Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

To check on whether something peculiar might be going on for you, I am going to temporarily change your password, sign in as you, and then restore your password by copying its encrypted form back to the database.

Do you see the "Edit" drop-down in the top menu, next to your name? Try that.

I am logged in!

Unfortunately I don't see the menu, see here:

Thank you in the meantime.

Unfortunately the selection menu 'Edit this Page', 'Edit Metadata for this Page' etc. is missing. Is it possible to restore the selection menu?

As far as I can tell, it is not missing. But you have to be signed in for it to show up. To avoid any confusion, I have changed the Edit menu item "Edit Index Information" to "Edit Metadata".

@ editors: I would like to set my suggestion 'Toggle Chess' to 'Private'. Unfortunately the selection menu 'Edit this Page', 'Edit Metadata for this Page' etc. is missing. Is it possible to restore the selection menu?

@H.G.: Can you imagine adding a selection menu to the 'Create holes' button that allows you to choose the colour of the 'black holes'? In addition to black, white or perhaps beige would be very suitable. A colour selector like the one provided by MS Office would be more than ideal :-). Because with these holes you can create very nice suggestions. Black is a bit harsh.

For your variants the programming would be limited to indicating the piece moves.

For most of them, sure. For Aquachess or Chess on a Tesseract, probably not. (Zwangkrieg might be a bit of extra challenge too. And I'm not too sure about Short Sliders.)

And I do hope, one day, to get some of my simpler variants on there.

Your variants are typically more 'regular' than Gerd's, in the sense that they could draw on existing chess-variants infrastructure of Jocly. For example, there is support for rectangular and hexagonal boards of any size and shape, but not for boards with switches, which would have to be programmed from scratch. There is support for normal, and even single locust captures, but not for 'recruiting' moves that make captured pieces appear elsewhere, or for neutral pieces.

For your variants the programming would be limited to indicating the piece moves.

Jocly is one such program available on GitHub. It is a gaming platform for use on websites through a web browser, or running on your own PC through JoclyBoard. It is mainly a user interface, but is designed in such a way that it can easily extended with new games, with already a lot of supports for the tasks most chess variants have in common. So you would only have to program the part that is unique to your variant, in JavaScript.

We have a version of Jocly installed on CVP, and there is also one on my website, where people could browse to, and play the games they support.

And I do hope, one day, to get some of my simpler variants on there.

GitHub is a website where programmers publish the  source code of the programs they develop. It is not a site where you can play anything. But of course some of the programs published there are games. Those could be downloaded and compiled to run on people's own computers, and often the programmers already offer a compiled executable for download. To offer something there that others could use, you would have to write a program that plays it.

Jocly is one such program available on GitHub. It is a gaming platform for use on websites through a web browser, or running on your own PC through JoclyBoard. It is mainly a user interface, but is designed in such a way that it can easily extended with new games, with already a lot of supports for the tasks most chess variants have in common. So you would only have to program the part that is unique to your variant, in JavaScript.

We have a version of Jocly installed on CVP, and there is also one on my website, where people could browse to, and play the games they support.

@Richard Milner:
Do we want to continue our games?

In my opinion, we should end the games 'Queenmania (conquer style)' and 'Queens (conquer style)' because the perpetual recaptures cannot be solved. As long as there is no counter for this problem that ends the repetitions, we will go round in circles. (Perhaps the protagonists of the scene will realize this at some point).

How do you see it?

I would like my game ideas to be playable on other platforms as well. Is it possible to realize ideas on github/jocly as well? My visits there leave me perplexed and wondering how to get there.
Could someone please tell me what needs to be done?

It depends on whether they would offer the same promotion choice or a different one. For the same choice all you would have to do is add the line

maxPromote=2

to the Diagram definition, and make sure the two promotiong pieces are the first two in the table. It doesn't matter what their ID is; only the IDs of the pieces they promote to must be used in promoChoice, never the ID of the promoting piece.

Offering a different choice is possible in the Diagram, by only have the first piece promote normally (the default situation), and defining a second promotion set, and letting the second piece morph to that. But this is not supported in the GAME code yet; only automatic morphing into a single type is supported there.

@H.G.: Is it possible to work with two different pawns (e.g. berolina pawn and asian pawn) that are both promoted on the opponent's base line? I think they should have different IDs (I'm thinking of GC), but how does the PTA recognize different IDs for promotion? 
And what if both pawns have the same ID, but they should be morphed differently.
Can't find the solution. Thanks for an answer.

Looking at the Diagram definition in the Page Source I notice this:

• It says royal=K , but it really should say royal=KJLMOT .
• The non-royal Queen is defined twice, in the same way
• The promoChoice parameter isn't useful without zone or morphing to *, and could have been omitted.

The morph parameters seem to do what you describe in the text.

@H.G.

Could you please take a look at my new idea.
I'm not sure if I've done it right because of the morph combinations. Thank you very much.

That is because you still have the HTML text that is supposed to go into an article's Pieces section in the Custom Sets text entry of the preset, rather than the description of a custom set.

A completely new matter for me. Now I understand that - it works.

Great! That is just what I need to avoid auxiliary intermediate variables and testing those with if-statements.

If not, it seems to be useful to have an operator (let's call it number) that would evaluate to the numerical value of its operand, but to zero if the operand was not numeric, or undefined. So that I could write something like number elem #key piececount, which would give me the expected 0 if #key was not a valid key in the piececount table.

The int operator, which already exists, should do what you want. It uses the PHP function intval to convert its input to an integer, and for input that is not numeric, it will return 0.

That is because you still have the HTML text that is supposed to go into an article's Pieces section in the Custom Sets text entry of the preset, rather than the description of a custom set.

I am not sure what you mean here. A 'transfer' is something you do, so how can it be 'missing'?

Of course, it is me who transfers the script from the piece table to the preset to create a custom piece set. But the point is that it doesn't work - at least not for me. I still get the error message 'Your Custom Set description failed to decode properly. Make sure it has no errors in it.'

In my opinion, however, move diagrams provide a more rapid overview, both for the description of the variation and for the presentation of the rules in Game Courier.

This is apparently a matter of taste, because I hate articles with many move diagrams. Especially of large games. The diagrams dillute the information density by about a factor 20, and you have to scroll like mad to find the information you want. Awful. A simple sentence like "moves 1-4 squares orthogonally" tells me all I need to know, seeing a move diagram with a piece centered on an 8x8 board tells me hardly anything (as the leaps reach the board edge). And for complex pieces a static diagram often cannot really illustrate what the move does (e.g. Chu-Shogi Lion).

For those who want to see move diagrams the I.D. offers plenty of opportunity. You can summon a diagram for every piece without scrolling, either by clicking on the name of the piece (which I usually display to the right of the Diagrams), right-clicking the piece in the Diagram, or clicking in the pieceTable after you opened that.

If I see it correctly, the correct transfer of the piece table when creating a custom piece set in the preset is still missing. Or have I overlooked something. Anyway, I am grateful  for your doing.

I am not sure what you mean here. A 'transfer' is something you do, so how can it be 'missing'?

The piece table and the automatically generated piece description for presenting the variant is a nice feature. A very useful tool for a quick approach. In my opinion, however, move diagrams provide a more rapid overview, both for the description of the variation and for the presentation of the rules in Game Courier. After all, you want to play a variant in Game Courier and that's where move diagrams pay off in my opinion. Perhaps also a matter of taste.

The solution to the highlighting problem in the preset is also great.

If I see it correctly, the correct transfer of the piece table when creating a custom piece set in the preset is still missing. Or have I overlooked something. Anyway, I am grateful  for your doing.

But what does this HTML sequence have to do with the Pieces section of my description of the variant?

The Piece Table button in the PTA is an aid for those writing an article about a new variant, to save them the work of writing a description of the pieces by hand. If they use the PTA for creating an Interactive Diagram they can copy-paste to the Setup section (after using the Show HTML button), they can use the Piece Table button to get the Pieces section as a free side effect, as a nice table showing the images of the pieces. The Pieces section in my Makromachy article was made that way.

The highlighting problem in the preset should now be solved too. The preset was using the "accelerated legality test" (by default), and this was testing only for attacks on the first royal type in the wroyals/broyals arrays (i.e. K or k in this case). I now changed that to the first royal type that is actually on board.