Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

The Eagle's move (is this the Griffon's move?) could be reversed here so that instead a Rook's single move is then followed by a Bishop's unrestricted slide - I did use similar pieces in my game of Citadel, but I kept both Rook and Bishop unrestricted slides in both pieces ( I called them Tiger-riders); they seemed about as strong as the Chess Queen - I had the original idea from the Giraffe of Tamerlane Chess and based Citadel very loosly on this Game.

It looks like an interesting game. A page on it would be a welcome addition.

> ( I called them Tiger-Riders); they seemed about as strong as the Chess Queen

It seems to me they should be considerably stronger than a Queen. Instead of Rook + Bishop they are Rook + double-barrel Bishop, or Bishop + double-barrel Rook. The normal Gryphon (as in Grant Acedrex) is already close to Queen. As it should, because like Queen, it covers 8 rays. You just lose a little bit because pairs of rays overlap on their first square.

BTW, it seems that your Citadel article could also benefit from an interactive diagram, as there are many unorthodox pieces in it, and the text describing the piece moves is a bit tedious to read.

@Fergus: OK, I will try to cook up something.

to H.G. Muller.....thanks for the reply.

Yes, Zillions does have the Tiger-riders of Citadel as a bit stronger than Queens, but more rays are blockable on their first move than Queens and this perhaps seems to knock their value down, at least on Zillions.

Yes, I agree that the text of Citadel could be tedious, in parts, with regard to describing its piece moves and rules (I find that few games aren't, at least in parts), but this was in the days when I tried to make absolutely sure that there would be no misunderstanding of the piece moves and rules to my games (I still do - it is very easy for the inexperienced to misunderstand such things unfortunately).....I try to counter-balance the mundane matter of learning piece moves  and rules with a short background story to my games that hopefully some might find interesting.

What matters of course, though subjective, is how interesting and well Games and/or Pieces actually play.

I managed to fix the Interactive-Diagram script such that it is possible to have multiple diagrams on the same web page. This only works if the HTML elements enclosing the diagram definition have the attribute class="idiagram", thourgh. The old way of recogizing the diagram definition by id="diagram" still works, but is limited to only a single diagram. Because in JavaScript IDs are supposed to be unique, so that it is an error to have two identical ones. Fortunately not a fatal one, but in any case causing the second occurrence to remain invisible to the script. It is possible to have many elements with the same class, and the script now scans the document for all of these, to expand them all, according to their specifications.

There is one problem with multiple diagrams on the same page, however: the script that powers it can only remember the position of one of them. So when you start moving around pieces, or displaying move diagrams, it forgets about what you have been doing to all other diagrams on that page. When you then again start clicking such other diagram, it will be re-initialized, and revert to its original position.

Another problem I had to face is that diagrams can be connected to external elements elesewhere in the text. For instance to automatically create a list of clickable pieces, like in my Metamachy diagram below. The old way to request insertion of such a list was to put an empty HTML 'ul' ('unnumbered list') tag pair with id=pieceList in the text. But for multiple diagrams it would not know what piece list to put there. So I introduced a new parameter to the diagram description, satellite=xxx, where 'xxx' must be unique for every diagram. A HTML element with id=xxxList will then be used to create the piece list for that diagram. The default value of 'xxx' is 'piece', for backward compatibility with existing pages that have only a single diagram.

To make sure your browser uses the new script, and not an old one it has cached, refresh the page with the Shift key pressed. Some things could still be improved; the script seems to start working before the page is completely loaded, and if the loading takes long, it would fail to expand the diagrams that load afterwards. I tried to have an 'onload' handler invoke the script, but I could not get this to work. (The script was then never invoked.) So I now built in a delay of 1 sec befre it starts expanding the diagrams. This could still be too short for a Shift-load, because that also forces reloading of all the piece graphics. But if some diagrams remain unexpanded that first time, then another normal load usually expands them all.

[Edit] I now also adapted the text in the Interactive Diagram article, and the Design Wizard, to describe/use the new method.

Well, I wrote an elaborate article on Metamachy.

But unfortunately it disappeared when I hit the Submit button, because the submission script did no longer consider me as being logged in. (It had taken me more than an hour to write the article.)

So I give up on the idea.

I hate it when that happens. I meant to do something about it this morning, but thanks to some error on the host's side, this site has been down since this morning. It is now finally back up late at night when I should already be in bed. Hopefully, I can do something about that tomorrow. Cookies have not been staying around as long as I intend them to, and the code needs to gracefully handle things when a cookie expires.

I'm going to fix the submission scripts to make them more user-friendly, but before doing that, I want to mention a way to preserve your data the way they are right now. When it says that you need to go back and sign in again, just open another page in another tab, sign in there, and then go back to where you were and reload the page. Your form data will still be there, and with you signed in, it will function properly and save what you wrote. As a test, I filled in some form data for a game entry, went to another tab and signed out, and got the message you got after your session cookie expired. I then signed in again from the other tab, reloaded the page, and the text I had already entered got saved as a new page.

Now, if you enter a submission without being logged in, a form containing everything you entered plus a password field will show up, and you will be asked to enter your password to save your content.

Thank you *so* much. I can't tell you how many posts I've lost over the years. Your change here makes this site much better!