Comments by HGMuller

Is the Paste Diagram description here: input broken?

Not that I know; for me it still works. What are you trying to paste?

Is the Sissa possible in fairy-max?

No.:-(

I am planning to create an engine similar in strength to Fairy-Max which can do anything the Interactive Diagram can do. But it is in a very early stage of inception,  and the project was interrupted by the necessity to rescue the TalkChess forum.

Resegnation is a fact of life that cannot be prevented by any rules. The best rules can do is put a sanction on doing it, and the worst imaginable sanction is an individual game is that you would lose. Which is exactly the idea, and thus has zero value as a deterrent. You will have to find a better solution for when one of the palyers forfeits (e.g. loses on time because he simply walked away).

The board is drawn in an unnecessarily much distorted way; many cells are very narrow, without reason. The 'arms' of the board could be made much wider, and all cells could be approximately circular. All edge cells could be of the same, minimal size, and then increase in size towards the center, the three heptagons being largest of all.

the ferz knight in this interactive diagram is wrongly colored for black

Not for me. Try to flush your browser cache; this problem was already detected and fixed in Herculean Chess, and that fix should be effective here too.

It seems we are turning into an art website, now that 75% of the pages is devoted to art, and only a quarter contains actual information. (And that is even discounting the ads...)

Perhaps we should move the website to the domain www.chess-art.com, instead of chessvariants.com?

A figure with a horse head or helmet doesn't remind me of a centaur.

It is a bit difficult to diagnose the problem. By adding the ?nocache=true you bypass the CloudFlare cache, but the browser would also consider it a file that is distinct from the one without that suffix. So it would keep separate copies in the browser cache for each of those, and when you have seen the correct one through the ?nocache=true prefix requesting the file without prefix might still give you the obsolete one.

And the problem is that in the context of pages in articles by others you have no control over whether this suffix is added.

I think the generally best idea for all situations is "if you cannot do it properly, better not do it at all".

The world will not become a better place by spreading around crappy solutions because these were the best one could think of.

Perhaps representing something that is recognizable as a centaur requires a level of detail that is incompatible with the level of abstraction (no arms, no legs...) of the Staunton design. In that case it would be a mistake to go for a realistic representation. Use something more abstract. Like bowling peg with a horse tail sticking out at 1/3 of the height.

the author refuses to further explain his reason for choosing such a number. 

You obviously have not read "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe"...

But, no panic!

As crowns and miters are something worn on the head, some other kind of headgear, such as a helmet or a hat would probably be suitable for a piece with the additional powers of a man. While this might not work as easily for rook+man or bishop+man, these are also rook+ferz and bishop+wazir and are known by other names, such as dragon horse and dragon king. So maybe they could be represented in a different manner. Or all three might be represented by human face pieces like in the Superba set.

Even though chess pieces (unlike the pictograms used in 2d diagrams) are more than just the head or head cover, it is true that the head is the distinctive feature, and the bodies all look alike.

To indicate the KN move in a variant that also features the Amazon, you could leave on the cross. It is very unlikely there will be both a royal and non-royal Centaur in the same variant. Or replace the cross by a spike, to distinguish it both from a Queen and a King head.

The Jocly 3d pieces can provide some inspiration; the Crowned Rook there is a Rook with a crossless King head mounted on top. No room for confusion there; a Rook with a Queen's head would make no sense. For the Crowned Bishop I use a pontifical tiara. Both give pieces that distinguish themselves very well from other Staunton pieces.

Resigning in a 3-player game is a serious problem, though. I think the rule that is currently stated is very unsatisfactory. In fact most games are expected to enter a phase where one of the players has no hope at all to win, and would likely lose interest at that point. If one of the players was obviously winning, resegnation at that point, resulting in a 3/4-3/4-0 score, would rob him of the deserved victory. Preferably resignation of one of the players would not disturb the balance of power between the other two, and desiding upon a result immediately would almost always do that.

Does Jocly currently support any variant that uses Berolina Pawns at all? The 3d realization was made mostly as a test case for the initial version of the Tube tool (it is a purely cylindrical design). In that sense the committing of it was a bit premature, like for the Flamingo.

The design you have here looks a lot like the Alfaerie design, which is a variation on the Alfaerie normal Pawn. But the Wikipedia set uses an entirely different Pawn design. If we want to add new Pawn types, I think we should use that as basis.

Spartan Chess is an implemented variant that uses a different Pawn type, for the Spartans. These 'Hoplits' are very close to a Berolina Pawn, but not exactly equal, because their initial double push can jump, and isn't subject to e.p. capture. They do have their own 3d image, (a Pawn modified to carry a lance), but also use the normal Pawn image in 2d. If we want to distinguish the Pawns in 2d it seems more urgent to do find a symbol for those. In the WinBoard implementation I use the Lance pictogram for those. We could also do that in Jocly (now that we added the Lance). But it would still not have its own picto-sprite in that case. (But who would want to use a Lance and a Hoplit in the same variant...)

I am not sure we should go for a double-head design in 2d if we did not also do that in 3d. An alternative would be to write a V on their breast, to symbolize their non-capturing move.

And what about the Asian Pawn, for the western skins of the Shogi variants? These now also use the normal Pawn symbol.

The date no doubt has something to do with it. :-)))

That is how I represented the ferz-knight and wazir-knight in Jocly (e.g. in Scirocco): A Knight on a somewhat taller base (so it is not so easily confused with a normal Knight) in the shape of a cross, oriented along the F or W move.

How about this one, then: "it would be a miracle if there weren't any genuine coincidences".

Wagon promotes to Rhino = W-then-B Spider. Chariot (R4) promotes to Griffon (on CVP still represented by a dragon) = Octopus = F-then-R.

This is as it should be.