Ratings & Comments

Well, in jocly/dist all games are always in the chessbase directory, no matter where they were in jocly/src. So there should not be any problem.

Time to nominate sth? I think it'd be great to feature Seiregi!

Here's where I wish there was a simple way to make compound icons (rather than entering it all manually)

I don't see an easy solution for that, as the possible number of compound images is overwhelmingly large. So only those that would occur very frequently (such as B-N or R-N) can have their own name, and it was for this that the possibility of drawing compounds was created.

The default.ini file in the SVG directory does allow the definition of set-specific meaning of (dressed) letters in FENs, though. This to iron out different naming unorthodox pieces often have in different sets (e.g. archbishop, cardinal, KnightBishop for the BN piece, which in FEN should be B~ no matter what set is in use). Since you can combine 26 letters with 7 suffixes (' ` " ~ ^ : !) that would still allow you to define a reasonable number of easily accessible custom abbreviations. The problem is always to remember what those mean.

Ah, OK. But I see it is open source. So it could always be changed to do whatever is needed.

I doubt that something would be needed, though. The model and view files for the various games in src/games/chessbase would not work on their own; they must also use underlying models and views for piece sets and boards. The only place where it is indicated which piece set or board model must be used for a given game is index.js. And the latter contains the path name of the models and views specific for the games.

But that is assuming that jocly-board uses the source code. Building Jocly does not only create a library in dist/browser, (where for each game all required model and view files are combined, and put into dist/browser/games/chessbase in compressed form), but also in dist/node. I never used the latter (I always test the builds through the browser part), but I suppose this is intended for any off-line application.

Is there a way to make stalemate a win for the stalemated player?

Here's where I wish there was a simple way to make compound icons (rather than entering it all manually)

What is jocly-board? Is that built from the project? One would expect it to use the library rather than the sources. There the config, model and view files are still all in one directory.

Anyway, I did some grouping. There now are directories shogi, 3d (2), hex (5), circular (3), mini (7), capa10x8 (3), tressau (2) and cazaux (5). I will probably add 'historical' as wel. Janus Chess should probably go into capa10x8, Los Alamos Chess into mini, and Wild Tamerlane in cazaux.

During testing I noticed that the new zobrist scheme broke Metamachy, because it is still directly calling the old scheme from its model code, to calculate keys for the initial setup. I will fix that later.

I just realized that jocly-board won’t be able to handle the subdirectories which is annoying.

134. Tesseract. This is an unusual piece, for which I have three different takes, all based on a classic drawing of a tesseract. The principal goal is that the piece can reach any square along a two- or four-space radius, including sliding up to four spaces diagonally.

The simplest one, from an XBetza standpoint, has the Tesseract leaping to any of the spaces (other than diagonally) on the first ring, then making a second leap to the second, or leaping directly to the second for those spaces that can't be reached with a double leap. (B4N2D2NYFX)

An alternate way of doing this is to skip the double-leaps, and let the Tesseract leap directly to the fourth circle. (B4DNWXFXDYNY)

To be really true to the concept, the Tesseract would be able to reach any space along the path by sliding along the lines, with as many turns as necessary. I don't think that can be properly coded in XBetza. (I even tried, without success, to come up with a simplified version that would involve only one turn at the corners; if I manage to make it work, I'll replace this sentence.)

There probably are other things that a Tesseract could do, especially in a 3D (or 4D) game.

It's really incredibly difficult get a cubical form to stand neatly on its corner, in either Tinkercad or real life!

I would like to declare files (in my case 'a' and 'i') as a promotion zone for pawns. Is that possible?

It is. Set maxPromote=0 to suppress normal promotion, and immediately after the Pawn definition line write

morph=*.......*/"/"/"/"/"/"/"/"

This declares the 1st and 9th square of the first rank to squares where Pawns will promote with chess-like choice, and then repeats that for the next 8 ranks. You might consider rotating the diagram 90-degrees, though...