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H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Mar 28, 2023 06:05 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 05:32 PM:

I was examining what the individual Interactive Diagram for each piece reveals, and it gets some things wrong.  ...

Well, this is partly to be expected. Move diagrams are for indicating how pieces move. For replacement captures this happens to coincide with how they capture. For other capture modes, these become entirely different aspects of the piece. Even if there was a King on the board, I would have no idea how to show all coordinator moves and captures in a single diagram, and the 'dynamic probing' by dragging a potential victim over the board is unlikely to discover the squares where it can be captured unless you already understand the move. For Long-Jumper capture we are at least lucky that the victim has to be in the path of the non-capture move.

It is indeed a bit strange that the Long Leaper's move diagram indicates capture of an edge piece is possible. The highlighting of moves in the move diagrams is now done by a completely different routine (namely the old one) than that for entering moves (which uses a move list generated by the AI). This because it really should highlight different squares, or use different markers for the same square. (For instance, the move diagram for Pawns must indicate the possibility to capture on squares that are empty.)

I suppose that the 'spell zone' of the Immobilizer could be indicated in the diagram. But it would require some additional explanation for an uninaugurated user to know what it means. Immobilization is not the only type of 'spell' the Diagram now supports. The problem here is that one would really be interested in the moves (or survival) of the piece that is being dragged around, rather than in the move of the Immobilizer.

I think that in cases of such exotic rules as Ultima, the rules can only be properly illustrated by showing dedicated diagrams with carefully set-up positions. The Interactive Diagram can assist in this by allowing the user to experiment with arbitrary positions in its main display.

As to moving your King in check: the ID would allow you to make any move, you could start with Ke8-d4 if you wanted. There is no rule enforcement, and moving your King into check is no exception to that. And of course it will capture it in that case. For some variants King capture is actually the goal. It should allow you to take back the moves, though, and continue play from an earlier position. If that did not work properly there must be a bug in taking back moves. There seems to be a problem with notation as well, as for some moves it indicates the piece by a question mark. And it seems to think promotion is possible, which could be a configuration error (e.g. wrong value for maxPromote) or a bug in the generation of move notation.

I will look at those problems; the betzaNew.js script is not fully finished yet. I am already glad that the newly added features allow it (with the aid of some custom scripting) to have the AI play something as non-chess-like as Ultima without making illegal moves.


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