Single Comment

I have now implemented the 'hover method': when you are displaying a move diagram it will show the piece on an empty board. But if you hover the mouse pointer over a marked square it puts an enemy pawn there, and shows the moves in the presence of this Pawn. This can in particular be used to elucidate hop targets (grey background), to see what kind of moves the screen enables, and locust capture squares (cyan star), to show where you have to move to make the indicated capture.

On touch-screen devices, where you cannot hover, a touch when a move diagram is being displayed will count as hovering the square, and materialize a Pawn there. Switching back to the setup diagram

[Edit]

I now implemented a method to reduce 'collisions' between moves of different type to the same square in move diagrams. For normal moves and captures the highlighting system itself already takes care of this, by defining different colors/symbols for move-or-capture, move-only, and capture-only, and also showing the latter in empty squares. But for hopping moves and locust captures there was a problem, as these moves are never really possible on an empty board, but only indicate potential moves. These potetial moves can coincide with real moves on the empty board. The potetial moves therfore now use the opposite highlighting system as the others. When normal moves are indicated by symbols, the move diagram will use background color to indicate potential hops, and both a symbol and a color to indicate locust capture. In the latter case, the symbol will only be drawn if it does not collide with another symbol, irrespective of the order in which the correspoding moves are defined in the Betza move string. This way a normal move will never be hidden by a hop or locust capture, while it will always remain visible that there is a potetial hop or locust capture over the square as well. When color is used as principal highlighting method, the potential moves will be indicated by drawing a question mark in the square.

E.g. for a Checker the locust victims coincide with normal non-captures, and in the move diagram this will be indicated by the move-only symbol, plus a background color. The user is thus warned that other move potetial is present when this square would be occupied, and can then hover over the square to 'realize' this potetial, by materializing a Pawn there, and calculating the actual move through the square for this case. If it was a locust capture, the victim would now be marked with the locust-capture symbol, and the destination square would be highlighted as a normal move. For a hop, only the destination square would be marked.