🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Mon, Mar 13, 2023 09:06 PM UTC:
The new Ultima presets are ready. Since the ones Antoine Fourrière had written were broken, and he is no longer active, I wrote entirely new ones that made use of the fairychess include file. These will display legal moves, and they will display piece names and descriptions in error messages. To test the new code, I replaced his preset with a new one and ran all the old Ultima games with it. Where a game complained about an illegal move, I checked which preset was at fault, and I made corrections in the new one when it was at fault. It turns out that the old preset allowed some illegal moves. In particular, I recall it allowing the King to move into check from a Coordinator. I also noticed that it handled suicide moves as deletions of spaces, which would be appropriate for Chesire Cat Chess or Wormhole Chess. For backwards compatibility, I enabled the substitute Galactic preset to handle deletions as suicide moves. But for the main fairychess preset, which the links on this page now go to, I did not. It will handle suicide moves as incomplete moves that do not include the destination. This is one of the standard ways that Game Courier handles suicide moves, and it works better with the mouse than the other ways do. One last thing is that I changed the notation to use co/CO for the Coordinator and ch/CH for the Chameleon. This should be less confusing than using c/C for the Coordinator and x/X for the Chameleon, especially if you are using the Abstract set, which displays the Chameleon in the form of the letter C. But this is only in the new fairychess preset. To be compatible with old games, the Galactic preset still uses the old notation.
The new Ultima presets are ready. Since the ones Antoine Fourrière had written were broken, and he is no longer active, I wrote entirely new ones that made use of the fairychess include file. These will display legal moves, and they will display piece names and descriptions in error messages. To test the new code, I replaced his preset with a new one and ran all the old Ultima games with it. Where a game complained about an illegal move, I checked which preset was at fault, and I made corrections in the new one when it was at fault. It turns out that the old preset allowed some illegal moves. In particular, I recall it allowing the King to move into check from a Coordinator. I also noticed that it handled suicide moves as deletions of spaces, which would be appropriate for Chesire Cat Chess or Wormhole Chess. For backwards compatibility, I enabled the substitute Galactic preset to handle deletions as suicide moves. But for the main fairychess preset, which the links on this page now go to, I did not. It will handle suicide moves as incomplete moves that do not include the destination. This is one of the standard ways that Game Courier handles suicide moves, and it works better with the mouse than the other ways do. One last thing is that I changed the notation to use co/CO for the Coordinator and ch/CH for the Chameleon. This should be less confusing than using c/C for the Coordinator and x/X for the Chameleon, especially if you are using the Abstract set, which displays the Chameleon in the form of the letter C. But this is only in the new fairychess preset. To be compatible with old games, the Galactic preset still uses the old notation.