Ratings & Comments

I see! I did not thought it should be 1 word :(!

Here is a match with Pawns handling turnovers on diagonal forward:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyppzlkwjj4&feature=youtu.be

I have beeen assigned to the second round games, but none of them are showing up on My Games on Game Courier. I eventually found them using search filters, but when I tried to move, I got a error message saying that the file for the game could not be found on the website. This happened to me for all three games. Any help I can get would be appreciated.

I have posted and cleaned up the "Setup" section, adding a table where I think it was intended and provided other HTML formatting.  I will take a stab at other sections later.

I am posting this mostly because of the amount of work that went into it.  I think it is a stretch to call this a chess variant, so I am not sure it really blongs.  I'm happy to hear thoughts from other members.

I played a few matches with the PawnFreetoCombine version and I have to be honest, I can not play the previous version again. Much more intuitive and uncomplicated, definitely elegant and sincere. I will change this rule soon.

Hi Carlos,

Can you try your move again?  Hopefully I've fixed it.

Thanks!

I agree that this is getting pretty far from chess.  It has the same wargame/chess crossover feel of some other games here, but this is probably further out.  But, I've always thought this site should be pretty inclusive.  And the tactical portion of this game is fairly chesslike (in fact, it almost would work as a standalone variant).

I'll work on some more formatting here in a minute.

I haven't read all of the details, so maybe I've missed it, but: what does the terrain "strengthening" and "weakening" actually do?  How are they located?
Edit: Oh, I see, "strengthen" and "weaken" are not separate effects, just a note about how the terrain affects pieces differently.

(And I might as well mention again that I don't particularly like publishing variants without the inventors' real names, but that ship has sailed.)

One of the weird things about this game is the fact that you can only have 2 Heavenly Horses at max, even though you need 4 to cover the whole board, probably there is some compensation for this. I also investigated the camel variant of it, this piece can only reach 1/6th of the board.

This looks like a somewhat playable variant, only the weird board size is killing it

(Er, I hadn't thought about how "that ship has sailed" would be interpreted:  I hadn't meant it for this variant, as a criticism of Greg for publishing it; rather, I was trying to indicate the last few years during which a few new anonymous inventors have had material published here.  And as Greg noted, this does include great community members like wtdr2, so I don't hold this position firmly; I would just like to encourage inventors to attach their names to their variants.)

The diagrams no longer work as intended because of a change in the diagram designer:
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=36723

I'll make the necessary changes when I have a chance.

Edit: done, although using the !-markers rather than the ./#-markers.

I have had some more time to test.  This is a really an excellent CwDA engine.  I think I have found another bug though.  In one game, it insisted ChessV made an illegal move when the move was fine.  In that game, ChessV was white playing the nutters and KS was black playing the rookies.  KS promoted a pawn on g1 and chose to promote to a colonel.  ChessV then moved the king to g4 and KS called this an illegal move, presumably thinking that its colonel on g1 attacked it.

So I think the issue is that when KS plays black and promotes a pawn to a piece from white's army, it thinks that the piece moves "forward" as a white piece instead of as a black piece.

Also, good catch about the memory usage.  ChessV does not yet offer an xboard engine's configuration options but as a stop-gap I have added settings for the generic "memory" and "cores" options and it will supply them to xboard engines that support those featuers.

The change of interpretation of the period from movement-marker to single empty square has affected a few pages.  (The changes were documented in this comment thread; a bug report was made at https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=37820 .) 

I have added the new functionality's description to the introduction here.

I've identified 25 affected pages, all but one of them by Charles Gilman.  (I only ran the search on member-submitted pages' Pieces section.  There were 4 false positives in the regex [from another author], so perhaps not all of these actually have problems.  The other affected page is an old never-published submission.)

ItemID    
MSaltorth-hex-chess    
MSnearlydouble-wildebeest    
MSnimrod-chess    
MSbachelor-nimrod    
MSman-and-beast-01-constitutional-characters    
MSman-and-beast-03-from-ungulates-outward    
MSman-and-beast-04-generalised-generals    
MSman-and-beast-06-the-heavy-brigade    
MShunterbeest    
MSman-and-beast-07-when-beasts-collide    
MSman-and-beast-08-diverse-directions    
MSman-and-beast-09-mighty-like-a-rose    
MSman-and-beast-11-long-nosed-generals    
MSman-and-beast-12-alternative-fronts    
MSman-and-beast-13-straight-and-crooked-moving    
MSman-and-beast-14-oddly-oblique    
MSman-and-beast-15-strengthened-across-the-board    
MSman-and-beast-19-the-vice-squad    
MSwestfield-chess    
MSman-and-beast-21-lords-high-everything-else    
MSfragnurasian-qi    
MSbachelor-hunterbeest    
MSaltorth-with-further-piece-types    
MSknavish-chess    

There might be a regex solution to fixing all of these pages, which seems superior to doing them by hand or splitting off a version of this script for the old period-markers, but I don't want to accidentally break anything more.  I think the periods that need to be replaced can be described as those following `drawdiagram.php`...`code=`, before any closing `>` or argument-separating `&`.  I'll think/look at it more later, but comments are eagerly solicited.

Your diagnosis is entirely correct. Because KingSlayer was originally designed with only (2x) 7 piece types, it initializes the move-generator data for the four variable types from a larger list of all types depending on the army choice. But when 'Traitor promotion' is set it initializes the 5th variable type as a copy of the 4th, in the table for the opponent. But I forgot to flip the orientation. I will add a note to this posting when I have fixed it.

Good that ChessV now gives a memory command. I already had made KingSlayer a bit more robust to not receiving one, by having it interpret memory size 0 as 128KB and launching it with that size, and then check the memory size at the start of every search to see if it is still at 0, and allocating 64MB if it is. But relying on default hash sizes is likely to give rise to unfair use of resources.

[Edit] OK, I uploaded a version (0.1, same link) where the traitor orientation should be fixed. This was a bit tricky, as the initialization also collects all sliding directions of an army, to know from which directions it should expect discovered checks.

A weird piece idea where all wazir movements are crooked

Good job tracking down those pages!  Fortunately not too bad.  Gilman has over 250 pages so I was afraid it could be much worse...

Given the scope, I don't mind taking it on, probably manually.  I'll probably take me a couple weeks to get through them but they've been broken for a while so I don't think fixing them is super urgent, so long as it gets accomplished.

I cleaned up the "RULES" section a bit to make it easier to read. Next time I'll upload some pictures. 

So this is supposed to be a rhino-mirror rhino alternating?