks ago, but when I try to send a personal invite and enter the userID/email, it just says that I haven't specified an opponent and sends an open invite.

Also, if it isn't too late, can I participate in the tournament?

Thanks!

SxG

 

(Edit) I'm not quite sure what you mean. When I put in a userID the same thing happens, if that's what you mean. am I doing something wrong? Thanks for the response anyway!

and the charging rook can only go forward 1

The chess w/ different armies code seems to have a few bugs in it, it says that moving a fibnif 1 space diagonally is illegal & that moving a colonel forward is illegal  

When it is asking for the address, it is asking for the URL.  The easiest way that I've found to locate it is to right click a piece and copy the address from there.  Let me know if you have any other questions!

-Nick

Hi,

I've been trying to create a new chess variant page but I don't understand how to add an image beside a description of a piece. It says to add the "address" of the piece, and I'm not really sure what is meant by this and I tried adding the fen code for the piece in { } brackets, which didn't work

Could someone please let me know what to do?

Thanks!

SxG

The code for Musketeer Chess is buggy right now. I'll fix it when I no longer have to work on moving the site to a new server.

Please can you help? I'm trying to set up a game of musketeer chess against my friend to play online. He has chosen his extra piece and placed it behind his back rank. I've chosen mine as well but can't place it behind my pieces - when I try another screen opens and it says "All you can do is place your pieces behind your back rank" or something to that effect, which is what I'm trying to do. I've tried using Opera and Chrome but get the same mistake. 

Yup, It seems to work now.

I was even able to add graphics to one of my recent posts.

Thanks Fergus!

What has happened to the editing of one's pages and the appearance of those already on the site.  Things seem to have got into a bit of a mess.

This is unrelated to Game Courier, but I'll answer here anyway. The textarea elements in membersubmission2a.php now use CKEditor. By default, it opens in WYSIWYG mode. So, instead of seeing your HTML code, you would initially see how it would look, and if you then switched to Source mode, it might rewrite your HTML. To stop it from doing that, I have now set the default mode to Source. So, when you go to edit your page, you will immediately see your HTML code, and you can edit that directly. Since Source mode uses Codemirror, you will now see your HTML with syntax highlighting.

Agreed. I noticed the same thing.

What has happened to the editing of one's pages and the appearance of those already on the site.  Things seem to have got into a bit of a mess.

I fixed the problem with CKEditor in Game Courier. I just had to slightly change a line of CSS so that it affected only the first level of DIVs inside FORM instead of all DIVs inside the FORM element. The problem happened because CKEditor adds its own DIVs that should not be subject to the website's CSS code. So that shouldn't be causing any more problems. Let me know if any further problems crop up.

While CKEditor is working well on the main domain, I am still having a problem with it in Game Courier. When I switch to Source mode, the area I can write text in becomes too narrow. I'll try fixing this later. But for now I'm going to switch gears and work on debugging Musketeer Chess.

Greg - I'm not using any code to change the initial placement of pieces.  I'm trying to facilitate action similar to that of the Muskateer Chess preset at the beginning of the game (adding pieces, saying instructions, removing pieces, etc.).

Fergus - It isn't allowing me to get back to review my preset.  I can't see the board nor the code.  I added some code under the pregame section that added some pieces to the board and gave instructions.  It worked fine.  When I started adding code to the pre-move 2 section, that is when it all started happening.  I'm not entirely sure if that is the case or not.

I wasn't very far into it, so I'm thinking about trying again and keeping the form data on hand if it screws up.  I'd like to start from scratch. 

There isn't a blank preset. There is just the default one, which is Chess without any rule enforcement.

A 500 error is a mysterious thing. I have just now been working on getting plugins to work with CKEditor, and maybe that was the cause of it. I think I have CKEditor working properly now. If the matter is not resolved, please send me the form data you entered so that I can try to repeat what you did and fix the problem.

I'm not doing anything totally difficult to start out with (adding pieces, emptying squares, the say and echo commands, etc.)

First, just to clarify, you aren't using code to try to change the initial placement of pieces are you?  That is done just by changing the text in the FEN Code text box.  Or are you adding pieces with code to automate some kind of action?

I have a couple of hopefully quick questions.  First, I hope I am not blind.  I have been searching high and low and trying to avoid embarrasing myself by asking - but what is the proper way to create a preset.  I don't see any links for a blank one.  What I have been doing is canabalizing existing ones (which may indeed be the source of all my frustrations to begin with).

Second, I am trying to learn how to code presets.  I'm not doing anything totally difficult to start out with (adding pieces, emptying squares, the say and echo commands, etc.).  I've done some work on a preset, but now whenever I try to update/save/run/test, it loads for 3-5 minutes and then comes up with a page that states this: 

A 500 error has occured

500 errors are generally caused by one of the following two problems.

1) A bad entry in the site .htaccess file, if you are the webmaster try logging into your cPanel, and use the file manager to rename your .htaccess file if this fixes the error you should then check the contents of the .htaccess file / roll back any recent changes.

2) A php error / code error also causes a 500 error, you can try enabling 'PHP display_errors' by following this guide Enable Display errors

If after trying both of the above solutions and you are still seeing the 500 error please do contact support"

I don't understand a word of it lol.  The rest of the site works fine so I'm wondering what if that is becuase my coding is bad, if the site is experiencing technical trouble on that side of it, or if it is because I'm canabalizing a preset.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks!

-Nick

I can't play this Burmese ches game. This is the second time it happens to me.

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Burmese+Chess&log=vik-cvgameroom-2016-349-106

I should have thought to check my email when you weren't moving. I have now fixed this problem. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hi Fergus,

I sent you an email a few days ago.  In our KMS game, I can't capture your knight with my pawn without promoting.  It asks me to which piece to promote, and I select pawn.  It then gives me the askpromote dialog again, and when I choose pawn again, it tells me I can't make two moves in one turn.

Thanks,
Greg

OK. Thanks! 

Okay, that's now fixed. The "strange symbol" you saw was debugging code that wasn't causing the bug.

Yes, I see that. However I still cannot make my first move at this log: sissa-playtester-2016-202-616

In the page where you should enter your move it appears the strange symbol ":-1" just below the movelist box. When I click "Preview", then it appears such a message.   

I just moved first as White in the Chess game you sent me an invitation for without any problem and without changing any code.

Reporting a bug.

Whatever the game, after accepting an invitation either open or personal White is prevented to perform his/her first move; it appears a message saying:

"lastmovenum = ; movenum = 0

WARNING: As a safety precaution, you cannot move and take back a move at the same time.

If you mean to take back a move, do that before you move. This will let you see the board accurately when you do move.

If you did not mean to take back a move, set the drop-down box with the history of your moves to the last move made."

Hi Fergus.  I sent you an email.  I'm unable to take your rook in KMS.  I get the following error:

ifhead[3] is switch

Syntax Error on line 5

The include command may not be used except at the main level.

For the sake of debugging, here is the full GAME Code program that this error occurred in. The lines have been properly indented to help you spot scope errors.

   0 set K findpiece K spaces
   1 set k findpiece k spaces
   2 setglobal piecekeys k d h r b g s l n p z K D H R B G S L N P Z
   3 set promote assoc z (n l s g) p (n l s g) n (l s g) l (s g) s (g) g () k () r (d) b (h) d () h () Z (N L S G) P (N L S G) N (L S G) L (S G) S (G) G () K () R (D) B (H) D () H ()
   4 alias +b h +B H +r d +R D
   5 include shogi
   6 setflag rules

Thanks,
Greg

OK... Enjoy!

ok, got it.

well, but I still cannot move.

ah...ok!

How?

Surely there is a bug in the Game Courier Game Logs webpage, but you can follow playing by clicking the links of each game from the Game Courier's email alerts.

suddenly I have no access to my game logs (or any game log). They just do not show up when I enter the game courier. What's that?

Thank you, Fergus.
I noticed that I am now able to play directly logging in to the site (and not only from a link in an email), so you might have solved the problem.
Thanks for your great work to maintain this amazing website!

Raymond

I traced the bug to the Logs page, which I recently updated to fit better on a mobile device. Some lines had braces around the %s in sprintf statements. I mixed up two different ways of inserting a variable into a string. I can insert a variable name directly into a string with braces around it, or I can pass a variable as a parameter to sprintf and have it placed where the corresonding %s is. I must have converted some lines from one way to the other without editing out the braces. The bug has been fixed, and it should work okay now.

That's weird. I have been neglecting my games for a while, but when I just tried to move in one, it put braces around my userid when the Preview form appeared. This should not happen, and I have never seen it happen before. Maybe there has been a change to PHP that is affecting Game Courier's behavior, or maybe another editor has tampered with a file that Game Courier depends on. When I tried to send my move without editing my userid, it told me that I was not one of the players. Until I can fix this, remove the braces around your userid before you send your move, and it should work.

Hi Fergus,

I just had a problem while begining a chess game : the website does not allow me to play, because it does not recognise me as one of the players.
I noticed that it was impossible to play from the site during a previous game, except when I used the link sent by email. If I try to play only from the website, I am not recognised as a player.
It is a real problem while begining a game, because I have not received an email with  link, so I cannot play at all.

Thak you for your help.

Kind regards,

Raymond D

I checked it out on the iPad, and there was no problem. I would not think that it would have any problem peculiar to a specific browser or OS, since Game Courier mainly operates on the server side. What may be going on is that you are trying to view it on a webpage that has outlasted the board image. When Game Courier creates a board image, it creates it as a temporary file that it stores on our server, and about half an hour later, if I recall correctly, it deletes the image. So you may have been trying to view a deleted image. If so, refresh the page and have it draw a new board image.

I will check it out on an iPad later. In the meantime, I checked it on Boat Browser, the webkit-based browser I use with Android, and it worked fine. What is the nature of the problem you are experiencing?

I have a question. I recently posted a preset for Heroes Hexagonal Chess with a hexagonal board using the PNG method. It displays fine on a PC browser, but will not display in IOS Safari on a mobile device. I then tried both JPG and GIF with the same result. Any suggestion on what I can do? Is the only solution a CSS board? Thanks.

Thank you, again

It's now restored from the backup.

We were almost to 90 moves /play/pbm/play.php?game%3DChu+Shogi+Alfaerie+Style%26log%3Dchappy-cvgameroom-2015-105-948%26userid%3Dchappy

I couldn't find 2015-105-948. What game was it for? Did anyone make any moves in this game before it got deleted?

Mr Duniho, thank you for your efforts. 
Mr Georg, I apologize. I wanted to read the warning on the delete page. I don't entirely understand what happened. It seems that sometimes when I hit the delete button, it goes to a warning page and sometimes it deletes without taking you to the warning page first. At the time I was distracted and did not realize our game had been deleted. Please forgive me, I have enjoyed our games and hope to play you again. 
Mr Duniho, is it possible to restore game 2015-105-948?

If your opponent makes an illegal move, you may go back to his last legal move, let him know in a comment that his move was illegal, and move again. If he repeats the same illegal move, or he keeps making other illegal moves, then feel free to delete the game.

Note that this is only a problem for games without rule enforcement programmed for them. I tend to stick to games that have been programmed to enforce the rules, and every now and then, I'll program a new game I'm interested in playing. Anyone else can program games too, and thanks to being able to copy and modify existing code for other games, it's not as difficult as you might think to program a new game.

Quote:

"If the problem is that the other player is not moving, add time controls to your invitations and win on time when your opponent doesn't play. This may get him to move more promptly"

I don't care that much if I win, I prefer to play. This I cannot, because he accepts every open game I create, obviously for no reason other than to prevent me from playing. I have no idea, why. Indeed, it's that childish!

I will not tell his name now. I hope he reads this and just lets me alone.

Yes, I made the same experience with him. Unfortunately there are currently some cranks around here.

But you also deleted our last game, didn't you?

I have an etiquette question. Pheko Motaung makes repeated illegal moves and deletes games. I am considering deleting all my games with him.

If the problem is that the other player is not moving, add time controls to your invitations and win on time when your opponent doesn't play. This may get him to move more promptly.

No, that hasn't been implemented.

I have a problem with a player here. He allways accepts my open invitations but does not move! So I delete the game, create an open invitation again, and what happens? He accepts again, but, of course, doesn't move at all. It's just annoying. Is it possible to ban players from my invitations?

Thanks. I asked them to contact you, because they are unable to move right now.

I recently updated sendmove.php to update the database when a game finished. In doing so, I left out a closing quotation mark and a semicolon, resulting in code that would not function properly. I have now fixed these, and it is possible to move again.

On Monday, April 6th, from about 7:30PM to 9:30PM EST, the database table that keeps track of userids and passwords was deleted, and no one could move. Around 9:30, I replaced it with a backup from Sunday. I checked to make sure that both of your opponents are still in the database, and they still are. So it's possible that they tried to move during that period and could not. If that was the problem, it is now fixed, and they should be able to move. If they still have trouble moving, I will need them to report to me on what they are doing, and I will look into it further.

Hi,

I'd like to report a bug : my opponent has not been able to play, thought he tried several times and made sur he valided his move :
/play/pbm/play.php?game=Chess&log=lewel-louis.veyrat-2015-89-456

I have an other opponent who has not played for 2 days, and I think it is the same situation :
/play/pbm/play.php?game=Shogi&log=torendil-raymond.delvolve-2015-91-623

Could you please explain what is going wrong?

Kind regards,

Raymond Delvolvé

Instead:

You will need to enter (type in) two moves in the Moves space and then click the preview button, etc.

e.g., f10 to e10, d10, c10 or b10 and then your rook from a10 to the other side of your king (since in Wildebeest Chess, one has the option of moving the king 1, 2, 3 or 4 squares over and then the rook to the square immediately on the other side of the king).

The way to do this is by separating the two moves with a semi-colon.

For example:

f10-c10; a10-d10

Good luck. That should work just fine.

If not, let me know...

Jeremy, how do I castle in Wildbeest Chess? I would have to move 2 pieces, but the preset doesn't allow it.

Works like magic. Thanks a lot!

A. Please go to this site: /play/pbmlogs/index.php

(Save the link because it can be a good idea to check in on it frequently. For some reason, not every move that's made via game courier goes through to email.)

B. When you go to that site, please enter your userid avunjahei where it says userid and then click the button on the right that says "submit". Then click on your name in blue for any of the three games you've started there. It will take you to that game.

Now, there are two ways you can enter a move and then there are some tricks for unusual moves that you may sometimes need to use especially in presets that aren't rules enforced (like all the ones I have submitted so far since I haven't taught myself that much programming yet for game courier). I will attempt to tell you the tricks if and when you may need them but for now, let me try to walk you through entering a move with a step-by-step process:

1. Point at the piece you want to move. Click on it. Click on its destination square. The move should show up in the space marked "Moves."

OR

2. Enter the actual move into the space marked "Moves" - this means entering the first coordinate followed by the last coordinate. (d2-d4 for example would move a pawn from d2 - d4 in a variant where this is possible).

3. Now, after completing step 1 OR 2, click the button "Preview."

4. In the new screen, there will be a space for you to enter your password. Enter it if you are satisfied with the move that appears on the screen (good to double-check!) and then click "Send."

Voila. It should now record your move. The move might not show up right away but it will.

Does that work for you?

I am working on a preset for Duking Falcons. It should ultimately require me to design a piece, get it and its movement approved by others who are working on this, and then get it uploaded. But in the mean time, I can send you a mockup preset with a piece we will pretend is the new one and / or one with the rook as the consort piece. Let me know if you want to do this. I'm glad you want to try it out.

Jeremy, thank you. That would be great. Now I also started a game of Ultima facing the same problems!

Georg, we will work it out. Game Courier works just fine but it can act a little weird. I'll challenge you to some games and we'll get it to work.

Well... i try to play my first game on this site (Wildbeast Chess) But it doesn't work. i make a move, the preset shows my move, but it's not remembered. Don't know what I do wrong-

Some while back, I posted a comment on how perhaps there should be a CVP app.  

http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=30079

I realize how difficult that would be, but it seems that an app implementation of Game Courier would be more useful than a Maharajah-for-Hire.

I've been at work making Game Courier more tablet-friendly. It can now fit Table, CSS, PNG, JPG, and GIF boards to the screen size, at least for square, grid, and hexagonal boards. I still have to do circular and custom boards.

Since Android limits the user to three system fonts, these typically being Droid Sans, Droid Serif, and Droid Mono, I have looked into using webfonts. I got some free webfonts from http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ that look like Courier, Arial, and Plantin, and they are looking very good on my Android tablet. Some CSS code keeps the fonts from loading unless you are using a tablet or other mobile device, and desktops will default to Courier New, Arial, and Georgia.

Bugs from this update seem to be fixed now. Let me know if anything is still not working right.

Just a word of warning in advance in case anything goes wrong. I am about to upload several modified files at once. The changes I made to them are all interrelated. So things would not work right if I uploaded one at a time. The changes are to the system for handling user preferences. Each user preference was previously coded one at a time. I am changing it to transparently handle all user preferences in two passes. When it loads a log file, it stores any customizations that differ from the settings file, then overwrites normal settings with user preferences. When it writes a log, it writes the customizations it previously stored as the main values to the log, and it assigns the user preferences to variables tagged with the player's userid. The benefit to doing it this way is that the code does not have to keep track of separate variables for user preferences, and it will become easier for me to add more options for user preferences.

I got the BUTTON tags to work for links in Internet Explorer by adding an onClick element to each one with some JavaScript for redirecting the page. Although this has the disadvantage of requiring JavaScript, Game Courier already works best with JavaScript enabled, Internet Explorer normally has it enabled, and I couldn't even find out how to disable it in Internet Explorer. I also added a huge message that appears when JavaScript is disabled, explaining why JavaScript should be enabled.

The CSS wasn't working with some pages, because the form was in a stray P element, and IE is stricter in how it interprets nesting elements. I fixed this by removing or closing the stray P element.

The changes are working well and looking good in Firefox and Chrome but not in Internet Explorer. In the menu form, which is what shows up when you first select a game, I used BUTTON tags for links within the form. These work in Chrome and Firefox but not in Internet Explorer. Also, the CSS styling doesn't work for every form in Internet Explorer, though it does work for some, which leaves me puzzled.

I'm redesigning how forms look in Game Courier. Using shared styles, I am visually grouping together the elements of each form, and where there is more than one form, I am visually distinguishing them from one another. Visually, each form is an olive block. Some forms are still tables. In those that aren't, a darkkhaki field, which despite its name is lighter than olive, surrounds a field and its identifier. Separate forms appear as separate olive blocks.

I saw no settings files for Battle Royal. So I sorted the directory by date to get the most recently edited settings files, and I found Royal Rumble. Checking the author field inside the file, I found your maeko userid. So I think the URL you want is