Ratings & Comments

I filled in the board size metadata as 8x8, but perhaps it would be better as 8x15 (still with 64 cells)?

You must also put

set opaque (EA FA BA SM AR ea fa ba sm ar);

there to make the flying pieces block each other.

Thanks.

For the terror trading rule, would it work to have set protected (EA T t) in pre-move 1 and set protected (ea T t) in pre-move 2?

or maybe they should be in post-game 2 and 1?

The author, HaruN Y, has updated this page.

Here are the errors I didn't find before or are new:

Incorrect 3d Kanji Readings (all should be colored red)

• Promoted Lance (should say 奔虎)
• Promoted Gold General (should say 大象)
• Promoted Kirin (should say 角行)
• Promoted Phoenix (should say 飛車)

You should add the western-style piece images for the rest of the pieces in the Pieces section (to align with the interactive diagram).

I have done it and it seems to be working fine!

I made some corrections.

ctrl+f5 : may help to reload scripts in case of cache issues

No Move Zero rule? I doubt this army is weak.

I saw you added the 3d Kanjis back to Chu Seireigi. I went through and tested everything, and here are the errors I found

Incorrect 3d Kanji Readings

• Unpromoted Great Leopard (should say 大豹)
• Promoted Knight (should say 天馬)
• Promoted Silver (should say 走狼)

Other

• Promoted Lance, Gold seem to crash/softlock the game
• Promoted Copper General (大豹), Promoted Running Wolf (奔猪) assets doesn't load
• Promoted Kirin (角行), Promoted Phoenix (飛車) indistinguishable from unpromoted counterparts (kanji should be colored red)

P.S.

I was surprised that they didn't have the same movements. I wondered whether a different adjective might be better to distinguish them: e.g. cunning fox and vigilant rabbit, Same for the whale with chu shogi.

That was because I found the Wa Running Rabbit to be too similar to the Lance, and knew that it would add too much defense after testing with the Old Kite. So I gave the Running Rabbit the ranging moves from its Taikyoku counterpart while omitting the stepping moves. The reason it has the same name as the Wa Running Rabbit is because it is one of only two Taikyoku pieces to be a rabbit, and I thought the running kanji fit better. As for the whale, its backward bias was a problem, so I replaced that move with the current one.

Did not knew that! Still in the evening, but thanks!

The author, A. M. DeWitt, has updated this page.

I've updated the title and will try to update the svg a little later, I'll be a little less available.

Bringing back the kanjis would be interesting to give a Japanese aesthetic, but I feel that to play a mnemonic skin would be a better alternative from my point of view.

The correct query for opening the preset in Edit mode is &submit=Edit, not &edit=true.

The problem appears to be the fast castling, and now that I think about it, I believe I never implemented fast castling in the betza.txt GAME-code include file. So the entries in the legdefs table that would be interpreted by the JavaScript powering the Interactive Diagram as fast castling are mistaken for something that makes the GAME code crash.

For now I recommend commenting out the four lines that define the fast castling at the end of legdefs, like:

1  1 -1  1     3
//2 99  1  0    88
//   1  9  0    25
//2 99 -1  0    88
//   1 -9  0    25
0);

The King will then not be able to castle, but at least you can continue implementing the other aspects of the variant in the preset. In the mean time I will try to support fast castling in betza.txt. And when I have done that, you can uncomment the lines again.

Much better.

The only improvements I can think of are reintroducing the 3d pieces, naming the game Chu Seireigi instead of Chu Seireigi Shogi (for the same reasons as with normal Seireigi), and maybe having the hand spaces all colored solid brown. But for the latter the wood is colored similarly enough that it doesn't really matter whether you do it or not.

Also, could you update that SVG for the laser cutter? I might want to make a plywood set in the future. But for now, the cutouts I made will do.

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Megalomachy&settings=default

I fixed it from the rabbit / kirin / elephant : current dev version

For the grid display, it's going to take a little time, I need to understand how it works quietly.

I get this error:

Cannot make a diagram with 0 pieces on an 8x8 board!

It probably means that you copy a lot of invisible stuff together with the Diagram definition; the line below the quoted error message makes an attempt to show you what you actually pasted. If I copy-paste directly from your latest comment into the PTA, I also get the error message, and for the pasted text it says:

<main><article id="maincontent"><div class="commentgroup"><div class="Comment"><div><table><tbody><tr><td class="line-content">satellite=megalo</td>...

So there is an enormous amount of HTML garbage prefixed and interleaved with the actual definition, and the PTA chokes on it. What exactly corrupts the Diagram definition might depend on your browser. I made the PTA resistant to the garbage that is added by copying from a FireFox Page Source (but you might have to flush the browser cache to benefit from that?)

Anyway, the safest method is to first paste the Diagram definition into NotePad;this will cleanse it of most invisible stuff. Then you can copy-paste it from there into the PTA.

I actually found a better replacement for the Old Kite with the Running Rabbit (fBfR).

Thankfully, this is the last time I will need to make any changes.

Here are all the errors I found in your draft:

Piece Movement/Promotion/Drop Errors

Old Kite should be replaced with Running Rabbit, which slides in any forward direction (fBfR)

For Pawn, Lance, Ram's-Head Soldier, Running Rabbit (currently Old Kite), Knight, Flying Swallow, White's promotion is always forced, while Black's promotion is never forced

When captured, White Kirin is not being placed in Black's hand

Board Setup Errors

White King and White Great Elephant are swapped from where they should be in the initial setup.

Other

The grid seems a little off, but you probably already knew that.

You must remove borders=0 because that messes it up somehow

You must only paste the name=value and piece lines, which normally are between HTML <div> and </div> tags. The script line is not part of the Diagram definition; it specifies to the browser what script to run to create an I.D. on  the page. Something the GAME code would never have to do.

I think I'll use Limping Pieces for something else instead.

I made a first draft. It seems to work.

I still need to find a way to adjust the sprite sizes. Is it possible to display a grid? maybe it's hidden by size issues.

I did not figured out what to copy and paste into the wizard. On my variants I start with this line:

script type="text/javascript" src="../membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/betza.js?nocache=true"

as far as I remember.

But a similar line seems to end the Megalomachy diagram.

I'll do it today!

Might it work to use the generated code for most of it and manually define the pieces that wouldn't work?

I suppose this would be an option; the 'Custom Pieces' section of the 'Wizard for GAME-code generation' article described how to add pieces that would need explicit programming. I think the Terror would not be problematic for the automatic conversion; it is the flying pieces that would need separate coding, in particular their jump-capturing moves. I suppose you could define thir moves in the I.D. as QK, RW and BF, and then replace the K, W or F moves by a routine for generating jump-captures in the described way.

But it might be simpler to clone the betza.txt file, and modify the move generator there with some dedicated code for this variant. And then use this modified version instead of the standard betza.txt in the preset. All that would have to be done is to insert some code at the point where it now is decided that an encountered piece can be hopped over by a test whether both pieces belong to the set {bat, eagle, raven, archer, spearman}, and abort the generation of that hopping move when they do.

Since this code would only be invoked when a hopper move hits a potential mount, it would not slow down the move generation very much, and I could even insert that in the standard include file. Then all what would have to be done is defining the pieces that cannot hop over each other in the Pre-Game code, like

set flying (...);

where the ... would be the list of labels of all the pieces (of either color) to which this applies.

I found it. I understood that the 3rd parameter of

cbDropGeometry(files, ranks, bottomHoldings) can be used to add rows

I will test it

I thought that might be the case. They don't seem too different from pieces I've done before with GAME code. It's the Terror that looks most difficult, actually. I have not yet managed to comprehend rule enforcing for multi-moving pieces.

Might it work to use the generated code for most of it and manually define the pieces that wouldn't work?

It should be explained in the commit message of the drop model. Unfortunately that is not easy to access now that GitWeb is disabled on my website (I haven't had time to fix that yet). But if you have pulled the pullreq branch you should be able to see it on your local machine.

One of us could make it. I'm interested in trying this too

I'm going to give it a try and see what it does, but how do I go about it?

Do I need to specify anything in the model to the cbDropGeometry?
Or in the view at the boardLayout?

Here is a link in https for the implems of hectochess-seireigis to avoid complains from some Browsers

The Coppers are not in the pictures but are in the svg. With inscape you might have to zoom to see all the drawings because of the various thichness of the lines, but laser cutting software can handle this king of file.

In general, I try to associate a visual with a movement whatever the game in jocly. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but I have to adapt a lot when the movements of a known piece change. That's why I used the trident that had been envisaged for the whale in chu shogi. I realized that the movement differed from that of the whale in chu shogi when I was making the documentation, and it seemed preferable to me to avoid confusion.

It would be interesting to add mnemomic sprites as an alternative. I don't know if you'd be interested in making such a file.

Here's an SVG seireigi set if you want to test the creation of a physical game. Example in plywood (compact / cheap and quick to make but rather simple), the color code for laser cutter is red/cutting, blue engraving recto, yellow engraving verso.

Here's a link to the jocly seireigi and hectochess implementations. It would require to code evaluation function to improve the level of the engine  which still needs to be done, and will probably require some expertise. Personally, I don't mind the computer being beatable.