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CHESSAGON. CHESSAGON® is like traditional Chess, but with Triangles, with one new additional piece named the Duke.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 07:41 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 07:16 PM:

And using a monochrome background is bound to save a far larger factor than 50%.

You misread what I wrote. That 50% refers to image quality. It is a value that is passed to the function for converting a PNG to a JPG. The reduction in filesize was around 90%. As I said, it reduced it to about 10% of the original size.


H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 07:16 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 05:47 PM:

But they would still look ugly, without monochrome background. And using a monochrome background is bound to save a far larger factor than 50%.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 05:47 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 04:08 PM:

There are two ways to reduce the filesize of these images. One is to re-edit them to use monochrome backgrounds. The other is to convert them to JPG images. These are all PNG files, which can be very large when you have many colors and lots of detail. I converted the setup diagram to a JPG at 50% reduction, which reduced the filesize to around 10% of its original size without any noticeable change in appearance. When I clicked Keep, it deleted the original image and kept the reduced image. So, I changed the IMG link in the code to the reduced image. If the author would convert all the other images to JPG images, they should fit in the space provided.


H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 04:08 PM UTC in reply to Ben Reiniger from 02:51 PM:

Another way to look at this is that the authors should simply provide suitable images. 8MB for a few pieces and move diagrams is pretty ridiculous. We did not put an upload limit for no reason; space and bandwidth are not entirely free, and unlimited wasting of those resources will hurt.

The images I see now in no way qualify as 'high quality'. They are in fact awful. They contain lots of totally unnecessary detail (like an irregular texture for the background of a board) which enormously bloats them, and is detrimental to the purpose they are for (namely to convey how the pieces move). Less detail = better, and the image size is a good indication of the lack of suitability.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 04:06 PM UTC in reply to Ben Reiniger from 02:51 PM:

shrink the image data size without hurting quality too much

The file manager is able to do that.


Ben Reiniger wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 02:51 PM UTC:

We should tackle the external images; one of:

  1. bypass the upload limit temporarily
  2. shrink the image data size without hurting quality too much
  3. add a way for editors to hide the external image warning block (case-by-case)
  4. maybe OK certain external sites? github ought to be pretty stable?

🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 01:39 PM UTC in reply to David Cannon from 04:57 AM:

I'm pleased to see this game! One correction : it is a trigonal, not hexaxonal, chess variant. The cells are triangles, not hexagons.

I unchecked the hexagonal category. However, it is accurate to say it played on "a hexagonal board of dark and light triangles," because the board is in the shape of a hexagon.


David Cannon wrote on Tue, Feb 9, 2021 04:57 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

I'm pleased to see this game! One correction : it is a trigonal, not hexaxonal, chess variant. The cells are triangles, not hexagons.

That said, I think this is an excellent contribution to the much under-explored trigonal tiling. Apart from a couple of games contributed by Graeme Neatham and Christian Freeling, along with a couple of my own, I think this is a little-used tiling which has lots of interesting possibilities for play.


Anthony Viens wrote on Wed, Oct 24, 2018 06:59 AM UTC:Good ★★★★

I am interested in seing some of the more 'out there' piece ideas you have.  In my personal opinion, once you've gone through all the trouble to develop a triangular board, you need to push the envelope on the pieces.

Other than just being chess on a triangular board, this looks perfectly playable!  Very nice!


💡📝Kerry Langford wrote on Thu, May 3, 2018 01:16 PM UTC:

My brother and I are in the process of creating some pieces for the board that have more interesting moves and rules which could be used for variations on the basic Chessagon rules of play.  Chessagon is intended to be as true to traditional Chess as possible.  However, we have always had additional ideas for unique variations to the Chessagon game much like Seirawan Chess or Musketeer Chess. We always felt the Duke pieces was special because it accounted for a whole set directions of movement you get when playing on triangles that you don't have at all when playing on squares. It was geometrically necessary to account for it and include it in the basic rules of play for Chessagon.


David Cannon wrote on Mon, Apr 23, 2018 02:42 PM UTC:Good ★★★★

I'm delighted to see a variant based on triangular cells, rather than squares or hexagons. Not that there's anything wrong with squares and hexagons, but that triangles are under-explored and under-exploited. Christian Freeling and Graeme Neatham invented several trigonal chess games, and I contributed a couple of my own (Rotorblades Chess and Rotorblades Fusion Chess). And of course there's Klinzha. But for the most part, inventors seem to give triangular boards a miss. 

I see that Chessagon tries to be as faithful as possible to traditional chess. That's one "pole" of the chess variant universe; the other "pole" is games like Arimaa, which barely qualify as chess variants. My own taste is for something in the middle —I like games that extrapolate the moves of the traditional pieces to the new geometry, but also introduce pieces that take advantage of the new geometry in a way that the familiar pieces cannot. The only piece of this nature to do so in Chessagon is the Duke, and I think there is room for more unusual pieces that would create interesting possibilities for play. 


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