Enter Your Reply

It seems that you have an application / need for the extra colors because you are not just displaying the piece symbols, but are actualy trying to create a realistic image of the game as it would be played with physical pieces.

Personally I don't think this is very desirable; I would prefer to play Shogi without th pentagonal outlines and Xiangqi without the circles.

We each have our preferences. In general, your program will appeal to a broader base when it can accommodate more preferences than just your own. For example, Game Courier uses some graphics I don't like and supports many games I have never become interested in, but it is more popular than it would otherwise be because I didn't limit it to my own preferences.

What software do you use to scale the GIF files? I always get excessively ugly reslults when I do that. Even when my browser scales a gif image of a Chess poition, separation lines between board squares are randomly disappearing, etc.

I use the GD library that comes with PHP. What I do is create a whole board image, then rescale that. I don't rescale individual pieces. The advantage to doing it this way is that I get in-context anti-aliasing of every piece with the space it occupies.