Ratings & Comments

Richard Milner suggested to me the names Bicycle (ski-bishop) Bireme (ski-rook) and Biplane (ski-queen) for these pieces.

I'm seeing a problem with move highlighting for certain pieces in games using the fairychess include file. This tiger chess preset is an example. All the pieces that have a jump-then-slide move only have move highlighting for the jumping part of the move, although legal moves are still accepted.

Hi J-L

I have a vague feeling that the 'What's New' section used to be prominently displayed on the CVP main page, but somehow it got buried a bit. Bugged me initially, but I got used to it. Still, it might be a turnoff for newbies to the site who don't know where to look for all the vital info covered by 'What's New'.

The GC preset is no longer up to date. I still need to work out the kinks of the contagious promotions.

'Ski-piece' is more a generic descriptive prefix for how the piece moves. Like one uses 'crowned' for pieces that also move like King ('Crowned Bishop for the Dragon Horse) and 'mounted' or 'knighted' for pieces that also move like a Knight.

I suppose the association with skiing mainly comes from the sport of ski jumping, where they first slide from a ramp to jump as far downhill as they can, before sliding further downhill. One finds similar behavior in the sport of motocross or BMX cycling. So one of these pieces could be called a Crosser.

In fact the ski-pieces are very similar in character to the bent riders: the first step of their trajectory is a different one than the rest of the slide. But the difference only manifests itself in the length of the step, while the bent sliders also change the direction. Especially Osprey and Ostrich are similar, as their first step is also A or D, and the following steps F or W. The Ski-Bishop could be described as A-then-B.

All these pieces are capable of launching 'sneak attacks' on the more conventional pieces. Bent riders attack from around a corner, and the ski-pieces from behind and obstacle.  'Highwayman' seems an apt name for that behavior.

My earliest post on that seems to have been ignored. I try to ask again the question, I don't understand being the only one feeling the need for that:

I would find useful to have "What's New" appearing directly on the "Explore" menu of the top bar.

If I'm not wrong, it only appear under "Topic Index" in the "Explore" menu, which is a bit burried.

What do you think? Is my suggestion stupid, maybe I've missed something?

I agree these pieces are very interesting. I prefer them to some "bent-hopper-riders" like the Osprey, Ostrich, etc. In my opinion they should deserve better names than Ski-something. (Skiing is not obviously connected to the idea of hopping for me, sorry, I'm a very good skier!) Maybe we should open a competition for the best proposal. Who's want to start?

GC presets are working again.

The deletion script for submissions is still not working properly though.

In my book about Jetan, published by McFarland, the rules of Jetan-Sarang are included in an appendix. That version of the rules are based on a thorough analysis of all available rule versions (including the version on this page) and games of Jetan-Sarang played on Game Courier, and fixes many of the ambiguities built into previous versions.

This variant, along with many other Jetan variants, is mentioned in my book about Jetan, published by McFarland. Follow the link to learn more. I would welcome reviews of the book posted to the book's page.

I would just like to mention that there is now a book about jetan, written by me and published by McFarland. Follow the link to learn more. I would welcome reviews of the book posted to the book's page.

I would just like to mention that there is now a book about jetan, written by me and published by McFarland. Follow the link to learn more. I would welcome reviews of the book posted to the book's page.

I have a broken game (Modern Makruk). When I click on it, all I get displayed is my opponents name, timer and "make and preview your game". No board, no nothing.

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Modern+Makruk&log=makov333-cvgameroom-2022-222-332&userid=csarmi

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2020-08-03 UTC

I found glibconfig.h in another directory and copied it over. I jumped through a bunch of hoops, and now it reports undefined references to several functions in cairo. It could be that render.c relies on an earlier version of cairo that had many functions no longer available in the new version.

OK, I installed Rocky Linux 8.6 on a VM, and had a go at it. It seems that Rocky Linux is riddled with errors: packages install files in places where the files themselves don't expect them to be. In the end I managed to compile the rendering engine to the point where it actually produced an executable a.out.

First I had to install the packages for the cairo and rsvg library:

sudo dnf makecache --refresh
sudo dnf -y install cairo-devel
sudo dnf -y install librsvg2-devel

To make gcc find the misplaced include files, I had to compile with the command

gcc -isystem /usr/include/glib-2.0 -isystem /usr/lib64/glib-2.0/include -isystem /usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -isystem /usr/include/cairo fen2.c -lrsvg-2 -lcairo

Initially this still gave a linker error for the symbol g_error_free, which is supposed to be in glib. I could not find the corresponding library, though: it was not in the place where pkg-config said it was. As it did not seem an important function (according to the docs it just cleans up after a run-time error to prevent a memory leak, and we should not have errors anyway) I just defined a dummy for it in the program itself, which returns without doing anything. This satisfied the linker, and just left some innocently sounding warnings about use of deprecated things.

I uploaded this slightly modified source of the rendering engine to http://hgm.nubati.net/fen2.c . I suppose the procedure described above should be able to compile it on the CVP server. And that renaming it to something.cgi, and placing it in a CGI enabled directory of the server then should make it work on site.

Of course the directories with the SVG images that it will be rendering will have to be in the place where it expects it. (Set by the macro SVG_DIR in the source at line 61, which should contain a sub-directory for each piece set that is available. (On winboard.nl that would be alfaerie and xboard.)

I fixed the problem that was stopping the File Manager from working for your Interactive Diagrams page. It wasn't taking into account the return of a false value from one of the functions for turning an image file into a GD image.

For those interested in testing out this unusual game, I have a new build of ChessV that plays it. Everything is supported except the rule where pawn moves to the last rank give you another avatar to drop.

http://chessv.org/downloads/ChessV2_Avatar.zip

NOTE: You may need to copy that link and paste it into your browser. Since my site is not HTTPS, some browsers will not follow the link.

Extract the zip somewhere, run ChessV.exe, and double-click on Avatar Chess from the games index.