Comments by ChessShogi

That's a really nice feature. For example, it saves a huge amount of time in the diagrams for Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi from not having to check nearly as many locations for Heavenly Tetrarches (which which immobilize non-Tetrarch pieces) during move vetting. I've now implemented the new code in the Rules pages for these games.

Also, can you approve the Rules pages for Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi? I've been waiting rather patiently, and their corresponding GC Preset pages have been approved, but the editors haven't seemed to notice the Rules pages, possibly due to the new sorting method for the Review New Submissions page.

I don't know how to approve articles; I limit my activities as editor to inserting Interactive Diagrams in existing articles, and improving the infra-structure for doing this. I am the only editor working on this task, and it doesn't seem a good idea to reduce the time I can spend on it by also taking up tasks that other editors can do.

That's OK. I assume you passed that along to another editor, and they approved it themselves.

It would be a misconception to think editors communicate amongst each other by any other means than the comments you can read here...

Well, whatever the case, the issue is settled. I'll let you get back to working on the Interactive Diagram code.

BTW, the tracking, and thus the marking the spell zone of the indicated piece, currently only works correctly if there are not more than two pieces of that type in play. Otherwise it will loose track of some of the pieces. The current way I use for tracking just keeps two locations (in loc[coloredType] and loc[coloredType+512]), of the last two pieces of that type that were moved during the search. (And it then only marks the spell zones around those.) Now this is fine for Mitsugumu Shogi, but in Suzumu Shogi there can potentially be 4 Tetrarchs. This is of course unlikely to happen in a real game, so perhaps we should not worry about it at all.

I can switch to a more robust way of tracking, able of handling an arbitrary number of pieces of the same type. This would cause a slight slowdown, though. Which is a pity, as almost no game would use it. An cheaper alternative would be to allow requesting spell zones around more than one piece type, so that piece types of which there can be more than two instances can be artificially split into two identical types. The location of each piece is tracked anyway, it is just a matter of marking the squares around the designated types before every move generation, and pieces where only a single type cause spells would not experience a delay by this.

It would even be possible to mark the spell zones of different types differently, e.g. as nodes | (1<<(24+K)) for the Kth spell zone. This would allow, say, freezing and burning in the same Diagram. The test for being in the zone would than have to be (neighbors[sqrNr] & 0xFFFFFF) == nodes. I wonder if all that complexity would be worth it, though. I am not even aware of any variants that would need it.

You could increase the cap of instances of one type for trackPieces to four without much trouble. This would take care of the 3+ Tetrarches problem in Suzumu Shogi while leaving plenty of room to handle the vast majority of cases. However, the more robust tracking method would be preferred for games using Chess-style promotion (you could have up to (#startingSpellPieces)+(#piecesPromotableToSpellPieces) pieces with spell effects).

As for multiple spells, I agree would not worry about that right now, as I can't see any variants that will be using that either. Besides, there is also the frozen variable, the 251 kamikaze promotion, and the 512(+[bits]) promotion methods, which can be used to implement spells in the xxZone, xxxPromotion, and xxxTinker scripts withouts using the spell parameters.

@Adam: I see that you are using your own markers. Beware that I have added a new marker (markerFFF000.png), which the betzaNew.js script uses for indicating moves of a piece that has active burning defined for it through the captureMatrix in the move diagrams. It then also indicates the blastZone on hovering, by making the background of the burned squares around the indicated target grey.

Thankfully that's very easy to do, as my markers are all simple circles.

Would it be possible to implement a system to allow the inclusion of pieces with multiple-character IDs in the Diagram parameters that use them? If you need suggestions for how to implement something like this, Fergus uses a system in his FEN parser for Game Courier that surrounds multi-character piece IDs in {} curly brackets (e.g. {+P} for promoted Shogi pawn).

P.S. Those empty comments were me trying to insert this comment while I was not logged in, which may be the result of a bug.

I guess I don't really need the curly bracket enclosures.

However, I do need help with captureMatrix. I'm trying to use it to replace the modified NextLeg Function in Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi, and it works, but it seems to exclude certain cases where hops should be allowed (such as hopping over a lower-ranking friendly piece). Strangely, Minjiku Shogi does not have this problem. The captureMatrix value I have so far is this:

captureMatrix=//////////////////////////27^27,27^60,27^28,27^61,27^34,27^64,27^35,27^65,27^37,27^46/28^27,28^60,28^28,28^61,28^34,28^64,28^35,28^65,28^37,28^46//////34^34,34^64,34^35,34^65,34^37,34^46/35^35,35^65,35^37,35^46/////////////////////////60^27,60^60,60^28,60^61,60^34,60^64,60^35,60^65,60^37,60^46/61^27,61^60,61^28,61^61,61^34,61^64,61^35,61^65,61^37,61^46/././64^34,64^64,64^35,64^65,64^37,64^46/65^35,65^65,65^37,65^46
 

Now I've got it figured out. Thanks to this, I no longer need the modified NextLeg function (jumpClass is still needed to for the multi-captures though).

Now I have it figured out. Thanks. I'll also redo the Tenjiku Diagram so it uses captureMatrix instead.

Hook Shogi is ready