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Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Feb 8 06:38 AM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from Wed Feb 7 10:07 PM:

Well, the SVG pieces are a 'work in progress', and if there is demand for Alfaerie pieces that have not yet been converted to SVG, we usually add those. In particular, putting a cross on an existing SVG piece is almost no work at all.

And once the piece exists as SVG we render it as 50x50 and 35x35 PNG to expand the repertoire there too. And whatever appears in those directories, will automatically appear in the auto sets; that is why they are called auto sets.

[Edit] The existing High Priestess image seems wrongly labeled, because (as you say), there is no Ferz cross on it. By Alfaerie logic it should thuse be a representation of the NA, and the High Priestess (which is FAN) should get a symbol with diagonal cross. But there seems to be no room for the cross. (Which is of course the reason it isn't there in the first place.)

In fact, I don't like this kind of symbol at all, with a demagnified version of one piece inside another. (And in this particular case, to a needlessly small size; the Knight could have been at least 50% larger.) Especially when there was no effort to preserve linewidth, and it was demagnified together with the overall size, so that visibility really suffers if the entire symbol gets rendered at a small size like 35x35. If it was up to me we would get rid of such symbols.

Now the fen2.php renderer used by the Diagram Editor with Scalable Graphics allows you to create on-the-fly compounds of two existing SVG images. So I did not even have to make new SVG pieces to create these:

I added those to the alfaeriePNG and alfaeriePNG35 directories under the name b/welephantknight.png . I checked that they also appeared in the corresponding automatic sets, with the name ELEPHANTKNIGHT / elephantknight. I picked these rather than those with the Knight in front, because the Elephant is wider, so that it covers the place where the bottom of the Knight image was cut off; with the Knight in front the bottom of the Elephant would stick out in an ugly way.

I like this way of combining pieces better, and it is more in line with what we do for BN and RN. I think the High Priestes symbol should really be replaced by this with an extra cross; the ear of the Elephant provides ample room for that.