Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
I'm thinking of two related games that use differently sized boards. Would those be better as two separate submissions, or one with the rules for both?

While adding Interactive Diagrams to existing articles I noticed how common it is that one article discusses several variations of it, sometimes on equal footing. E.g. this one. In that respect the feature of the Diagram to allow switching between alternatives through self-generated buttons proves really useful.

Ok so apparently there's been quite a discussion here since I was last active (it's been a busy semester) and it's taken me a few days to catch up, but for what it's worth, here's where my current thoughts are on all this:
For the most part, H. G.'s position makes sense to me; my own tendency has been to be perhaps a little more lenient (in hindsight, an argument could be made, f. ex., that the accelerated Constable games might be folded into the main articles), but even there, there really ought to be some sort of limit. I have to agree that in particular the latest set of Courier‐Spiel variants Kevin is anxious to get published are similar enough to be worth condensing into fewer articles.
Whilst I appreciate Kevin's desire to give people the option to rate/favourite/comment on different pages separately, the overall tendency on this site (even without editors explicitly asking for it) has tended to be for multiple similar games to be described on one page. Betza perhaps took this a little further than would in retrospect be comfortable (often his articles would tend to focus more on general CV ideas, the games coming almost more as an afterthought in some cases; which did occasionally lead to duplication (at least two completely unrelated games called ‘Nick Danger Chess’) and makes finding specific things difficult sometimes), but most other authors who do/did so have tended to find a good balance; for all the controversy(?) around Gilman's prolific output, the actual quality of the write‐ups (perhaps excluding some of his earliest) I've always considered a bit of a model.
And whilst it's true that separate articles make indexing/categorisation easier ([this page] features only one subvariant among many that features exclusively standard pieces + compounds thereof — does it deserve the relevant tag? I deemed the answer to be yes, but a case could be made otherwise), in practice this tends to be a minor issue. Even when considering such apparently fundamental things as board size, we have pages (including one of mỹ own) that discuss multiple games with different sizes.
If I might offer a positive argument for considering multiple games on a single page, besides merely avoiding clutter: it gives you an opportunity to compare and contrast the various options, making it easier to highlight any differences/peculiarities you feel makes each one worth presenting. That's much harder to do if you're describing each one in relative isolation.
A case in point: the presentation as individual pages of Mats Winther's series of games that each add a single bifurcating piece to the orthodox array makes it very difficult to get an overview of them (especially since they look very similar to his pages for less closely‐related games). On his own site he has a separate page which introduces bifurcators in general, which is probably the most valuable page of the lot imo. And it obfuscates, rather than making clearer, the fact that he's put some effort into figuring out for each piece what he feels is the most suitable board, starting position, approximate value, ⁊c.
Addressing some of the issues raised in this comment particularly:
- Staying silent can have a variety of causes, not just tacit agreement. In my case, I've simply been very busy with life outwith CVP for the last few months, and the last week or so at least has been spent catching up on (among other things) this discussion. That I also agree with many of H. G.'s points, at least on originality, is a separate point. I'd also note that he often articulates those views I agree with better than I do, and once articulated there seems little point in repeating them; CVP comments aren't the most lightweight among ways to communicate.
- I'll admit, at least for myself, to often being quite conservative with respect to publishing things that have had (potential(?) ) faults pointed out by fellow editors (or indeed other fellow members, depending on the nature of the fault). Often these are things that either I outright agree with and have simply missed, or things where I don't really consider myself to have the expertise to judge standards (where admittedly I would in isolation tend to be lenient, but would defer to someone I feel is perhaps more authoritative in that respect)
- It might be worth making a distinction, if partially due to the way contributions to this site are structured, between originality with respect to other people's submissions, and originality wrt one's own. In particular, an author who feels like they have an interesting variant of another existing game has little option but to either add it as a comment (which in sufficiently trivial cases would be plenty) or make a whole new page for it. Lev's recently published set is perhaps the closest thing to a middle ground here, in the case of having multiple proposals (though I myself had misgivings about the originality of any of these, before the present iteration of this discussion came up). On the other hand, a single author with a set of similar ideas is very well‐placed to discuss them all together, highlighting the similarities and differences between them (and indeed, perhaps, relative importance, if some might be considered subvariants of others rather than all on equal footing). H. G.'s original comment regarding Kevin's ‐Spiele refers very much to this latter case; the former deserves arguably a bit more leniency.
@Kevin:
I'll probably take a closer look at your submissions (and the various others that've been languishing over the past couple months) in the next couple of days, though I fear there may have to be some give‐and‐take involved on your part; on a cursory assessment I'm inclined to agree many of them are similar enough that they'd be better off being described together.
@ H.G. (plus others who I addressed in my previous post, in this Thread):
Regarding the list of 5 CVs that I thought (in my opinion) were insufficiently original (the 5 may be worth discussing, if your post I'm now replying to is [yet again?] indicative of a true/unofficial policy on CVP site that I was unfortunately unaware of, until it was just a bit too late, for my stuff to be published by any editor, to date), that list of 5 is given again below, with my explanation of why I thought they may not meet such a threshold. I pointed these 5 out (to be viewed as examples) in my previous post in this Thread, since you yourself opined quite a while back that at least some of my own still waiting-for-publication CV invention(s) were, in your opinion, insufficiently original.
The result of that opinion of yours, to date, as I see it, is that you, in effect, heavily contributed to the blocking of a huge load of stuff, that I have waiting to be hopefully more closely examined by others (at least by more than 1 or 2 editors) as to whether any should be published (and, hopefully as individual CVP Rules Pages, as I very much prefer). Never mind your claim that I'm somehow distracting you too much in your last post (should I care, when you may simply have elected not have responded to my previous post, or to any others of mine in just this Thread, since your views seem already clear? - but by posting I did kind of give the benefit of the doubt, in case there was any hint of flexibility/interest to see by any poster[s], at all, otherwise). Note also that I'd rather see all that load of stuff of mine published first, than instead do stuff that you (and any others?) may prefer I do first, i.e. in spite of what you indicated in your post that I am replying to. Of course, I also wonder about any CVP editors who may still be deciding about my waiting-to-be-published stuff, even if a large number of them eventually agreed, by way of (any Comment[s], at all), with any or all of your assessments to date about my waiting stuff.
I'd note again, that the sort(s) of publishing hinderances of much of my stuff in my pipeline, that I've been faced with on CVP site to date (which can indeed be overcome, perhaps especially by those who are skilled enough as Contributors, and/or if they may be willing to cave on [at least some of] their principles, plus sacrifice more of their free time) might happen later on to other CVP Contributors, at least in theory). OK, I think I've largely said my piece (in just three paragraphs), in case very few got the most vital points from my previous post, in this Thread.
As a digression (especially to you H.G.), as to why I'm trying to fight what I see as a good fight on this CVP site, at least at the moment. Even I myself am not quite sure why such a fight (i.e. via my posts on CVP site) is worth it. I do have at least some free time, even of late, yet it's typically far from even just a very few hours every day of the week. I still live with a lot of pain - literally - every day. I trust you couldn't possibly believe me as to why, H.G.. Let's just say I'm doing my little bit to try to help save mankind, from any number of threats (I hope Fergus won't be offended [i.e. as in do an edit - hopefully only a partial one, at worst, rather than delete this whole post], since he is whom I see as, in my own informal way, CVP editor in chief, if I say here that I personally feel the need to ask for, as it were, favors from the Universe [the last word being a mysterious term astrologers in newspapers sometimes use], any number of times a day). The threats to mankind are real enough, in any case, regardless of whether you think any new medication - read any general news headlines about various parts of the globe, on the internet, on most days so far this year, for example. That's a big reason why I wonder why I use much of my free time at all, on frivolous matters (especially in this current year), such as on this CVP site, for example.
Anyway, regarding the 5 CVs that puzzled you as to why I mentioned them in my previous post, H.G., regarding as to why I saw them as lacking in originality:
-
'Xiangqi vs Orthodox Chess' and 2. 'WWII Chess' (which has a shogi army for one side's army) are in my view both not original enough to be published as a CVP Rules Page (and here's where other people might agree or disagree, besides yourself), simply because I see them as more suitable to be (perhaps merged, maybe as you'd refer to it) called cases of armies that might be somehow added to 'Chess with Different Armies' (overlooking for the moment that you assessed each of these two CVs as each being mismatches too much in favor of one army or the other, H.G.).
-
'Palace Shogi' is something I think in hindsight I was way too hasty about in assessing. I thought this CV was a bit too similar to Shogi (with some Chinese Chess rules added in), but today it is far from clear to me that it's too unoriginal, since its seems many (special!?) rules are added in to this CV
-
'Swedish Hopper Chess' was a bit too similar to FIDE Chess - just one piece in each army is different than for FIDE Chess.
-
'SuperKnights Grand Chess' is a CV I thought was a bit too unoriginal, for the same reasons that you did.
Note again that all 5 of these cases, that I happened to see in less than a week, were of already published Rules Pages on CVP - I was attempting to try to improve my case, as I see it, that CVP site may already be abundantly full of unoriginal stuff, yet all of a sudden it seems my stuff was heavily picked on. It may simply be that I should have (as a purely practical matter/strategy, as a Contributor) tried to publish just a few of my waiting CVs over the space of several years, as if to keep a low profile, and then maybe no one might have caused me my current misfortune on CVP site, as a Contributor.
Regards, KP.
Is it possible to make the ?nocache=true trick working again? It is really annoying that this causes downloading of a very obsolete and buggy version at the moment.
That should be fixed now. I had a rule for it, but it was testing the query string for *&nocache*
instead of *nocache*
.

@Fergus:
Is it possible to make the ?nocache=true trick working again? It is really annoying that this causes downloading of a very obsolete and buggy version at the moment.

It is not really a proposal, and it was not invented by me. Over the years I have seen a variety of CVP editors reject submissions for not being sufficiently different from what we already had on the site, with the remark that they could add the slight rule variation as a Note to the existing article. Usually this happened when the existing article was by another user, and the author that submitted the nearly identical variant was not aware of it. Authors that have nearly identical variants to submit will of course be aware of that, and usually have the good sense to submit them as a single article. E.g. Great Shatranj (with either Rook or War Machine) from 2006, Rose Chess (with pieces either on 1st or 2n rank, 2007), Ajax Chess (10x10 and 10x8 version, 2009). In the Wa Shogi article I made in 2015 I mention both the variant with and wihout drops, even though as far as playing experience goes the feel of these games could hardly be more different. But it only takes a single sentence to mention whether captured pieces can be dropped or not, and IMO it would not make sense to have two separate articles only differing in that single sentence.
There were three recent submissions that only differed in whether in addition to normal FIDE play you could swap pieces only with other pieces on the board, with pieces that had been captured, or with both. My recommendation was that these had better be combined into a single article, and indeed the author has now done so (under the name Swaps, where first there was Inner Swaps, Outer Swaps and Any Swaps). As far as I am concerned that does remove any objection to publication.
BTW, originality is of course not the only criterion for getting published. Playability and quality of the presentation (clarity and graphics) are other criteria that are heavily weighted. And for articles about variants that are not own inventions the originality aspect could be replaced by the notion of importance, e.g. was it described in an authoritive book, is or was it widely played, etc.
You mention 5 variants as examples of being unoriginal, but you fail to mention why (i.e. what variant they are so similar to, and whether that was by the same author or not.) Apart from nr. 5 (the umptieth variant with BN, RN and QN compounds, but many of these being historic) I would not know anything close to the others. Of course 1 and 2 are unplayable, due to the huge strength imbalance (1) and the 'guaranteed-draw problem' (2). Although in case of WW-II one could argue that it would still be a feasible game for players that are close enough in strength that both aspire to win; it doesn't seem easy to build a fortress once the pieces are spread over the board and it becomes clear that your opponent is getting the upper hand. If it had been up to me I would have certainly rejected 1. (Even the graphics suck there!)
A case that I encountered is ZigZag Madness, which in the Notes mentions to be closely related to two other variants by the same author. The unorthodox pieces in two of these three variants only differ in that one is the sliding version of the other, in the sense that a Ski-Bishop is the sliding version of an Alfil. In defense one could say that the largest part of these articles is devoted to elaborately explaining how exactly the pieces move, and they are different pieces needing a different description. So not much of the text is duplicated. This makes it quite different from the case where two versions of the same exotic piece were used instead of one of each.
And now that we are at it, can you explain why you have time for distracting me from my work of equiping hundreds of articles with Interactive Diagrams, many of these yours, by typing Comments that are even tedious to read, instead of saving me some work by equiping your articles with such Diagrams yourself? I would think that this site would benefit far more if you started to do something useful for a change, as you apparently have time to waste...
@ H.G. (and Ben, Fergus, or any [editor] who care[s]):
I have an axe to grind against CVP site, of late, and for quite some time, in fact. I admit it. I feel discriminated against, somehow (though maybe it's just acute paranoia/[being pretty darned steamed, now and then]).
H.G., you wrote, in the post I am replying to, that [henceforth!?] [all!?] [newly!?] published CVP [authored items that are about] CV inventions should be 'sufficiently' original [I suppose meaning in the 'opinion' of a given editor(s) 'judgement', to paraphrase an earlier post by Fergus in this CVP Comment Thread that I seem to recall].
Well, H.G., as far as I am concerned, this piece of policy that you propose (and that, at least so far, almost all of your fellow CVP editors who have recently visited CVP site [i.e. since the start of 2025]) have, as if, by default (you yourself have kind of put it to me that way, in this CVP Thread) condoned this policy, by their very act of staying silent (note that editor Ben has not been silent - he in effect, it seems[??] agreed with you, at least in regard to rejecting some of my own CVs still in my pipeline, waiting for publication - Fergus has been silent on that ruling, but far from silent on many other aspects of relatively recently discussed matters in this Thread). That is, these silent editors, as if by default (and you, again, H.G., seem to interpret it to be their default stance), i.e. in the way of not giving any posts that object at all to your policy proposal. Is it now fully in effect as an official CVP policy, as if your so far unchallenged opinion/(policy proposal) is in effect a new, ironclad, CVP CV item/(Page) publication requirement 'law' (Fergus, for example, might elect to comment on that, in this Thread)?.
As an aside (#1), one problem (e.g., for me!) I may have had for quite a while now is that, a kind of CVP editors' snowball effect can happen now and then: as soon as any CVP editor(s) see(s) that a fellow editor is at the least even a bit squeemish about publishing something on CVP site, quite possibly every CVP editor may in effect jump on that bandwagon (excuse my mixing metaphors - anyway, I do not care about such trivial stuff like that, right now), rather easily, if they're not quite sure if they (dis)agree with that fellow editor, even.
As another aside (#2), I see it, so far, it's one thing to silently abstain from voting in a democracy, or even within a typical sort of business organization, say one with Robert's Rules of Order in effect, but it's another thing when being someone who has volunteered to be an editor [say on CVP site] to stay silent on what I, at least, see as an extremely serious proposed policy, e.g. the current one I am writing about, that has been put forward by H.G. [there could be a separate discussion on this whole view of mine re: all CVP editor's right(s), if there should be any, to abstain for very long on {any?} policy issue(s) discussion(s), I suppose]). This is such an extremely serious policy proposal by H.G., as I see it, that it could, in the fullness of time (i.e. if this proposal is fully accepted by CVP staff) perhaps even become a sort of existential threat to the (widely!?) hoped for (even minimally sustained) popularity of this CVP site, as just possibly more and more [potential] contributors over time, in effect, may vote with their feet, as in, quit/(stay away) from this CVP website, perhaps forever more (as in, possibly not ever even bothering to later visit now and then, to even check if anything has significantly improved enough, to their own liking).
Anyway, H.G., you may ask, what prompted me to reply to your post, in regard to this particular policy proposal of yours, until finally just this day? Well, I'll tell you, H.G. - a bit further below, I'll give a short list of some CVP published CVs (a number of which you yourself updated their Pages, without adding any Comment [to such Pages], whatsoever, say especially to the effect that the CVs in question lacked sufficient originality, in your own opinion, at the least), which today I saw were Commented/Updated/Posted upon (in any way, whatsoever, unless somehow any post[s] were deleted by editor[s]), in the CVP public Comments Thread, that were dated 3 April 2025 or later. That's aside from other considerations that have somewhat restricted my own free time to post at length on CVP site, etc., for quite a while now.
Not to beat around the bush much longer (if so), I've detected (at least in my own opinion [which may well be a bit biased, I admit - not to mention that I think any number of the CVs I listed further below are, shall we say, not even worth walking the short distance across my own side street, to even become just a spectator to a pair of people playing a game of such a CV that might be among the ones that I have listed below - you be the judge, H.G., if you care to check all 5 of them quite closely, regarding assessing their playability]) a certain lack of originality to the following (5) CVs in the short list below. You tell me, H.G., or any other editor/poster, why you may disagree with my assessment re: their insufficient originality - I admit it may be a different 'lack' of such originality that you and Ben opined upon much earlier (elsewhere, I think), when not recommending the publishing of many of my own still-waiting-to-be-published CVP Rules Pages, for quite a few CV inventions of mine, which you, H.G.. recommended that in some cases should be instead merged together to make for fewer such Pages (especially due to your own /[Ben's?] perception that many CV inventions/Pages of mine still awaiting publication were not quite original enough compared to others of mine), never mind (and I paraphrase) your added observation (again elsewhere, I think) that some still waiting Pages of mine just might be (at least temporarily) rejected for publication for any other possible reason:
My list of just some (5) published CVs on CVP site that seem to lack sufficient originality, perhaps, in my opinion at least:
- Xiangqi vs. Orthodox Chess
- WWII Chess
- Palace Shogi
- Swedish Hopper Chess
- SuperKnights Grand Chess
Regards, KP.
I could use outline-offset with a negative value to keep the outline within the confines of the space, but I need to know the dimensions of the piece to finetune it.
It's now doing something along these lines. It first does some testing to determine whether the piece images are padded. If they are padded, it applies a universal outline-offset
value of "-3px"
to each image in the diagram. If they are not padded, it applies a universal value of "1px"
to each image, which keeps the outline from touching the image.
I might also see if I could use outline with a negative outline-offset on the table cell, but I'll look into that tomorrow.
That seems to work, but going with this solution would require more changes to the code.
I am not sure what problem exactly we are trying to solve here, because I don't know the shortcomings of these older browsers we are trying to cater for.
This is not about that. The problem is that putting borders around images that are already 50x50 expands table cells that are supposed to be 50x50 to something larger. There are different alternatives to doing this. One is to reduce the size of images that are too close in size to the table cell. Another is to display pieces as background images and to highlight pieces with a border over an invisible image. A third is to display pieces normally but to highlight them with the outline
CSS property instead of the border
CSS property.
I also don't really understand the difference between HTML and CSS.
Generally, though not completely strictly, HTML is about the structure of your web page, and CSS is used to control the appearance of HTML elements. Since HTML elements already come with default styles, they may be used to style a page to a limited extent. For example, I frequently use <i></i>
for italic text, and that is just an HTML tag. HTML elements also come with attributes, which can change the appearance of an HTML element. In HTML 4, for example, <FONT>
had attribute for changing the color, size, or font-face of displayed text. In HTML 5, many of these attributes are being deprecated in favor of CSS, but browsers still generally support them. CSS can be used to change the appearance of any HTML tag.
All HTML elements have a 'style' property, and it seems to me that thickness and placement of the borders are just as much style properties as background image and how that should be tiled.
The STYLE attribute on an HTML tag is a way that HTML lets you use CSS. What appears inside the value of a STYLE attribute is CSS, not HTML. You can also include CSS on an HTML page by placing it between <STYLE>
and </STYLE>
tags or by using a <LINK>
tag to load an external style sheet.
These are similar to the ways you can include JavaScript on an HTML page. You can use attributes like onClick, onMouseOver, or whatever, or you can place it between <SCRIPT>
and </SCRIPT>
tags, or you can use a <SCRIPT>
tag with an attribute to load an external JavaScript file. Like JavaScript, CSS is not HTML, but HTML includes ways for letting you use it.
For controlling such properties statically I always use a style="background:green" type specification in the HTML element itself, (rather than a class specification and a separate CSS file), when it has to be dynamically altered from JavaScript I use assignment like getElementById('...').style.background = 'green'.
That pertains to your own programming but doesn't seem to have an application to mine.
I suppose that we are dealing with the dynamic case here, where the properties of the border should be changed in reaction to selecting pieces or destinations through mouse clicks by JavaScript that is running client side. But I don't see how it would make any difference whether one uses borderWidth, background or backgroundImage as the parameter to change the visual appearance of a selected square.
By using outline
, I am not doing anything with the border. An outline may look like a border, but it operates differently than a border. An outline goes around an image without being included as part of it, whereas a border is treated as an extension of the image. So, using an outline does not increase the size the container has to be to contain the image. The advantage to doing it this way is that images can be displayed with HTML instead of CSS, as they can be displayed as normal table cell content instead of as background images. So, if someone were using an older browser or had styles turned off, they could still see where the pieces are in the diagram. While CSS styles are being used to highlight pieces, this is not as critical a feature as showing which piece is where.

While using
border
expands the box size, usingoutline
does not.
I am not sure what problem exactly we are trying to solve here, because I don't know the shortcomings of these older browsers we are trying to cater for. I also don't really understand the difference between HTML and CSS. All HTML elements have a 'style' property, and it seems to me that thickness and placement of the borders are just as much style properties as background image and how that should be tiled. For controlling such properties statically I always use a style="background:green" type specification in the HTML element itself, (rather than a class specification and a separate CSS file), when it has to be dynamically altered from JavaScript I use assignment like getElementById('...').style.background = 'green'.
I suppose that we are dealing with the dynamic case here, where the properties of the border should be changed in reaction to selecting pieces or destinations through mouse clicks by JavaScript that is running client side. But I don't see how it would make any difference whether one uses borderWidth, background or backgroundImage as the parameter to change the visual appearance of a selected square.
One alternative to reducing the dimensions of the images would be to unpad them by cropping out surrounding white space, and it looks like showpiece.php can handle this.
I tried that, but the background color wasn't perfectly transparent, and the Alfaerie pieces looked misaligned. So I looked into other options, and the one I settled on was to use outline
instead of border
to highlight spaces. While using border
expands the box size, using outline
does not. So, if a piece is as large as the space, the outline will spill over into the surrounding spaces, but it will not expand the size of the space being highlighted. I could use outline-offset
with a negative value to keep the outline within the confines of the space, but I need to know the dimensions of the piece to finetune it. I might also see if I could use outline
with a negative outline-offset
on the table cell, but I'll look into that tomorrow. Anyway, by using outline
, the pieces don't have to be reduced in size. So they no longer are.
It's not a clearly inferior method. It may be better for padded images, but for unpadded images, the Table method can be better. By putting the border around the piece image, it avoids covering the piece with the border. One alternative to reducing the dimensions of the images would be to unpad them by cropping out surrounding white space, and it looks like showpiece.php can handle this.

Are such browsers still around? Anyway, considering Kevin's remark, I don't think this is sufficiently clear to the user. Users should be warned not to use clearly inferior methods that we only provide as support for obsolete browsers if they have a better one. Ideally the server would automatically select the method that gives the best user experience for the browser he is using.
Why don't you change the table rendering method such that the pieces are displayed as background to the
elements, rather than as their content? That's what the CSS rendering method does, so called because it uses CSS. The Table rendering method does as much as it can with HTML, so that it will work with older browsers that support HTML but not CSS.
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Mar 27 06:59 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 05:44 PM:
Why don't you change the table rendering method such that the pieces are displayed as background to the <td> elements, rather than as their content? Cells would never expand if the background image is too large; they would just clip it or shrink it. The highlighting rim would always think it is in an empty cell.
This worked wonders in the Interactive Diagram. There the table cells only contain thehighlighting markers, with pieces as background. Because the piece images are transparent outside the piece, you would still see the <td> background color around those. Or, when the background is transparent, see the background of the <table> element through it. This completely removed the problem of expanding cells (or the need to take large margin around the images), which was plaguing me when the piece images were cell content.
🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Mar 27 05:44 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 06:32 AM: Fergus should know whether he changed anything in GC's general board display routines.
Yes, for the Square Table rendering method, pieces are displayed as images in a table, and they are highlighted by adding a border to the image. But when the image size was too close to the dimensions of the square, this would result in expanding the size of the square, which would also expand the size of its rank and/or file. This was not a problem for most Abstract pieces, which were optimized to the dimensions of the visible image and kept small enough that a border would fit around them without needing extra space. But since Alfaerie pieces were normally padded to 49x49 or 50x50 whatever size the actual image was, this was a problem for Alfaerie pieces. To fix this, I modified the Square Table rendering method to reduce the size of piece images that were too close in size to the size of the squares.
There are two ways to see the pieces at normal size. One is to expand the scale to 120%, which will allow the Alfaerie images to display at 50x50 instead of 40x40. However, this will also increase the size of squares to 60x60. The other way is to switch to the Square CSS rendering method. This uses CSS to give fixed positions to pieces, and it highlights pieces with the border of an invisible image it places over the piece image. This allows each border around a piece to be the same size no matter what dimensions the piece image is. Therefore, it has no reason to reduce pieces in size. In fact, I believe it works best with padded images, and it will pad optimized images to work better with it.
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Mar 27 06:32 AM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from 12:50 AM:
Indeed I could find some time to make another swoop through existing articles, for equiping those with Interactive Diagrams. To make sure I don't overlook anything I do this in alphabetical order, and it turned out you had a lot of accepted contributions starting with W.
My policy is to avoid altering the original design, i.e. use the same size, board colors and piece glyphs as the original static diagram, unless the latter is 'ascii art'. When the design uses alfaerie pieces, I use the PNG pieces derived from the SVG set, either rendered as 50x50 or 35x35. The Diagram script I use is able to scale those to other sizes.
As you noticed the elephantwazir symbol in the SVG set has the + (as wel as the x for the elephantferz) in a slightly different place on the elepant as the old GIF set. I think Greg Strong created these SVG glyphs, and I am not sure why he placed these markings in a different spot. Perhaps he thought it looked better, or perhaps he did not think about it at all. I don't think this can cause any confusion; a + inscription on a piece always means it gets the Wazir moves in addition (which of course does not exclude people will sometimes use it for some other purpose if no more suitable glyph is available for describing some weird piece, such as W-like rifle capture). There never is any information encoded in the exact location of such inscriptions.
So this seems purely an aesthetic issue, and I am neutral about whether the elephant ear or its rear leg would be a better place in this respect. Perhaps we should have a vote on this.
If your issue is that the Diagram now uses a slightly different glyph for the Waffle than you used in the explanation in the Pieces section, feel free to replace the latter by one from the PNG set too. That would look better anyway. My priority is to upgrade the main diagram of all articles; fixing other aspects would slow that down, so I don't spend any time on this.
I did not touch any presets; Fergus should know whether he changed anything in GC's general board display routines.
Kevin Pacey wrote on Thu, Mar 27 12:50 AM UTC: @ Fergus (and/or H.G.):
In regard to the link I am giving far below in this post, to a long published CVP CV Rules Page of mine (re: my Waffle Chess CV invention), I have some questions:
CVP editor H.G. made an Interactive Diagram some time ago for that Rules Page, and (I assume) substituted it, himself, for my original Setup Diagram that was once on that Rules Page. That's quite fine by me (thanks, H.G.), except only as of today I now worry that Rules Page of mine may presently not quite conform to (albeit unwritten [prominently], I suppose) CVP site standards/policies (yours personally as webmaster/editor, I assume, based on some past experiences of mine), regarding fairy chess figurines/diagrams that are to be on (at least presently) acceptable CVP Rules Pages/(CVP Preset launching Pages). That's because (though it may in fact be a very trivial/unimportant detail for most people), the (only) figurine that was used in the Pieces Section on that Rules Page of mine shows a Waffle figurine that has the '+' symbol of it (on the elephant symbol for the Waffle piece) positioned in a slightly different manner than on the Interactive Diagram itself - i.e. it is in the center of the elephant (as in fact such a figurine looks exactly as, as it is currently presented/(chosen to be) in the relevant PieceClopedia article for the Waffle/Phoenix fairy piece type). H.G.'s Interactive Diagram for my Waffle Chess Rules Page, on the other hand, uses a figurine that shows the '+' on a corner of the elephant instead (I don't know if H.G. had any other figurine available to him in any piece set, at the time that showed the '+' in the center of the elephant).
I am not 100% sure if I had the '+' symbol in a corner of the elephants in my Setup Diagram when I succeeded in getting my Waffle Chess Rules Page published on CVP site some years ago (before H.G. replaced that Setup Diagram of mine on my Rules Page with his Interactive Diagram). My history of revisions for that Rules Page seems to indicate I myself did so (subsequent revisions by you, Fergus, included a figurine in the Pieces Section on that Rules Page that showed the '+' in the middle of the elephant). I did check my Preset launching Page for Waffle Chess (also published some years ago), and discovered that CVP editor Greg Strong chose a '+' symbol to be in the corner of an elephant (from some piece set) - evidently I had accidently used an 'x' symbol instead of a '+', regardless of where I meant to have the '+' placed on that Preset launching Page of mine.
Note also that in the actual preset that I currently have (I think there is just only one of mine, at the present), I have used such '+' in the center type of elephant symbol figurines for my Waffle pieces. Not sure this is entirely acceptable, in that it does not perfectly match up with what is on the Preset launching Page's Diagram. One thing that does concern me a little more though, is that now for some reason the preset seems to show the pieces on it in the setup for it as quite noticeably smaller than I recall when I last edited that preset - is there anything that happened that could account for such a thing happening, and is it widespread (I did notice when I used to more actively use H.G.'s app to generate code for a rules-enforcing preset for a CV of mine that at one point such apparently inexplicable under-sizing of pieces for such presets also (began?) to seemingly appear regularly)?
Anyway, here's the relevant link to my CV invention (Waffle Chess) Rules Page - please let me know if there are any minor alteration(s) you may wish that I may make to my Rules Page, or to Preset launch Page, or to my Preset (all re: Waffle Chess), that any CVP editor(s) may not have spare time for any time soon; Regards KP:
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Mar 26 07:30 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 01:01 AM:
It is now. You can use the radio buttons to specify a range that will be deleted. This will delete your own revisions within the range except for the last one.
Thanks! I deleted all my incomplete revisions to the pages I have equiped with an Interactive Diagram these past days, so that now only the revision with the working Diagram is added. I also added the tag #InteractiveDiagram to all these articles.
🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Mar 26 01:01 AM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from Mon Mar 24 08:17 AM: Is it possible to delete individual revisions, rather than just everything but the last?
It is now. You can use the radio buttons to specify a range that will be deleted. This will delete your own revisions within the range except for the last one.
🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Mon, Mar 24 04:35 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 08:17 AM: Is it possible to delete individual revisions, rather than just everything but the last?
Not at the moment. I can work on adding that.
H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Mar 24 08:17 AM UTC:
@Fergus:
Is it possible to delete individual revisions, rather than just everything but the last?
(When I am adding Interactive Diagrams to an article in the database, it usually takes a few iterations before I get it right, and they now all show up in the revision history. I would like to delete most of those, without deleting the revisions made by the original author.)
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It depends somewhat on the details. But larger boards also tend to contain more pieces of new types. And, unlike variants that replace one of the pieces by another, they would certainly have no overlap in their game trees. Jean-Louis Cazaux's Metamachy (12x12), Gigachess II (14x14) and Terachess II (16x16) are clearly related, but each has its own article. OTOH, the article on Capablanca Chess discusses both the 10x10 and 10x8 version. But this could be because these both historically are called 'Capanlanca Chess'. The Ajax Chess article discusses both a 10x10 and 10x8 version with otherwise the same piece setup (but one with mirror symmetry, the other inversion symmetry). I have separate articles for the related variants Makromachy (14x14) and Megalomachy (16x16).
If a rule is to be derived from these facts, it would be that if variants that only differ in the number of empty ranks between the armies (with corresponding adaptation of the Pawn's initial push), and/or the orientation of the black army, should be presented in a single article.