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The Game of Nemoroth. For the sake of your sanity, do not read this variant! (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Robert Price wrote on Sat, Jan 17, 2004 10:17 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

I would love to help in coding Nemoroth in Zillions, just as soon as I can convince myself that it's possible at all. As I understand it, piece attributes can not change the appearance of a piece, so a petrified Basilisk, for example, must be implemented as a different piece-type from an ordinary Basilisk (if you want them to look different), even though their non-voluntary behaviors are identical. A far greater concern is multiple-occupancy. The usual approach is to declare a piece-type for every combination of pieces that may coexist on a space. Add to that the need to distinguish between petrified and fleshy, friendly and enemy (because such strange bedfellows may indeed come to share a space). And realize that pile-ups of more than two may easily arise... All of a sudden, Octi's library of 256 piece-types (<a href='http://www.zillions-of-games.com/games/octi.html'>http://www.zillions-of-games.com/games/octi.html</a>) is looking downright trivial by comparison. From the game-logic standpoint, I intend to investigate the possibility of treating each of the 64 spaces similarly to a prison in the ZRF for Shogi. From the graphical standpoint, we can't afford simply to divide each square into a 3x3 grid of positions as I did for <a href='http://www.zillions-of-games.com/games/edgechess.html'>Edge Chess</a>, or people will need a magnifying glass to see the great graphics someone's going to make for the pieces. Instead, the cells of my prison will overlap, and with a well-defined order of precedence. I learned from <a href='http://www.zillions-of-games.com/games/platformchess.html'>Platform Chess</a> that the later-defined space will have its contents drawn before a sooner-defined space. This works perfectly. The front cell of the prison will dominate most of each space, with four more behind it kind of peeking in from the corners. Clicking-and-dragging a piece from the prison works as expected; if you grab a pixel that belongs to two spaces, Zillions assumes you mean the one it drew out in front. So if you want to move your Human that someone's gone and pushed a Basilisk statue onto, you can click on the visible portion of his puny form and command him, exactly as if two pieces really were present on the same space at the same time. Anyway, multiple occupancy is what struck me as the big difficulty. Besides that, the non-simultaneous nature of the Go Away shout may not be pretty. One solution is to present a big pop-up menu consisting of all possible orders in which to push the victims (or only those which are substantially different due to the presence of basilisks). I would hate to have to use one move per push, because that's the sort of thing that weakens the computer opponent. The evaporation of ichor is something that will just have to be managed by a ?Moderator who is programmed to scan the board and decrement all the ichor-plies by one. This raises another point... in order for ichor to be visible, it has to be a piece-type. I could do that by making a position behind each prison, where the ichor would sit. If the graphics designer wants to make ten different pictures of ichor, that's great, because each ply of ichor is going to be a different piece-type, and when the board is covered in broad sweeps of the stuff, the players are entitled to know which ichor is ickier. Compulsion is tough to describe - it's slightly more complicated than the move-priority construct which in Checkers requires you to jump if able. But it is definitely doable. A piece is never compelled to make any particular move, only to make a legal one, provided the 'legal' constraint handles the details like preventing a piece within 2 of a Ghast from moving-without-fleeing. (note the beauty in Nemoroth on this point: The same *legality* constraint appies whether the Ghast is friendly or enemy; the only difference is that a piece within range of an enemy Ghast is compelled during its move generation.) Imposing move-priority and also (somehow) verifying that either a compelled piece was moved, or no compelled piece remains (after the immediate effects of the move have happened) comes very close to fitting the bill. This sounds like an extraordinary game, and it certainly was presented in a marvelous way.