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Frog/Hannibal/Waffle chess with Gryphon/Manticore and falcon. Expansions of Kevin Pacey's Frog/Hannibal/Wafle Chess. (9x10, Cells: 90) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Jul 8 09:39 AM UTC in reply to Aurelian Florea from 08:09 AM:

I think this is a very good way to present a group of variants that is so closely related. But I still have a few suggestions for further improvement:

The gatable pieces start in the piece table, but this table starts closed, and it might not occur to the reader to open it. You can force a piece table that is open from the beginning by including <table id="KevinTable"></table>, e.g. where you now have the KevinList. (Which such an open table you would need to also include enableAI=2 in the diagram definition to keep the AI available.)

The board uses a square size 35x35, because that is the I.D.'s default, and you did not specify a size in the initial Diagram. But then you use 50x50 piece images. This is no problem, as betzaNew.js scales the images to fit the board size. (Unlike betza.js, which would do the opposit.) But this makes the piece table, which does not have such scaling, look unnaturally large compared to the board. Which would become all the more obvious when you would always display them side by side. You could cure that by using the alfaeriePNG35 set. (Or put squareSize=50 in the initial Diagram, but then board and piece table might be too wide to display side by side.)

Actually I like the way you solved the placement issue in the GC preset (gatable pieces starting in the center of the board) better than dragging the pieces from the table. But the I.D. doesn't allow it! Even though it would allow illegal moves in general, it does not allow moves to 'hole' squares. Perhaps I should allow those too? Or at least allow those for virgin pieces on the central rank(s)?

Instead of writing "choose your desired diagram" I would say "choose the desired setup". You should add some instructions for how to place the Griffon / Falcon / Manticore too before starting normal play (and opening the AI panel), especially if these come from the table. I guess I could have the I.D. suppress the AI from replying to moves that were not at least pseudo-legal (i.e. to non-highlighted destinations). Then it would not matter when you opened the AI panel.

I think it is site policy to have pages that only look acceptable for viewers with JavaScript switched on. So I think you should at least provide a static image of one of the start positions (and perhaps of all three), within <noscript> tags.

[Edit] I now made the proposed changes to the Diagram script. So it should be possible to start the gatable pieces on the central rank.