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I have started to incorporate this into Game Courier, so that you can make diagrams from presets and game positions, but it looks like it will have to be a bit more sophisticated than it currently is to handle what Game Courier can throw at it.

I made an automated set for your interactive pieces. For a directory listing, would you prefer a listing of every file or just a listing of graphic images? If the latter, would you prefer a list of pieces or of all graphics?

I have added a script to each directory of piece images called list.php. It will list file names in order, putting file names in both the HREF and text part of an A tag. It will not list directory names.

There are two other options. Game Courier groups pieces into sets, and it groups sets into groups of sets with images for the same pieces. This allows people using Game Courier to change the piece set for a game being played. So, one option is to use a set of internal names for the pieces instead of their external names. You can keep the internal names consistent no matter what external names the piece artists give to them. The other option is to put piece images into folders under your own control, so that you can name them as you please.

As a relative newbie, I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if a Pegasus piece image (e.g. in an Auto Alfairie set) stands for any sort of standard fairy chess piece? I'm not absolutely sure that it isn't a way used to represent a Nightrider. I was thinking of using the Pegasus symbol to represent a novel idea for a piece otherwise. A second question is: does the Unicorn symbol, when used for 2D variants, standardly represent a Banshee (i.e. Nightrider & Bishop compoiund), as stated on wikipedia? In that case, that's how I'd be thinking to use it, but I'm curious since 2D variants commonly show Unicorn symbols.

Tonight I spent quite a while generating a diagram for a 91 cell hexagonal starting position for a hypothetical variant, partly as a test to see if I could do so. I succeeded, but I eventually became so tired that I accidently closed the Diagram Designer window on my laptop... fortunately the FEN code was remembered by the Diagram Designer, so reconstructing the diagram won't take so long if I try.

There is already a designated Nightrider piece. So the Pegasus is not used for that. As far as I know, the Pegasus is mainly a mythological creature, not a particular kind of fairy piece.

I'm not familiar with the name Banshee for David Paulowich's Unicorn. The Fairy chess piece article does not say that the Unicorn standardly represents this piece. All it says is, "Combination of Bishop and Nightrider. Also known as Unicorn." The name of Unicorn for this piece was introduced by David Paulowich, a contributor to this site, and I used the same name for the piece in Caissa Britannia, which included pieces based on the heraldic animals of Britain.

In general, there is not a whole lot of standardization in names for fairy pieces. For example, the two most common fairy pieces are each known by several names. One is known as Princess, Archbishop, Cardinal, Equerry, Centaur, and Paladin. The other is known as Empress, Chancellor, Marshall, Guard, and Champion. Meanwhile, some of these names have been used for other pieces. There's a different Cardinal in Cardinal Super Chess, a different Champion in Omega Chess, etc.

To give an example in the other direction, the name Lion has been used for several different pieces. There is the Chu Shogi Lion, the Murray Lion, the Leo (called a Lion in Caissa Britannia), and the Half-Duck Lion used by David Paulowich in Unicorn Great Chess.

In general, it's up to a game inventor to choose which names he uses for pieces. However, some names are more closely associated with a particular piece than other names. Nightrider is a name closely associated with a particular piece, because it is a homonym for a literal description of the piece, Knight-rider. Other names may gain popularity if the game they are used in is popular enough, and the same piece does not appear in other games of equal popularity.

Although I've sometimes seen a Pegasus image used for pieces, it's not a common name for any fairy piece I can think of, and it is not listed in the Piececlopedia or the Wikipedia article.

Thanks Fergus. I saw a hexagonal variant diagram used by Charles G. some time ago in the Comments section, and it had me wondering about possible fairy chess conventions for piece images.

Fwiw, here's a wikipedia link, that mentions Banshee as an alternate name for Unicorn:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_chess_piece

I am also not familiar with the Pegasus as a named piece.  As an image I am most familiar with it as representing the Bishop-Knight in Ed Friedlander's applets.  That has a nice feel to it, the Bishop move somehow adding "flying" to the knight(/horse)'s move; but in most places people somehow overlay a more traditional Bishop imagery with the knight, which I think is a better representation.

I think the Pegasus and Unicorn images (and the latter name) are just attractive choices as chess pieces, and so get reused for several different things.  I wouldn't expect any confusion to arise if you reuse them in a new way.

I haven't added support for circular boards to the Diagram Designer.

I have gotten the drawdiagram.php script to work correctly with Push to Kindle and Send to Kindle, two services for sending copies of webpages to Kindles. Images created by the script and sent to a Kindle through one of these services will show up on the Kindle intact instead of displaying the message that shows up for illicit offsite use.

Since some contributors have been using drawdiagram.php to display individual pieces, I have made a couple changes.

1) When drawdiagram.php is used to display a single piece image, it will not display coordinate labels.

2) The Diagram Designer now includes code you can cut and paste for displaying the piece images used in your diagram. This code places piece images within FIGURE.piece tags with a caption, and I have added CSS to the global css files for formatting the piece class for FIGURE.

Here is what the output looks like for Chess. You can view the code itself on this page.

Hello Fergus,

I need for my apothecary to include bruhahaa  squares so bassically a 10x10 board with 4 more squares connected to the top and bottom rank, say d0,e0,f0,g0,d11,e11,f11,g11. But just those. Is there a way to block the rest of a 12x12 board or do something to be able to draw that? Also I need to figurate a pocket square for an joker(jester) that will be added during the game seiwaran chess style. How do you recommend me to do that?

Thanks!

You can use a minus sign in your FEN Code to delete squares. Just use it the same way you would a piece label but for spaces you don't want on the board. I don't know what you mean by figurate a square.

If you want to add a new square later in the game, you should probably include room for it from the beginning, initially deleting it and any other extra spaces you'll have to include in your FEN code with the minus sign. You can add the space later by putting a piece or an @ sign (representing an empty space) on it. But if you're actually playing the game, you would want to use Game Courier, not the Diagram Designer.

Thanks, I am trying to write an article for now! Then I'll be constructing the game courier and maybe other wonders for everyone to enjoy!

Images made with the diagram designer will now have smaller file sizes when the color count does not exceed 256. Although the script was outputing images with larger color counts as JPG, and it was outputing smaller pallette images as PNG, it was still outputting the PNG images as true color images. I modied the script to output PNG images as small pallete, and I modified it to use the greatest amount of compression when outputing a PNG. In a test I ran, an image that was originally 12.7 KB got reduced to 7.66 KB by changing it to a small pallette image, and it got further reduced to 6.43 KB by maximizing the compression. In another test I ran, I compared the file size to that of an image I had already reduced the file size of with Ultimate Paint. With its file size optimized with Ultimate Paint, it had been reduced from 12.9 KB to 6.6 KB, but the improved script now outputs the same image with a size of 6.57 KB. This means there is no longer any need to reduce the size of the PNG images created with the Diagram Designer with some other program. Note that this affects all diagrams previously made with the Diagram Designer, since the changes were to drawdiagram.php, the script that draws the images, not to diagram-designer.php.

In order to make conversion of FFEN diagrams easier, I recently modified drawdiagram.php to recognize periods in the FEN code. A single period indicates a single empty space, as it does in FFEN diagrams. Unlike the number 1, which would indicate too many spaces if repeated, the repetition of a . just means one more empty space, not ten more or 100 more, etc.

The previous change I made to increase compatiblity with FFEN is incompatible with a change I previously made. That change was to use . for border colored dots and ! for text colored dots. The . for border colored dots works if you enclose it in braces, and the ! for text colored dots still works normally. The reason for this, and the reason I didn't catch it earlier, is that these are handled in two different parts of the code. To use periods in the same way that FFEN does, it catches a period when populating the board and inserts a @ to represent an empty space. When actually drawing the board, it interprets a period as a border colored dot. The problem is that now, a period in the FEN code does not get inserted as a period in the array representing the board unless it has been enclosed in braces. I'm going to keep the use of the period for empty spaces, and I will use the # sign for border colored dots. These dots are for use in movement diagrams. Note that these will be overridden if a set uses these punctuation marks to represent pieces.

Besides using # and ! for border-colored and text-colored dots, it will now use numbers to specify dots in the color of one of the colors listed in the colors field. This field is normally used for coloring the spaces of the board, but it may be expanded beyond the colors needed for the board. On a regular checkered board, the two colors of the board will normally be 0 and 1, and the next color will be 2. You can set 2 to whatever color you want, then insert {2} in your FEN code to display a dot of that color. Since numbers are normally used to indicate a number of empty spaces, any number used to designate colors must appear inside braces. This lets the number be used as a label instead of information about the number of empty spaces.