Comments by benr

From the chess StackExchange site comes this variant question: https://chess.stackexchange.com/q/41052/18278

To paraphrase very briefly: compound pieces seem to often have a synergy value of 1 (e.g. Q=R+B, v(Q)=9, v(R)+v(B)=8); do amphibians see a larger synergy bonus arising from their un-binding?

@Greg, leaving (at least) two spaces at the end of a line before a return renders a newline without a new paragraph.

E.g.,
Ben

I made a quick test submission and can confirm that text outside of paragraph tags disappears somewhere between the submission and the database. What changes happened with the addition of markdown as an option for MS pages, and to what extent does CKEditor interfere with the HTML option?

The Revisions for this page also look very strange, pegging loads of revisions to the same timestamp 2022-11-27 12:54:56. None of them load the wizard for me, but I'm on mobile right now.

I think the Elk is a great example where being able to move the piece around would be really helpful. No, the user might not start with the diagram and quickly figure out the pattern, but a static movement diagram leaves the user with the impression that it's just a rook (assuming it started on light). Reading the rules is required in either case, but with the ability to move the Elk in the movement diagram the user can verify that it's working as expected / that the user has understood the text.

Now, the actual ID is sufficient for this, and the movement diagram mode doesn't need this additional feature. But it seems an incremental improvement if it's not difficult to implement and doesn't confuse the interface too much.

@Jean-Louis A fair amount of the editorial work here can be done through the forms on this website, and so don't require file transfers and such. But updating an old html page requires that (or at least sending the html file to an editor who can), and migrating an html game page to the database requires that plus some more technical work.

Indeed, I must have done something wrong in the migration. At least the current home of the page in the database appears to be fine. But the old page /large.dir/tamerlane2.html tries to redirect to /rules/TamerlaneII (which I think should be correct; that's the ItemID I set up everywhere) but that gets a 404 as well; instead, I get access to the DB version of the page here at /invention/tamerlane2.
@Fergus?

Thanks Thomas, you're right. Neither of these tags should exist anyway, because item entries already store the number of rows and columns, and that's a better way to search for items.

We started to work on adding pieces to the database a couple of years ago, and I'd like to pick that back up. Eventually that would replace the piece tags here (at least, I think it would be better), but until we get scripts up for crowdsourcing the piece-game relation table, I think users adding tags like these will work, and we can migrate the information over later.

I'm not sure if this is due to the server move, but member-submission of External Link pages doesn't seem to be working. I started doing some debugging, and it seems to die in membersubmissions2.php when trying to execute the replaceitem query (but the error handling there doesn't trigger either), what is currently line 385.

@Jörg You can also get to same-board listings from the header menu, Related->Games on Same Board.

I just tried again, 7:44am CST, itemid MLlichess. I had added MSlichess before realizing I had forgotten to switch to a link item, so that's likely the problem, but I removed the Item and IndexEntry entries (and the MemberSubmissions never got created), and any other locations shouldn't affect the Replace into Item query?

Also, as someone else reported recently: I can't edit another test entry (MLtestlink) to have empty content, but without empty content I cannot use the forms to delete it. Which of these protections do we want to keep?

@Kevin, indeed GC presets aren't "Items" in the database, and so can't be favorited, commented on, tagged, etc. Perhaps some of that can be changed, but it would be a pretty big change. (I think favorites should be limited to games, but comments on a preset separate from the game make sense to me. I'm not sure about tags: I wouldn't want information duplicated between the game and the preset, but maybe there are sensible preset-specific tags? But then we'd have the same system for two disjoint sets of objects...)

As for searching for presets (without a Game or preset landing page*), maybe the /play/pbm/listgames.php script should take additional filtering options.

*That's another thing: the pairing of preset landing pages (MP... for member-submitted ones) with presets has always seemed redundant to me.

@Fergus, thanks! I had emptied boardrows in my submission.

I thought in the past I could put board rows/columns/levels/cells as empty and they'd populate as nulls. Either I'm wrong about that, or something has changed. I think being able to leave those fields blank for non-game pages is the most natural.

Should this script be calling update_row (or some other indexing func) instead of its ad hoc query?

The title of this page seems wrong on both counts: it is not infinite, and it is 4d, not 3d.

The introduction discusses infinite chess, but the eventual game description is clearly 4d (in an asymmetric, "2d+2d" way like Parton's Sphinx Chess).

It should be the same as for rows/columns in 2d hexagonal games, right? (I'm not sure if we have a consistent policy for that...)

4d games are rare enough that I wouldn't have bothered to add a database column. It will probably cause confusion for new authors. But there's already reason to expound on the categories and index information on special cases, maybe as tooltips plus a link to a page describing non-obvious conventions?

The queen and wizard don't slide then, correct?

Checkmate might be rather difficult here, but I haven't thought too much about it; the pieces are weaker than many 4D variants, but it's also a very small space.

Note that the knights cannot reach the centermost square. I was wrong here, see subsequent comments.

I cannot use the item quick-edit script (as an editor) because the form does not have the new BoardRealms input (though perhaps the quick edit can be deprecated now that the author list population isn't so slow), and the database apparently won't allow it to be null. Again, I really think allowing nulls for non-game items would be best, and BoardRealms should be defaulted to 1 in any forms.

No, rules 2-3 means that pieces cannot move from one "domain" to another except as in a 4d (asymmetric) game.

But it does look like I may have been wrong about the title: the domains are each infinite, while apparently the domains are supposed to be limited to an 8x8 grid.

Afaict the second part of the N's move is optional here[...]

Ah, you're absolutely right.

I did some minor editing (fixed the header levels, changed the origin of the berolina pawn, shrank the custom setup image). The en passant rule "same as Horizon" should be explicitly spelled out on this page, please.

Any updates here?

Do you mean white (er...blue?) pieces don't give check except when they are on ranks 4-7?

What do you think about the volatility of facing rooks and queens?

This reminds me a little of the Unreal-Tournament-inspired Domination Chess.