Comments by benr

white (blue) can put the king in check on ranks 5-7

I wonder how hard mate will be; you can't get very close to the king while still giving check, so a rook/queen net seems the only way, but with all the other pieces getting in the way...
On the other hand, maybe all the other pieces actually help? A sample mate (preferably one arising from actual play) would be helpful.

In Borderline, capturing pieces is excluded

Oh boy, sorry. Maybe add that all-important bit as the first bulleted Rule so skimmers like me don't miss/forget it from the intro (ugh, and even the short description, maybe it's just me)?

missing description of the pieces

@Fergus, the sections aside from Introduction are empty, yet the display script is not hiding them as usual. Any idea why?

@Eric, I had to fix most of the index information you provided.

The third sentence of the archer's description is incomplete.

I tried to set Begnis as the inventor. That field seems to have populated, but the edit person script appears to still not work. I can try again later if Fergus (or another) doesn't beat me to it.

Fergus, you were able to see proper sql error messages in the logs before; can you get those to print in the helper function?

I think we use 0 for infinite/indeterminate.

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.

Comments from non-(signed-in-)users display empty until an editor approves them, or a certain amount of time passes. They used to display a message to that effect; I'm not sure when or why that changed.

I deleted the copies of this comment.

A Zillions page here needs to have the zrf included (or a url to such, but I think the actual file is beneficial for preservation).

Since people keep wanting to use tags for information that is already stored in the database, I have modified the footer script to include categories and board dimensions just above the tags section.

Did any of the folks interested in board size tags still find them useful after this addition, or can we delete them?

Even if you would only allow combinations of two

This seems to be the case, see the references to "basic" pieces as opposed to "queens".

[...] you would still have 6x5 = 30 combination pieces.

Half that, since the order of specification doesn't matter. The article mentions 15 pieces in the values section. (Still a lot of names, granted.)

But what do these add, now with board size specified and linked at the bottom of pages?

@Kevin, you did indeed upload the image; all that remained was to edit the page's content to update the IMG SRC tag to use the new URL (visible in the file manager where you uploaded it).

@Fergus, the third rule means the king isn't under attack from the starting position.

I'm able to use the applets in Chrome with the CheerpJ Applet Runner extension.

I know eventually all these workarounds will fail and these applets will be forever unplayable. And indeed there are increasingly good ways to keep playing many of the variants elsewhere. But Ed's applets (on his own website) were my first introduction to variants, and I'll be sad when I can't play them anymore.

This first page of the member submitted item process has an ItemID, so it can be commented on, but they don't display at the bottom of the page (I added the comment through the Info page). I'm fine either way there.

But it also displays the Tags snippet, which has been misleading users into thinking they can tag their new submission.

At first I figured this was just another "haha, it's big and there are a ton of pieces", but then I got to the Progressive part. I'm not sure if that saves the game, but it at least makes it worth asking about; your example games link doesn't work (and strikes me as a little sketchy anyway).

If it were possible to attach such a file here, I would gladly do it.

Under the Edit menu, Upload or Manage Files.

The first experimental correspondence tournament has recently ended and I have the results of all 42 games with diagrams. If you want I can send it to you. [...] Judging by the results of the tournament, many players, even of a decent level, were confused and did not find the right tactics and strategy over the board.

That would be nice. Send to [email protected] so other editors can see it if they'd like. Probably putting in the page one particularly illuminating example game would also be nice.

I agree that the empty board should be removed. The large blue area is due to putting too large a number of empty spaces (made blue rather than board spaces by the limit to number of rows): replacing the 384 at the beginning of the code string by 96 should work. For file labels that's a parameter in the diagram designer (and resulting image url string) and can easily be fixed, but it's worth saying something in the text: you want to skip x so that capture notation doesn't conflict.

Also, there's an odd pattern of blue strips between some rows and columns. Changing the scale parameter to 60 seems to fix it; other numbers give different patterns. Probably better is to use the default scale for the diagram designer, but then scale it down in the page.

But is there some motivation for this game? There are other games that just push together multiple boards & piece sets. Does this one stand out as better in some way? Why so much space behind the pieces?

For reference, Betza has a (unofficial/untested?) Chess-with-different-armies team with an amazon; he just limits the rooks to R4 and keeps the other pieces:

https://www.chessvariants.org/d.betza/chessvar/cvda/amazon.html