H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Oct 10, 2018 05:27 PM UTC:
I had an idea for a system to indicate pieces in FEN strings with 'dressed letters', which should not be too difficult to remember. No matter how ingenious a system is, in the end there are just too many pieces in the Alfaerie set to avoid that you have to identify some of those by the root name of their image file. The system used in Fairy-FEN, which writes this name between parentheses, using capitalization of the first leter to indicate the color, seems the obvious way to do this. This system is already completely universal. So the system of 1-letter (possibly plus one punctuation character) codes serves only to allow a more efficient encoding.
My idea was to use punctuation to indicate various enhancements of the piece indicated by the letter. Of course we wantthe orthodox Chess pieces to be indicated by their normal 1-letter ID: P, N, B, R, Q or K. But e.g. a tilde '~' suffix could be used to indicate the piece indicated by the preceding letter is knighted (the tilde looks somewhat like the letter N, hence it seems the obvious choice for indicating this). So Archbishop, Chancellor and Amazon would be B~, R~ and Q~. By also assigning single-letter codes for Wazir (W), Ferz (F), Alfil (E, as we usually depict this as an Elephant, and for this purpose it seems more important to represent how the symbol looks than representing its move), and Dababba (D), we then also cover all 'augmented Knights', W~, F~, E~ and D~.
In a similar spirit, we could use a (single) quote for a wazired piece, and a back-quote for a ferzed piece (because the backquote typically is more slanted in most fonts). The Crowned Rook and Bishop then become R` and B'. Modern Elephant would be E` (ferfil), Phoenix (WA) would be E', Kirin (FD) would be D` and Woody Rook D'. If we assign the letter A to the Alibaba, we have A' for the Omega Champion, A` for the CwDA Fad, and A~ for the Squirrel (NAD).
A '^' could be used to indicate a rider, e.g. N^ is Nightrider, D^ is Dababba-rider. P^ could be the Shogi Lance, which is the slider version of the (Shogi) Pawn. The basic obliques would also have their own letters, N (Knight), Z (Zebra) and C (Camel). That makes the Omega Wizard C`. This relatively simple set of conventions already covers a very large fraction of the pieces one typically encounters in variants. A colon could be used to indicate Pao-like hopping: 'R:' for the Xiangqi Cannon, 'B:' for the Vao, etc. Perhaps the G and S should be reserved for Gold and Silver general.
Remaining letters could be used as abbriviations for animal names. E.g. L = Lion, T = Tiger, H = Hawk, U = Unicorn.
I had an idea for a system to indicate pieces in FEN strings with 'dressed letters', which should not be too difficult to remember. No matter how ingenious a system is, in the end there are just too many pieces in the Alfaerie set to avoid that you have to identify some of those by the root name of their image file. The system used in Fairy-FEN, which writes this name between parentheses, using capitalization of the first leter to indicate the color, seems the obvious way to do this. This system is already completely universal. So the system of 1-letter (possibly plus one punctuation character) codes serves only to allow a more efficient encoding.
My idea was to use punctuation to indicate various enhancements of the piece indicated by the letter. Of course we wantthe orthodox Chess pieces to be indicated by their normal 1-letter ID: P, N, B, R, Q or K. But e.g. a tilde '~' suffix could be used to indicate the piece indicated by the preceding letter is knighted (the tilde looks somewhat like the letter N, hence it seems the obvious choice for indicating this). So Archbishop, Chancellor and Amazon would be B~, R~ and Q~. By also assigning single-letter codes for Wazir (W), Ferz (F), Alfil (E, as we usually depict this as an Elephant, and for this purpose it seems more important to represent how the symbol looks than representing its move), and Dababba (D), we then also cover all 'augmented Knights', W~, F~, E~ and D~.
In a similar spirit, we could use a (single) quote for a wazired piece, and a back-quote for a ferzed piece (because the backquote typically is more slanted in most fonts). The Crowned Rook and Bishop then become R` and B'. Modern Elephant would be E` (ferfil), Phoenix (WA) would be E', Kirin (FD) would be D` and Woody Rook D'. If we assign the letter A to the Alibaba, we have A' for the Omega Champion, A` for the CwDA Fad, and A~ for the Squirrel (NAD).
A '^' could be used to indicate a rider, e.g. N^ is Nightrider, D^ is Dababba-rider. P^ could be the Shogi Lance, which is the slider version of the (Shogi) Pawn. The basic obliques would also have their own letters, N (Knight), Z (Zebra) and C (Camel). That makes the Omega Wizard C`. This relatively simple set of conventions already covers a very large fraction of the pieces one typically encounters in variants. A colon could be used to indicate Pao-like hopping: 'R:' for the Xiangqi Cannon, 'B:' for the Vao, etc. Perhaps the G and S should be reserved for Gold and Silver general.
Remaining letters could be used as abbriviations for animal names. E.g. L = Lion, T = Tiger, H = Hawk, U = Unicorn.