Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Look in Japanese Chess for the Shogi program.

It helped me get a grasp on the book Shogi:  Japan's Game of Strategy by
Trevor Leggett by allowing me to play through the examples.

The program itself does what it was intended to do.

Ed, thank you much for your continued ambassadorship of variants and
giving the chess variant-appreciative public an opportunity to learn these
games.

I tried to run one of the Java applets today but couldn't. The website would not load in Safari 5.1.7, the latest version of Safari for Windows, and when I ran Internet Explorer, I was notified that Microsoft no longer supports Internet Explorer and that I should use the IE tab in Edge for anything requiring Internet Explorer. However, the IE tab in Edge would not let me run Java.

Since no other browsers even support Java, I have added code to the homepage to show the link to this page only in Internet Explorer. It now fails to show up in every browser I have tried, including Edge in an IE tab. Since the apps don't work in the IE tab, this is fine. But since I can't run Internet Explorer myself, I can't test whether it will show up there.

Since the widespread lack of support for Java makes these pages obsolete, and since Interactive Diagrams and Jocly are doing what these did even better, I'm considering retiring these pages.

I have also commented out links to this page and to individual Java applets in the header menu.

As one last test, I plugged my old harddrive into my computer and booted up Windows XP. For some unknown reason, only chessvariants.org would work in Internet Explorer, and chessvariants.com would not. Although both Firefox and Internet Explorer tried to run the applets, they would not work. After updating Java and making sure this site was in the Java Exceptions list, I tried again in both browsers, and they still wouldn't work. I then tried Chrome, but the site wouldn't load in Chrome. So, it's looking more like the only value of these pages is that some of them cover Chess variants not covered by other pages on the site.

I know little about Java. But I do know that it can still be used to run programs locally. E.g. Ai Ai runs under Java.

Would it be possible to make the applets that used to be automatically downloaded and executed by a Java-enabled browser downloadable, so that people who have Java installed on their PC could run those locally? Or is this a nonsense idea?

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.

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

Okay, I installed that and got an applet working in Edge. I didn't find the extension for Firefox. With this extension available, I can reinstall the links and add a note about installing this extension in Edge or Chrome to run the applets.

Personally, I think any variant that has an interactive diagram doesn't need a Java app page. They clog up the index and offer little value. There are so many alternatives at this point.

Should we start weeding out applets for games with Interactive Diagrams? And maybe even make it a goal to eventually replace them all?

It is true that the Interactive Diagram is the modern version of the Java applet, and targets the same niche of casual opponent. I have no idea how the playing strength compares, because I never managed to run the Java applets either. If these play better, iit would be an incentive to keep them. Now that there exists a trick to run them, perhaps I should try a match.

Index clogging is a general problem. Perhaps we should try to cast the index in a different format, where each variant has only a single entry with potentially multiple icons preceding the short description,  and where clicking the rule icon or descriptive text would bring you to the article describing the rules, (which itself would contain links to additional pages about the variant), but clicking one of the other icons would bring you directly to the corresponding 'special purpose pages' (like GC presets, Zillions downloads, external links, photographs, puzzles, Java applets).

The interactive diagram is almost surely a stronger opponent, maybe with a few exception games.

We can already filter searches by page type, so index clutter doesn't seem a huge concern. I would support cleanup at the database level: we duplicate information about the game for each page about it. But of course changing the database structure would require a very careful undertaking.

I'm not surprised Fergus has identified some bugs and inconsistencies, but I am surprised at how many have appeared so quickly.

We can already filter searches by page type, so index clutter doesn't seem a huge concern. I would support cleanup at the database level: we duplicate information about the game for each page about it. But of course changing the database structure would require a very careful undertaking.

I don't think we need a radical transformation.  A few years back, Fergus added a "GameID" column to the Item table.  The goal is to populate that with a unique value for each game so that all the pages for a given game can be readily associated.  I started populating it but didn't get too far.  I'm willing to go back to it if there is a desire to make use of it for a better game-centric organization.

One of the main goals with GameID is to use it as the index of a new table for games and to migrate the game-specific columns of the Item table to the new table. While doing that, I would also like to consider revising the categories we use for games. In particular, we have a bunch of usual equipment categories that each effectively combine two categories into one. It might be better to have just a single usual equipment category, then replace the usual equipment categories we have now with ones that describe only one feature of the game, such as having different board rules or a different winning condition. These would help us better categorize games played with different equipment, and when used in combination with the usual equipment category, we could still query the database for lists of usual equipment games in the same categories we can now.