Ratings & Comments

Ok, I'll take a look tomorrow. Thanks!...

This is because you copied old code that was still buggy. When I made a fork and copied in the new code from Chess, it worked fine. The new code is described in detail on this page in the Aliases section.

The 4 initial moves. The ones that the usual king does not have.

I had done that and the moves were displayed but I was not able to do them due to the error saying that a king cannot move there.

I have change the code in the setconst area to:

setconst k Apothecary_King;
setconst K Apothecary_King;

and now things work properly as far as I can see.

I see in your code that you started using the name King directly instead of as an alias for Apothecary_King. When you do it this way, it calls the King subroutine. This is working out for you, because the King subroutine calls the King function. The subroutine also includes some code for handling castling, but since you have not set wcastle and bcastle, it will recognize any attempt at castling as illegal without needing to call the castle subroutine. So, it basically just uses the function to check the move's legality, and it updates the value of kpos or Kpos to the space the King moved to. What the King subroutine is doing that your code was not doing before is updating kpos or Kpos BEFORE your code checks whether your King has moved into check. Presently, you have the code for updating kpos and Kpos at the very end of your Post-Move sections, but these variables need to be updated before checking whether you have moved into check. So, if you just changed the position of this part of your code, you could use King as an alias for Apothecary_King without any problem.

I have made tests for the all moves and then check and checkmate and things seem ok if we redefine (by overwritting) the king subroutine. These don't work properly if an Apothecary_king function is defined and then use of aliases is made. Is there a reason against leaving things as is, Fergus?

Is not that post move section?

It is, I misread sorry!...

I don't understand what you are trying to say.

You said:

The only thing is that the definition of king is used rather than an apothecary king and then an alias with king.

That's a bug. It should show the description for the Apothecary_King. This bug is due to you using older code that is not bug-free. This buggy code is in your Post-Move sections. The Chess preset has up-to-date bugfree code in its Post-Move sections. The bug is in this line:

set desc join #name "-Desc";

This should be:

set desc join realname #name "-Desc";

But I verified checkmates and they work in both apothecary chess modern and apothecary chess classic as I copied the functions to the other game.

I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Since King is an alias for Apothecary_King, it converts King to Apothecary_King before it searches for a function, subroutine, or description. If it can't find an Apothecary_King subroutine, for example, that's the end of the line, and it will not search for a King subroutine.

Except that your code is based on some earlier code with a bug in it. Compare your code for displaying descriptions with the code in the Chess preset, which is up-to-date and corrected.

All right. Things are great! Thanks!...

The only thing is that the definition of king is used rather than an apothecary king and then an alias with king. Could this have any problems. Anyway big help for your Help!

The line "and or f2 f9" should be "and flag #0".

Finally I tried to replace the code that was using a boolean variable with one using flags. I'm not sure how this will change what you provdeded earlier and worked fine while kpos and Kpos were used correctly.

I see from you commenting it out that you've identified this line as the problem that's causing premature checkmate:

set Kpos space moved;

It should be changed to

set Kpos $dest;

The space operator returns the piece on the coordinate given to it, but you want to set Kpos to a coordinate, and $moved is a piece, not a coordinate.

I was wondering about one line during the night. This should correct it. Note that if you had switched to flags earlier, this line wouldn't even be needed. Keeping things simple makes programming easier.

def Apothecary_King
checkleap #0 #1 1 3
or checkleap #0 #1 1 2
and match rankname #1 1 10
and or and var K1stmove == #0 f2 and var k1stmove == #0 f9
or checkleap #0 #1 1 0 
or checkleap #0 #1 1 1;

Unfortuneatly the code you proposed does not work either. It gives false pozitives when displaying (shows all camel and knight moves) but on the other hand, the special 1st time moves are considered wrong when applied. My guess is that then it is a deeper problem as the king is not a ordinary piece and changing it's properties could impact other subroutines in less predictable ways.

I have not changed the code to use flags because yesterday I was a little busy with other things, but I doubt this impacted the overall result, althought a slower speed was to be expected. Thanks for your help Fergus, but it seems that apothecary chess is to difficult for me to program at this time, so I'm considerring taking a break from programming presets.

I think your problem stems from the overly complicated way you are writing your Apothecary_King function due to keeping track of whether the King has moved in a more complicated manner. It should clear up once you change how you keep track of whether the King has already moved and write a simpler function that uses flagged spaces.