Comments by ChessShogi

Here's a preset I made using code from the Play-Test Applet:

Yangsi

When I click on a piece to move it in a Game Courier preset, the selected piece doesn't get surrounded by a black square. You can still tell which piece is selected by looking at the Moves Field though. Personally, I prefer to be able to see which piece I have selected on the board without having to refer to the Moves field.

There seems to be a bug in my rule-enforcing presets for large Shogi variants (except for Shosu Shogi) that makes the legal moves displayed for a piece repeat after ten squares. For example, in the Suzumu Shogi preset, if I click on the black Vice General in the starting position, Game Courier will display the normal legal move to 16e, but it will also show another legal move on 6e (which is still treated as illegal by the preset). I have no idea how this is happening, as I haven't changed the code for displaying legal moves (which is based on stalemated subroutines from teh chess3 and shogi include files) in any of these presets. Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

[Edit] I also found another bug that prevents Game Courier from displaying legal moves after trying to make an illegal move by the mouse and then cancelling it.

The rule against perpetual check was intentional back in 2019. It was meant to compensate for stalemate being a win for the stalemating player. In Chess, if you're in a lost position, then the stalemate rule can save you. The rule against perpetual check had the same purpose. However, I removed it from all of my Shogi variants some time ago, as I believed it would add nothing but confusion as to why someone lost a game.

I would like the presets listed below deleted. All of them are mine, so you do not need someone else's permission to delete them.

The default preset for Hanten Shogi

The default preset for Gyaku-sama Shogi

In case you are wondering why I want them deleted, I have decided to delete their related articles from the Chess Variant Pages, as I have lost interest in them.

In making my own interactive diagrams, I decided to add functions for getting FEN codes from board positions and loading positions from FEN codes. They work pretty flawlessly, provided you use an ID w/ at least one letter for each piece. It even works w/ multi-character IDs, which are enclosed in curly brackets in the FEN code.

I also made functions for getting and loading game moves using a more specialized notation, w/ each element of the move separated by hyphens. Though it isn't standard algebraic notation, I have tested this system and it works very well.

If you would like, I can send you a text document w/ the functions.

They actually managed to get the site back up. I though Jocly was permanently down.

This page is now finished and waiting to be approved.

Game Courier presets for my larger games are theoretically possible. I have the tools necessary, and creating the PHP file shouldn't be that hard, but I am unsure how I would get that to work. The sets that Game Courier currently has either don't have enough pieces, have pieces which don't accurately represent the pieces in my large shogi variants, or have pieces whose names are too complicated for me to effectively implement them into Game Courier.

That's not to say I don't want to make presets for these games. If I could create the proper PHP files for the pieces and get them added to Game Courier, that would allow me to create presets for these games with proper representation of the pieces, which would be great. If you are an editor, perhaps you could help me with that when I finish the PHP files?

As for Hanten Shogi and Gyaku-sama Shogi, I am in the process of reviving them.

I assume all piece moves are the same as in standard Shogi?

I will have the blue coloration come back sometime, although I will probably reverse the colors to save me time if I need to update any graphics.

Kyoto Shogi style switchbacks could be interesting. But there is a problem: the instant a Pawn or Drunk Elephant moves, it would be forced to promote, which boosts defense early on and makes the game less interesting in my opinion. Of course, this can be easily solved by including exceptions to this rule for those pieces, and providing some sort of visual cue to match. But to me, the condition that promotion/demotion only happens on captures makes more sense, as you would need less visual cues for it.

You can find the preset for Hanten shogi in the Computer Play section of the notes.

I've been working on a side project of mine called the Universal Chessboard, a stand-alone application designed to support as many chess variants as possible, within certain parameters. It is somewhat similar to and inspired by these interactive diagrams - for example it uses the same general format for its presets as the format that is used to parse these diagrams (albeit with some parameters added/missing/different). Although it is still very much in its infancy (as it is currently at version Alpha 0.0), it already has many basic features implemented. You can move pieces with the mouse or with text, navigate through the game, undo moves. reset the board, load board positions, load game presets, etc.

You can check out the application in its current state as an Eclipse IDE project or a runnable .jar file here: https://github.com/amdewitt/Universal-Chessboard.

I have a new piece set file for my large shogi variants that I want to test out in Game Courier. Who should I contact to get it uploaded to the site and linked to the list of piece sets?

Are you using the aliases as the piece IDs instead of the original piece IDs specified by the set file being used? If so, that will not work. You need to use the piece IDs originally specified by the set file, as the alias command only makes a visual change to the piece ID (it does not change the internal ID used in the code).

I would like to request that the presets default2 and promotest for Suzumu Shogi be deleted, as they are excess presets and no known games for Suzumu Shogi have been found. (promotest was made to try and work around an internal bug in Game Courier, and default2 was made when I thought I would need to update the default preset for the game, only to find that it was safe to change the original).

@Greg Strong and Ben Reiniger - Since you two seem to be the one that I should contact for uploading set files, should I send my set file to one of you via email? Also, would having a plus sign (+) in a piece label cause any problems for Game Courier? It seems to work fine when I use code in the presets to change the labels, but I want to make sure the same is true when there is a plus sign in the label coming from the set file, as all the promoted piece labels have plus signs in them.

I will only be sending the first one for now, as I want to make sure it works as intended before uploading the other two.

This is a very nice index you have so far. However, I noticed that Ryugi was missing. While it is admittedly not my favourite game, it is just as simple for AI to play as Yangsi, if not simpler. If you can add Ryugi to the list that would be great.

Also, my larger Shogi variants have diagrams that an AI can play as well, though not including these is sort of understandable, as the AI would of course take a very long time to make a move. I actually had the AI play a game of Taishin Shogi (my largest game) for the first 60 or so moves, and in the worst case it took upwards of 9 hours for the AI to make a move due to the sheer size and complexity of the game, which only increased as more moves were made, although this would theoretically lessen as the board thins.