OK, sorry. I missed that 3D button. The Tiger looks nice. Most of the pieces in the table don't exist as 3D yet, though. And another concern: are we allowed to use the pieces there in Jocly? The Musketeer Jocly branch is proprietry.
Kirin and Phoenix are very popular shogi pieces, I guess for the lack of oblique leaps there. So their choice for 8-target leapers isn't so large. And many of my variants were shogi-inspired; this whole idea of flying pieces was taken from Tenjiku Shogi. In Minjiku Shogi I used the Rhino for Kirin, because I understood it is a horned mythical beast. But I don't particularly like the 3D realization of that . (Now that we have Giraffe I could use that instead, as this is the modern meaning of the Japanese word 'kirin'.) For the Phoenix I used the Stork, which is not one of my best creations, though. (It doesn't really have enough resolution.) I made it by replacing the vertex coordinates of the upper part of some other piece, (so it could keep using the same uvs and maps) with the aid of a small program to generate a set of tilted rings.But the piece I started from did not have enough rings in it to get a smooth effect, even though I like the overall shape.
Something completely different: In the latest version of fairy-move-model.js I added a (yet untested) function Model.Game.cbPiecesFromFEN. This is an attempt to automate the creation of the pieceTypes object in the game definition. You just pass it a FEN of the position you want, and then it would put standard descriptions of all the pieces that occur in the FEN, with the corresponding initial coordinates. For variants without very exotic pieces this then would be all that is needed. For orthodox Chess you only would have to write:
and then continue with the castle: and promote: definitions.
One can allways add pieces to it later with statements like pieces[N]={ name: "xxx", ... };. Or perhaps I should put a method for that in the pieces object, so that you could write pieces.add({name: "xxx", ...});, which automatically puts it at the next number.
How useful this is depends of course on the 'palette' of pieces that are recognized. I now have the orthodox pieces P,N,B,R,Q,K, knighted A and M, Omega W and H (for Champion), bent sliders G and U (for Unicorno), hoppers V and X (for Xiangqi Cannon), Elephant, Camel and Zebra. S is the Asian Pawn (Soldier). If we stick to single letters D,F,I,J,L,O,T,Y are still left. Do you have any suggestions for how to assign those? (T could be Terror, and alternative name for Amazon.) It should be for pieces that have a well-established move only.
I also have some misgivings about the cumbersome way conventional Jocly programming implements initial Pawn pushes. Which clutters the function needed for promotion. This is totally unneeded, because Jocly's graphs intrinsically have position-dependent moving. So initial Pawns and normal Pawns could very well have been the same piece, using a graph with different moves on the 2nd rank than on other ranks. So I am thinking of generalizing the cbPawnGraph function to produce a graph that by default always allows the Pawn to move up to the mid-line of the board, but where an extra numeric parameter could limit the rank from which this is possible. (Which would usually be the starting rank.)
OK, sorry. I missed that 3D button. The Tiger looks nice. Most of the pieces in the table don't exist as 3D yet, though. And another concern: are we allowed to use the pieces there in Jocly? The Musketeer Jocly branch is proprietry.
Kirin and Phoenix are very popular shogi pieces, I guess for the lack of oblique leaps there. So their choice for 8-target leapers isn't so large. And many of my variants were shogi-inspired; this whole idea of flying pieces was taken from Tenjiku Shogi. In Minjiku Shogi I used the Rhino for Kirin, because I understood it is a horned mythical beast. But I don't particularly like the 3D realization of that . (Now that we have Giraffe I could use that instead, as this is the modern meaning of the Japanese word 'kirin'.) For the Phoenix I used the Stork, which is not one of my best creations, though. (It doesn't really have enough resolution.) I made it by replacing the vertex coordinates of the upper part of some other piece, (so it could keep using the same uvs and maps) with the aid of a small program to generate a set of tilted rings.But the piece I started from did not have enough rings in it to get a smooth effect, even though I like the overall shape.
Something completely different: In the latest version of fairy-move-model.js I added a (yet untested) function Model.Game.cbPiecesFromFEN. This is an attempt to automate the creation of the pieceTypes object in the game definition. You just pass it a FEN of the position you want, and then it would put standard descriptions of all the pieces that occur in the FEN, with the corresponding initial coordinates. For variants without very exotic pieces this then would be all that is needed. For orthodox Chess you only would have to write:
and then continue with the castle: and promote: definitions.
One can allways add pieces to it later with statements like pieces[N]={ name: "xxx", ... };. Or perhaps I should put a method for that in the pieces object, so that you could write pieces.add({name: "xxx", ...});, which automatically puts it at the next number.
How useful this is depends of course on the 'palette' of pieces that are recognized. I now have the orthodox pieces P,N,B,R,Q,K, knighted A and M, Omega W and H (for Champion), bent sliders G and U (for Unicorno), hoppers V and X (for Xiangqi Cannon), Elephant, Camel and Zebra. S is the Asian Pawn (Soldier). If we stick to single letters D,F,I,J,L,O,T,Y are still left. Do you have any suggestions for how to assign those? (T could be Terror, and alternative name for Amazon.) It should be for pieces that have a well-established move only.
I also have some misgivings about the cumbersome way conventional Jocly programming implements initial Pawn pushes. Which clutters the function needed for promotion. This is totally unneeded, because Jocly's graphs intrinsically have position-dependent moving. So initial Pawns and normal Pawns could very well have been the same piece, using a graph with different moves on the 2nd rank than on other ranks. So I am thinking of generalizing the cbPawnGraph function to produce a graph that by default always allows the Pawn to move up to the mid-line of the board, but where an extra numeric parameter could limit the rank from which this is possible. (Which would usually be the starting rank.)