BTW, the tracking, and thus the marking the spell zone of the indicated piece, currently only works correctly if there are not more than two pieces of that type in play. Otherwise it will loose track of some of the pieces. The current way I use for tracking just keeps two locations (in loc[coloredType] and loc[coloredType+512]), of the last two pieces of that type that were moved during the search. (And it then only marks the spell zones around those.) Now this is fine for Mitsugumu Shogi, but in Suzumu Shogi there can potentially be 4 Tetrarchs. This is of course unlikely to happen in a real game, so perhaps we should not worry about it at all.
I can switch to a more robust way of tracking, able of handling an arbitrary number of pieces of the same type. This would cause a slight slowdown, though. Which is a pity, as almost no game would use it. An cheaper alternative would be to allow requesting spell zones around more than one piece type, so that piece types of which there can be more than two instances can be artificially split into two identical types. The location of each piece is tracked anyway, it is just a matter of marking the squares around the designated types before every move generation, and pieces where only a single type cause spells would not experience a delay by this.
It would even be possible to mark the spell zones of different types differently, e.g. as nodes | (1<<(24+K)) for the Kth spell zone. This would allow, say, freezing and burning in the same Diagram. The test for being in the zone would than have to be (neighbors[sqrNr] & 0xFFFFFF) == nodes. I wonder if all that complexity would be worth it, though. I am not even aware of any variants that would need it.
You could increase the cap of instances of one type for trackPieces to four without much trouble. This would take care of the 3+ Tetrarches problem in Suzumu Shogi while leaving plenty of room to handle the vast majority of cases. However, the more robust tracking method would be preferred for games using Chess-style promotion (you could have up to (#startingSpellPieces)+(#piecesPromotableToSpellPieces) pieces with spell effects).
As for multiple spells, I agree would not worry about that right now, as I can't see any variants that will be using that either. Besides, there is also the frozen variable, the 251 kamikaze promotion, and the 512(+[bits]) promotion methods, which can be used to implement spells in the xxZone, xxxPromotion, and xxxTinker scripts withouts using the spell parameters.
@Adam: I see that you are using your own markers. Beware that I have added a new marker (markerFFF000.png), which the betzaNew.js script uses for indicating moves of a piece that has active burning defined for it through the captureMatrix in the move diagrams. It then also indicates the blastZone on hovering, by making the background of the burned squares around the indicated target grey.
Thankfully that's very easy to do, as my markers are all simple circles.
You could increase the cap of instances of one type for trackPieces to four without much trouble. This would take care of the 3+ Tetrarches problem in Suzumu Shogi while leaving plenty of room to handle the vast majority of cases. However, the more robust tracking method would be preferred for games using Chess-style promotion (you could have up to (#startingSpellPieces)+(#piecesPromotableToSpellPieces) pieces with spell effects).
As for multiple spells, I agree would not worry about that right now, as I can't see any variants that will be using that either. Besides, there is also the frozen variable, the 251 kamikaze promotion, and the 512(+[bits]) promotion methods, which can be used to implement spells in the xxZone, xxxPromotion, and xxxTinker scripts withouts using the spell parameters.
Thankfully that's very easy to do, as my markers are all simple circles.