Check out Modern Chess, our featured variant for January, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Sep 30, 2023 08:32 PM UTC in reply to Bob Greenwade from 06:52 PM:

Well, e-readers do have monochrome displays, and this was originally the reason why I introduced the board markers as an alternative for back-ground-color highlighting. For the current application it seems less essential to be able to distinguish the colors, though. It would be rare that the different 'special actions' would be needed in the same variant; in fact it would already be rare that they would be used at all. And if you don't make any mistakes you would just be spreading around a special action you just selected over empty squares / table cells. And even if you did make a mistake that need overwriting you would know what you are spreading around, and where it had to go, and it would not be of interest what was there before by mistake.

As a legitimate application for overwriting I could imagine a piece that can in general not be captured, except by just one or two types, in a variant with a great many types. You could then use double-clicking to fill the entire capture row (to be used as column here) with holes, and then overwrite those for the few piece types that actually can capture by clearing the holes again.

Other than that, the only thing I'd say is that pieces on the board should have their moves on the table shaded green, just like the Absentees. If you think they should be differentiated, then perhaps cyan would do.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking too, but since placing on the board is a normal operation of the ID that is also used in playing games with piece drops (where we definitely would not want the table pieces to be marked) I didn't figure out yet how I could achieve that by code embedded in the Applet page, without modification of the general Diagram script.

And did you make any changes to the piece selection list? A couple dozen of them seem to have vanished, including several that I was relying on for Short Sliders.

I did not make any conscious changes in the table. And even if I would have deleted pieces from the table defined on the page, the initialization script there would scan the piece-image directory, and add all pieces it finds there to the table. The reason I included any piece table at all on  the page is to make sure important pieces have the appropriate move defined for them (the script would not know this for the images it adds), and to make the most commonly used pieces appear early in the table in a sensible order (rather than in the order they would have in the directory listing, which might be alphabetical).

Can you tell me which piece(s) you are missing, so that I can see if I have this problem too, and if so, what causes it?


Edit Form

Comment on the page Play-test applet for chess variants

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.