Comments by FergusDuniho

I can't access my game that was interrupted. I hope that timed-out games (due to the site being down) will be playable soon.

It appears that the problem with your game affects only Chu Shogi, and it has nothing to do with the game being interrupted, as I encountered the same problem when I tried to simply move pieces in Chu Shogi. What happens is that the page stops displaying partway through the menu, and it doesn't give me any clear indication of what is wrong. It looks like this is going to be a problem for Adam DeWitt to solve, as it stems from his chu settings file.

I still see time on the clocks, and I already gave additional time to all interrupted timed games. I'll do some testing later if he still hasn't moved.

My opponent sent an email to me saying he cannot move in the following log:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=McCooey%27s+Hexagonal+Chess&log=panther-tim_olena-2021-204-636

He's in check and has few legal moves. Also, the ASCII diagram he is using will not display legal moves or allow moving with the mouse. I was able to get as far as previewing a move after changing the rendering method. Not being him, I couldn't go any further.

UPDATE: Upon further testing, I found no problem with being able to move. I created a test log that just changed userids, and I successfully moved. Since the log had no time controls, the time the site spent offline had no effect on anything.

I made a test copy of one of these games, and I successfully moved in it. If Oisin had around two days left, that's consistent with him having less than a day now, because the site has been back online for a few days already. Tell him to move before his time runs out.

Testing whether posting here meets same error as posting on new server.

I have set up some cron jobs to do backups with rsync. On this server, rsync will create hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backups. These are in case it's important to revert a change to a script or page. Editors with access to the server can find these in /home/chessvariants/backups/.

The new server has a cron job to make a daily backup of the public_html directory on this server. I set up an SSH key pair to allow it to do this without a password. This will copy the /public_html/ for chessvariants.com to that for chessvariants.org. This is expected to happen at midnight EST. To be sure of what time it does it, I'll check the timestamp on the /public_html/ directory tomorrow, since I also made the script use the touch command on it when it is done updating. I still have not added commands for backing up the database. It will be important to do both together to keep their backups in sync.

It depends on a feature of MariaDB 10, but when I restored the server earlier this year, MariaDB 10 was frequently losing the connection to the database, and MariaDB 5 proved more reliable. So, I switched to MariaDB 5 and manually removed the details that required 10. On the new server, I have installed Rocky Linux 8, PHP 8, and MariaDB 10. Since it also has reverse DNS, which should make email more likely to be delivered, I have plans to make it the main server when everything is working correctly on it. For now, I have to update scripts to work with PHP 8. The new server has less storage space, but it has more than enough for the site. It has less RAM, but this server usually doesn't use even half the available RAM. Both sites have 4 cores, and the new VPS uses faster CPUs. Although the new server is on chessvariants.org, it will not support comment search until I add support for this back into the database. To start with, I will look into updating to MariaDB 10 on this server.

The touch command was used on the new server's /home/chessvariants/public_html/ directory at 12:00:14 AM EST. So, the automated daily backup worked when it was expected to. I'll look into including a backup of the database into the same script today. But since there are some different files in the folders for the database on each server, I want to fix that by making them both use the same version of MariaDB.

My attempt to update chessvariants.com to MariaDB 10 has not been successful, and I have been unable to revert to MariaDB 5.5 without errors. So, chessvariants.com is currently without a working database. At least I made a backup and copied it to chessvariants.org. If the problem on chessvariants.com continues, I might not continue with HostSlayer. As long as I have things backed up on RackNerd, I may try reinstalling the OS on HostSlayer. But for now, I have floaters in my eyes, and I need to have lunch.

Try using only alphanumeric and punctuation characters found in ASCII in your file names. Korean letters may not be recognized by all software.

I now have a script set up that runs from the backup server to make daily backups of both the /home/chessvariants/public_html/ directory and the chessvariants database every midnight at Eastern Standard Time. The script looks like this, but with the actual database password. It doesn't need the server password, because it is using an SSH key pair to connect.

#1/bin/bash
mv /root/chessvariants.sql /root/chessvariant-backup.sql
ssh [email protected] mysqldump --opt --user=root --password=XXXXXX chessvariants > /root/chessvariants.sql
/usr/bin/rsync -ae ssh --delete [email protected]:/home/chessvariants/public_html/ /home/chessvariants/public_html/
touch /home/chessvariants/public_html/
mysql --password=XXXXXX chessvariants < /root/chessvariants.sql

I'm open to feedback on how best to manage this sort of thing. One possibility is to create a new Item with the new name, we can move over the references in the database I've mentioned, and leave the old page with just a link forwarding to the new page (possibly even an automatic redirect, though I'm not sure if that'd work in a member submission view script).

The database has a RelocatedPages table. Just add an entry that includes its old URL and its new ItemID, and the 404 script will take care of the details.

See the Ai Ai tag at the bottom of the page.

I decided to rename Futashikana Shogi to Dai Shosu Shogi.

While it has apparently been done, or is in the process of being done, I would like to advise against renaming in general. When you release a game, it takes on a life of its own that may extend outside of this site. While I was working on the taginfo.php script today, I was testing it with the Ai Ai tag, and one line on the page was displaying as empty. When I tracked down what was causing this, it was the ItemID for Futashikana Shogi. Apparently, someone has programmed Futashikana Shogi for Ai Ai, where it remains known by that name and not by the name Dai Shosu Shogi.

Additionally, the name has been changed without updating the RelocatedPages table. This table should have a row added to it for each page whose URL and ItemID both change. It may be done by editing the table in PHPMyAdmin, which the main editors have the URL, userid and password for.

When the page gets rewritten, it should mention the original name and why the name was changed.

I was looking for a global way to eliminate some PHP warnings, but that requirement proved to be too restrictive. So, I have removed it.

I then tried requiring minimal argument counts instead, but even that caused problems for unary, binary, and mixed unary/binary operators. But since they seemed to work with operators requiring 3 or more arguments, I left those minimal argument count requirements in.

Thanks for reporting this. Although I'm doing most of the development over on the other server, I do copy over changes toward the end of the day after they seem to be working, and then it's Europeans who are the first to encounter any bugs I may have introduced into the code, because they start the day earlier than I do.

The bug here is preventing the Rook's legal moves from being displayed, but it does not seem to be preventing you from manually typing in the move and making it. I will now look into this and try to fix it.

There was a syntax error in one line. It's now corrected.

Okay, I deleted them and the database entries for them too.

The problem was that the board was too large to rotate 180 degrees. When I switched the shape from Grid to Square, it worked. To make it work for the provided background images, I replaced imagerotate() with imageflip(), which could get the same effect as rotating by 180 degrees by simply mirroring the image across both dimensions. Because this used fewer resources, it could handle the images provided for this game.

Since I can now work on code on the development server, I took the time to remove the remaining code for creating offline pages. While David used to make offline versions of the website, I have never done that. For one thing, I wasn't familiar with how he went about it. But I also didn't see the use for it. Things have changed since David wrote the code for this. Back when we got on the internet with 2400 baud modems that used the phone line, it would have been convenient to have an offline version of the site. But now that broadband and WIFI-enabled mobile devices are both common, it is easy enough to connect directly to the website. When the site is down, as it was recently, archived copies of pages can be found at archive.org. So, an offline copy is not needed for archival purposes. Additionally, the website has grown more interactive than it used to be. While it was originally a set of static HTML pages, it now includes comments, database-generated pages that may be revised on the website, and ongoing games. Finally, when I program code, I write it simply for a website, and I do not want to have to take care to build in support for generating offline pages.

Besides code that was run with the condition $foroffline or $offlineindex, I replaced every instance of echoandwrite with echo, and I removed the function definitions for echoandwrite and echoorwrite. The latter wasn't even being used anyway.

Removing some of the $foroffline code created a bug, and this happened to draw my attention to the icons that appear to the left of links. I had thought of these as slightly informative decoration, but they included links to information pages and included a bunch of ALT text telling some things about the item linked. I got rid of the links to the information pages, changed the ALT text to TITLE text, and reduced the provided information to just telling what the icon meant. With this done, I was able to remove the remaining $foroffline code in make_author_line, and I also removed the $foralttext option from it. There was really no need to include author information in the ALT text for the icon when it was already on the screen anyway. Removing the little-used links to info pages and reducing the information provided by what is now a tooltip should reduce page size and make index pages quicker to load. With that in mind, I may look into extending how many links may appear on an index page.

I have been working on replacing absolute URLs with relative URLs. But I had mainly been looking for chessvariants.com URLs. I guess I'll have to look for chessvariants.org URLs too.

I noticed that in one of your games yesterday, and when you mentioned it, I thought perhaps it was because there were no adjustments for your boards in the image_dimensions.php script. But I just tested Shogi and Xiangqi, and I am seeing the same thing. As I've been editing code to not show warnings in the PHP error log, I have made lots of edits to draw_grid_png.php. I'll have to take a look at it and see what's causing this.

One more reason for no longer supporting offline pages is that many pages now include script-generated images with the drawdiagram.php script. These will work on a website running PHP, but they will not work offline. If I wanted offline pages to support them, I would have to write a script that finds each link to a script-generated image, creates a copy of the image with a unique name, and replaces the link to the script-generated image with a link to the copy of its output. That's too much work for something no one probably needs anyway, and archive.org can already make copies of them.

The problem is that there is no file to download. As the author of this page, it is up to you to fix this. Please upload it with the file manager in the same way you have uploaded images. There is a link to the file manager in the Edit menu.

Is there a way to detect suicide moves in GAME code?

There are two ways of doing a suicide, and these have different effects on the $old variable. Adding an @ to a space works like a promotion, which leaves the value of $old unaffected. Moving a piece nowhere gives $old an empty value. This may give a better indication that the move included a suicide, but it would come at the expense of the information about where the piece moved to.

Since it sounds like your Fire Demon piece is making a multi-part move, you may want to break down the whole move and analyze it step-by-step. You will find examples of this in multi-move variants like Marseillais Chess and Extra Move Chess.

With that in mind, another option would be to move the Fire Demon to the piece's space, then immediately move it back.

Another possibility for detecting a suicide move is to store the board position before the move into a variable, then compare the new position after the move to the stored position and see what differences there are.

As I've been editing code to not show warnings in the PHP error log, I have made lots of edits to draw_grid_png.php. I'll have to take a look at it and see what's causing this.

It does not appear to be caused by any recent edits to draw_grid_png.php. I temporarily reverted to an earlier version, and the problem remained.

Another possibility for detecting a suicide move is to store the board position before the move into a variable, then compare the new position after the move to the stored position and see what differences there are.

This could potentially solve the problems of detecting a suicide move if I knew how to do it.

Here's a preset I made to demonstrate how to do this:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DChess%26settings%3Dspotcaptures

This records the position of every piece on the board in an array whose keys are coordinates and whose values are piece labels. It does this both before and after a move. It then goes through the current positions of pieces. For each empty space, represented with the @ piece, it compares it with the previous value to see if it was empty before. If it wasn't empty before, it records it as a capture.

Since I am already writing this, would the system used for the multi-move variants be able to handle moves with three or more parts (i.e. that of the Lion Dog in Maka Dai Dai Shogi)?

You could adapt it. For the multi-move variants, there are usually the same number of move parts each turn. So, it makes sense for these games to do the multi-part analysis globally for all pieces. But for games that include pieces with multi-part moves, you may want to reserve the multi-part analysis for specific pieces and tailor it to each piece that needs it.

The Edit Comment scripts aren't working properly. Whenever I try to edit a comment it fails. Posting comments still works though.

Until I'm feeling better, I have simply reverted this to Sunday's version. I have been having fever symptoms. I had chills last night, and now I'm feeling too warm. I will continue debugging code when I'm feeling better.

Guess I could try emulating windows 95

I don't think that will help. I think you just need to coordinate with another person who is willing to play against you at a certain time.

Is it just me, or is the latest version of my Taishin Shogi GC preset overloading this whole site? Whenever I click on my settings file to play it, I get nothing but 524 errors for a while.

When I first tried loading it, I checked the error log and got

PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/chessvariants/public_html/play/pbm/gamecode.php on line 2524

I fixed some of the errors above it, but I still get a maximum execution time exceeded error. There is one persisting and multiply-repeating warning that I think is due to your own code:

PHP Warning: Undefined array key 897 in /home/chessvariants/public_html/play/pbm/gamecode.php on line 1122

The line in question, line 1122, is part of the code for the "sub" command, which indicates the beginning of a subroutine definition, and it says:

$linenum = $links[$linenum];

This refers to an array that is calculated before any line of GAME Code is executed. This comes from analyzing the structure of the code. So, I would recommend looking for a structural problem in one of your subroutines. Perhaps a block of code wasn't closed off properly, causing endsub to not be expected yet when it appeared. The problem might be around line 897 of your code, since that was the value for $linenum in the warning that kept repeating.

Originally posted on Pemba, where this piece is called a Crocodile.

Calling the diagonal Cannon a “Crocodile” makes zero sense. I prefer Gilman’s term for the piece: Arrow.

Agreed, except that I introduced the name of Arrow in Yang Qi, and Gilman copied it. See Comment 14476 on the Yang Qi page.

Fixed.

The board is colored in 4 colors because of the fact that the nightrider is easier to visualize this way.

But why not three colors instead of four? When I created Cavalier Chess, I tried a four color board, but I found that three colors works better.

Okay.

One more thing. I am a relatively new person to the CVP, and I believe I saw some articles detailing some strategies in oriental games. However, I cannot find an option to do that.

To do what?

Fergus, Are you here?

Yes, I've been slacking. I'm also trying to catch up on my reading, as I am still ten books away from my reading goal of 52 books for the year, and I have less than six weeks to complete it.

Okay, those are deleted.

Pretty amazing that this did not appear to cause any problems in Play mode.

I ran a simple test in Solitaire mode, and it kept running the code for when the constant is not already set. I'll now look into why that is.

Being based in France, I see ads from e-bay in French. But many are not related to chess. The reason is that "chess" is "échecs" in French, always at plural, with an "s" at the end. The word in singular, "échec" means "failure" in English. (It also means "check" which may complicate).

So, there several ads for books dealing with the failure of something, failure of education, failure of economy, whatever, but no relation at all with chess.

The search term has in fact been "echecs", but since you pointed it out, I did see some books in the preview for the books ad that used the world echec, such as L'ECHEC DE L'ISLAM. To fix this, I changed the search terms to "echecs -echec", and only books with "echecs" in the title showed up.

The problem occurs when I make a triple move with a piece with Lion Dog powers where all three parts move the piece to different squares and the third square is empty. The preset will exit with an error message stating that the promotion is illegal when it should be legal.

After a triple move, you would need a fourth move for the promotion, but your allow statement does not include any allowances for fourth moves.

I have the feeling that this page is not the latest version.

You may have this page confused with The History of Chess Variants, which is an independent page, unrelated to this one.

Is "heterdox" an English word valid in this context or just a typo here?

It's a typo. I've now made corrections.

I introduced a general problem last night regarding the parsing of $_POST values, and I have now fixed it.

I'm having some problems with this game. First, I can't seem to get the piece images to show correctly. Right now it looks ok at first, but when viewing a game from black's perspective it's all wrong again.

Because you're using the Alfaerie:Many set, which includes some flipped pieces, you need to include a value for $flipped. Since you are not using any flipped pieces in your game, you should set it to the same value as you are setting $pieces to.

@Fergus: please also have a look at the problem reported here.

Do you mean the problem reported by Daniel Zacharias, which I just gave the solution to? Or were you describing an independent problem? If so, I would need a link.

There is the more recent page Who is behind the Chess Variant Pages?.

Are these the correct instructions at the end of the presets?

setsystem pieces #mypieces; setsystem flipped #mypieces;

Since the first one worked, the second should too. I think using var instead of the # prefix would be a bit quicker for an array, but it is probably negligible.

I made a correction to the handling of case statements. If multiple case labels were in the same case statement, it would previously check only if the first one was already assigned. It will now check whether every single case label has been assigned. If a case label has already been assigned in a switch, it will give an error message.

If a case label includes whitespace, it will now report an error message. This is in case a colon is left off a case statement, and a new line character gets included in the case label.

If a switch statement is passed a value that does not match any of its cases, and it has no default case, it will report an error message that neither the expected case nor a default case exist.

The print statement can now be used to print the value of an array, which will make it more useful for debugging.

Isn't it possible to do some syntax checking on the GAME code (e.g. when it gets submitted) to prevent such erratic behavior?

I have added some error messages to make it easier to spot this kind of error in the future. See comment 43913 on the Game Courier History page.