Comments by DavidPotter

Matthew, it sounds like your computer has issues that have nothing to do
with me. My site does not use black as a background colour, and as I said
in my earlier post, I don't deal with people's hard disks, nor could I
using the browser platform as I do. Many people have accessed the site and
several have played the game without similar experiences. I have played on
a five year old computer running Windows 98 over a dialup connection to my
ISP.

I hope you are interested enough to try on a different computer.

Dave

This is in reply to Andreas:

Thank you for your favourable comment on the originality of the real time
aspect of the game. There is in fact another real time variant, Kung Fu
chess, although it is a very different game.

With respect to your question, why not use the Dark Chess visibility
rules? The short answer is that I was not aware of Dark Chess until
recently. I do believe the rules are similar: you see through the eyes of
your men, and your men see according to their movement pattern. The main
difference seems to be that in Verve they can also see additional squares
diagonally adjacent to squares they can move to. I did this for two
reasons. First, it ensures that endgames work properly, because a rook for
example, can see the enemy king when it is closely blockaded, not just when
it is in check. Second, it makes pawn ambushes harder, because a man can
see enemy pawns attacking the squares it can move to.

Your larger point seems to be that too much information may be available
in Verve. At the beginning it is certainly true that more information is
available than in Dark Chess, because of the larger fields of vision
(pawns that have not moved also see further than in Dark Chess, because in
Verve they get credit for their ability to make a two-square initial move,
and in Dark Chess I believe they do not). But later in the game, Verve may
actually have less information available because men temporarily go blind
when they move. Since this depends on the players' rate of play, my hope
is that players would adjust their rate of play so that just the right
amount of informaion is available, neither too much nor too little. But we
won't know for sure until more people have tried it.

I want to think a bit more about your comments on move synchronization,
and will reply later.

This is in reply to Matthew:

With respect to your security concerns, I have tried to minimize players'
exposure to internet risks by not requiring the downloading of any
executable software to players' computers. No executables, applets or
plugins. Verve does use scripts run by the browser, subject to the
browser's built in security restrictions (eg, no access to players' hard
drives etc). So Verve is about as safe to use as a web application can be.

With respect to using direct dial in instead of the web, that would be a
fundamentally different platform and I do not have any plans for going
that route.

I have tested only with Internet Explorer. If the game catches on, one of
the planned enhancements is support for other browsers, if this is
feasible. The issue I ran into when I tried it briefly with Netscape a
long time ago was the handling of overlappiing communications to the
server. (It needs two, one each way.) Meanwhile, do you have access to IE?