Ratings & Comments
Turkish Great Chess variation V. Large variant with three new pieces. (13x13, Cells: 169) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The rules above seem to be seriously flawed due to a series of errors in the literature. Please check our paper with Stefan Härtel in Board Game Studies Journal 14, pp. 43-60: https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/bgs-2020-0003
Russian fortress chess. An old Russian variant for four players. (Cells: 192) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Please check my 2015 paper on this game in Board Game Studies Journal 9, pp. 41-49: http://bgsj.ludus-opuscula.org/PDF_Files/41_49_Markov_web.pdf
As for "Tchigorin, Capablanca and Lenin": photos of Ulyanov's chess table on the internet show a board with 160 squares, i.e. the western variant with 3 additional rows, and no fortresses. Information on Capablanca, I suspect, is due to mixing up double chess (which Capablanca did play indeed), and four-handed chess. No idea about Tchigorin but I doubt it.
About Game Courier. Web-based system for playing many different variants by email or in real-time.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Wed, Oct 20, 2021 04:06 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 01:55 AM:I saw your comment after I fixed the error in the preset's code, but thank you for posting the information anyway. I'm guessing the errors above the subroutine error in the log were the main cause of the Error 524 problem, but it could be that the preset was just so big that it took too long to spot the error and print the log. After all, Taishin Shogi's GC preset is the largest GC preset with full rule enforcement and display of legal moves that I know of (in terms of board size (25x25), number of piece types (232 in total), and number of lines of code (total is probably close to or over 1000 as of right now)).
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.
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Tue, Oct 19, 2021 09:18 PM UTC: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.
I will admit that the thing is one of the biggest GC presets out there in terms of file size (if not the biggest) since there are so many piece types, as well as special promotion rules (i.e. contagious pieces), and all manner of multi-part moves, but I haven't had problems like this before.
Edit: I found the problem. It was a tiny syntax error in the isdoublemove subroutine. Everything works fine now.
Pemba. Extension of Shako, with 60 pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Dear editors I believe this page, Pemba, is ready to be published. Thank you
Pemba. Game Courier Preset to play Pemba, 60 pieces on the decimal board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Dear editors I believe this page, GC to play Pemba, is ready to be published. Thank you
Zillions of Games. It can play an endless variety of abstract board games, and we have a large collection of Chess variants you can play on it.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Guess I could try emulating windows 95
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
ChessV
. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I think I found another problem. I've tried giving a piece the xbetza move pB, but even though it can only move by jumping, it can still capture like a bishop.
Also, I have a question about promotion rules. Is it possible to have pieces promote only when making a capture in a certain area of the board, and only if the promoting player has no pieces on the board of the type being promoted to?
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]A. M. DeWitt wrote on Fri, Oct 15, 2021 10:43 PM UTC:The Edit Comment scripts aren't working properly. Whenever I try to edit a comment it fails. Posting comments still works though.
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Fri, Oct 15, 2021 07:27 PM UTC:I finally have the new Fire Demon fully and correctly implemented. Now I just need to carry the changes over to the other presets that use it.
Bugfixes for all Suzumu family GC Presets: The Fire Demon's double move option now only triggers if the piece moved to an adjacent square or there are enemy pieces adjacent to its destination, making it more user friendly. I also fixed some bugs with the Queen and Reverse Chariot not being able to promote and the promoted Queen not being given the option to make a double move when it was able to.
Game Courier Developer's Guide. Learn how to design and program Chess variants for Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]A. M. DeWitt wrote on Fri, Oct 15, 2021 07:25 PM UTC:As it turned out, I didn't need the suicides to perform the burns in Suzumu Shogi. I just needed to tweak the isdoublemove subroutine a little bit, add a FD subroutine for the Fire Demon, tweak the Fire Demon functions to include the new subroutine, and return the Fire Demon to its destination square with empty and add after it made a burning move. I love GAME code... :)
Pemba. Game Courier Preset to play Pemba, 60 pieces on the decimal board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Dear editors I believe this page, GC to play Pemba, is ready to be published. Thank you
Pemba. Extension of Shako, with 60 pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Dear editors I believe this page, Pemba, is ready to be published. Thank you
Game Courier Developer's Guide. Learn how to design and program Chess variants for Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]If something similar could be used to detect the type of piece affected by the suicide, that should be everything I need to enforce the burning rules using suicides, at least in theory.
That information is in #pfore. Just use the coordinates of the spaces with missing pieces as keys to this array.
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Thu, Oct 14, 2021 04:06 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Sun Oct 10 11:15 PM:This preset of yours for detecting captures is huge. The fact that it reliably detects where the suicide occured means that I can use it to test whether the suicide is a King's move away from the moving Fire Demon and ensure that no suicides are done when a non-Fire Demon moves, which should solve the majority of problems with coding the burning move. If something similar could be used to detect the type of piece affected by the suicide, that should be everything I need to enforce the burning rules using suicides, at least in theory. Best of all, I can just ask players that haven't made a burn after moving a Fire Demon rather than worry about displaying legal moves on the board.
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.
This is what the original Suzumu Shogi preset (and all presets using the same general codebase) does, which is largely thanks to its isdoublemove subroutine. So, I guess I could use integers instead of booleans and sub ismultimove instead of sub isdoublemove to keep track of which part of the move suffices. The only major problem is that I'm not exactly sure how to enforce rules for the third part of a three-part move. Perhaps I am overthinking it though. Perhaps just copy-pasting and tweaking the code for the second part of multi-moves will be enough. This requires testing, but thankfully, the Taishin Shogi preset (which is fully coded, at least for enforcing the old rules) affords just such an opportunity.
Edit: I figured out how to detect the type of piece that committed the suicide. Now we should be all good.
Bn Em wrote on Wed, Oct 13, 2021 02:02 PM UTC in reply to Daniel Zacharias from 01:48 AM:On the other hand, with an initial leap the blocking would only be on a single diagonal, rather than having to check the nearby orthogonal squares as well. A tradeoff really, though in any case due to the ability to avoid nearby blocking pieces the t[HB] is probably too powerful (or, on small enough boards, too awkward) to use in (most?) games anyway.
Tengu Dai Shogi. Turbo version of Dai Shogi, with some Dai Dai Shogi pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I've been working on implementing this game in Ai Ai, and have realised that there is an error in the write-up here: the Knight does not promote to Gold General in Tengu Dai Shogi, it promotes to a new piece which moves as a Chess Knight or as a Gold General. The text description and diagram are visible under the 桂馬：けいま heading on the original Japanese page.
I agree that a piece that changes direction after 3 steps could be awkward to visualize. It would be worse, though, if the first step were a jump to the third square, because with a sliding move, you can easily see if a nearby piece blocks the movement.
Bn Em wrote on Wed, Oct 13, 2021 12:11 AM UTC:I was scrolling through some old comments and have found what Aurelian would call a 3.manticore posited by Sam Trenholme in this comment, alongside the ‘3.griffin’ and a bunch of others (the ’2.manticore’ or ‘running osprey’ is in there as well). No names alas, but still interesting to see these pieces having been discussed 12 years ago (almost to the day!).
It seems to me (on the topic of that thread) that simply the fact of having to count to three rather than either changing direction immediately or simply foregoing any counting altogether (griffon/manticore and hook mover/capricorn respectively) makes the ‘3.manticore’ non‐simple from a player's perspective; the ’2.manticore’/‘running osprey’ is kind of liminal in that respect — two‐step moves are still easily visualised and trivially interpolated — though even it is in some ways arguably more complicated than the component of Tim Stiles' fox and wolf, which only has immediate turns.
Spherical Corner Chess. Game on a truly topologically spherical board with corner‐camp arrays.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Game Courier Developer's Guide. Learn how to design and program Chess variants for Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I realized the role that $width and $height play in centering the borders for highlighting spaces, and with that in mind, I simplified the code in draw_grid_png.php and made adjustments to the $width and $height of Shogi pieces and to the values of $offx and $offy in image_dimensions.php. By using proper values for $width and $height, the code will always apply CSS for margins and padding to the space class rather than to each element of the space class.
I didn't immediately recognize the importance of $width and $height, because I created these variables years before I ever added the ability to display legal moves by highlighting spaces. These variables describe the width and height of spaces, and they are used when automatically generating a board to know what dimensions to give to spaces. But sometimes an image of a board is used instead, and when it is used, $width and $height should match the size of the spaces on the image.
This is what I was neglecting to do. The highlighting in Shogi was a bit off, because the value of $height did not match the height of the spaces on the images of Shogi boards.
Since Shogi divides each space by lines, there are two choices on how to specify the dimensions of a space. One is to use the inner space between the lines, and the other is to extend the size to include the lines. I tried both and chose the latter for Shogi.
For automatically-generated boards, the centering of borders for highlighting should now be done automatically. But for boards provided as pre-drawn images, it's important to match them up with the correct values for $width and $height. One way would be to size the board with spaces the same size as the dimensions given for the piece sets to be used with it. Abstract and Alfaerie sets both normally use 50x50 spaces. Another way would be to provide correct values for your board. I could add these to the image_dimensions.php script for specific boards.
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In fact, the rook - both here and in the Emperor's game - does end up next to the king. After Tressau's (and I believe this is the correct name, not Tressan: see Oettinger’s Bibliotheca Shahiludii) rules for the Sultan's game, K moves four squares towards R which lands on the adjacent square. Check the illustrative games in Tressau's book. I have a paper in press in the Board Game Studies Journal dealing with the Emperor's game and the Sultan's game which I hope will be published in 2022; will provide a link when it is.