Ratings & Comments

I also suggest adding the hovering pawn in  for pieces like mNmcafsW on the movement diagram

Since the userid is limited to 16 characters, and ChessVariantDemos has 17, I could not make the change. Note that you have two different IDs on this site, though both are presently the same for you. These are the personid, which is limited to 32 characters, and the userid. The userid is the handle that you use to sign in, and it is also used when you play games on Game Courier. The personid is used to identify you when you post comments or contribute content. This site was using personids before userids were ever a thing here, and the original personids were based on a person's name, such as DavidHowe or FergusDuniho. Userids were meant as shorter handles for signing in. I could change your personid to ChessVariantDemos, though one based on your name would be preferable.

I guess it could be an interesting game for two (either with neutral queen or with swapping instead of moving to empty space, with prohibition on undoing opponent's moves in both cases), where players have to get certain poker-like combinations in a limited number of turns or to be the first to achieves several goal.

Fergus, thanks. I was missing it.

What do you want to change your userid to?

It is used to evaluate possible castling moves without producing error messages. If you search for it, you will find it being used in the stalemated subroutine.

I have to comment it for having simple yet original rules, promising a good entertainment, perhaps even well commercially-sold.

@Fergus,

Hello!

In the chess2 include file what is the sub castlepos supposed to do?

Anyone know who can help me create a new UserID for this account?  Not just name change...

I have posted a patch to bring ChessV2.2 up to Service Pack 1 (SP1).  This is a zip file that just contains replacements for the EXE and DLL files.  Unzip it into your ChessV2 program files directory to overwrite those files.  If you are still on Release Candidate 1 (RC1) that is ok, this will still bring you up to SP1.

Download ChessV2.2 SP1 Patch

This contains everything we discussed below plus a couple of other small fixes.

I will also be updating the regular installer version and source code.  I will post when those are updated, in case you prefer to download the full installer, uninstall, and reinstall.

Server load rarely gets very high, and the rare peak of high server load does not correlate with the site going down. So, even though tables could also work, I'm not worried that using single images will increase the load too much. Also, it has been simple enough to replace various JavaScript diagrams with generated images, because I could reuse the FEN string from the JavaScript with only occassional modifications.

Sorry, I knew about that. I meant HG's interactive diagram :)! And thanks for the info :)!

As I mentioned to you not too long ago, the script used to draw this picture is cached by Cloudflare. Also, the previous diagram had ranks broken into two rows and looked really bad.

The 'diagram designer' was not made by me, but by Fergus. I am only responsible for the 'Interactive Diagram'. Because you explicitly address me, I will answer for the latter:

It is certainly not possible in the Interactive Diagram to use other board topologies, such as hexagonal bords, or circularly deformed boards. All boards must consist of a corner-connected grid of squares. Irregular shapes of such boards (such as e.g. in Omega Chess, with its wizzard squares, or the citadel of Tamerlane Chess) can be emulated by declaring some squares in the smallest surrounding rectangle to be inaccessible 'holes'. The Design Wizard in the Interactive Diagram article has no provisions for defining those, though. But you can just edit the HTML code that it delivers to add the holes; you only need to define an extra 'piece' with the name 'hole', followed by a list of squares that should be holes.

You do realize that this drives up the bandwidth it requires to download the page, and increases the server load? Browsers would display a table of individual piece images without any further server access, once the complete Alfaerie set is in their browser cache. And the most commonly used pieces certainly would be, from visiting other pages on this site. Perhaps a rare piece (such as the Grasshopper) would have to requested once (from Cloudfare!), and then the user would have that cached too.

A monolythic image of the entire position would be unique for every article though, and have to be downladed. Using a PHP script to generate the image 'on the fly' means it cannot even be cached by Cloudfare.

Yes, I should have included pawn moves in that. I meant 100 full moves but that probably is excessive. 
I think I'll just remove the last to move wins stuff from here. I still like the idea but it might make more sense as a separate variant all by itself. 

My reasoning for using zebras rather than camels is that I think it matches the other added pieces better. The gryphon starts with a diagonal step and continues as a rook, and the zebra's move can be described similarly. It begins with a diagonal step and then continues as a knight, jumping over any occupied squares on the way.

I'll try to fix the diagrams and rules.
 

I added a diagram and performed a few minor edits to improve the text.