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Revisiting the Crooked Bishop. Revisiting the Crooked Bishop.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Bn Em wrote on Sat, Nov 26, 2022 04:29 PM UTC:

Fergus asked some time ago whether a piece covering the same squares as a zB but alternating between the move's arms (for which he suggested the name ‘Helical Bishop’ on account of the path's resemblance to a DNA‐style Double Helix) had already been invented. It seems we can now answer that in the affirmative: it's mentioned twice on this page, as the Zigzag Bishop. Betza also posits what Gilman would go on to call a Bruegel (t[Wzt[FAA]]; for which I initially mistook Fergus' description), as well as a piece (the t[FzDD]) ‘dual’ (in the Gilman sense) to the Harvestman of Seenschach which seems to go curiously unnamed in M&B.


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sat, Nov 26, 2022 04:22 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 08:43 AM:

PRE tags are typically used for no other reason than to preserve indentations

But is that an appropriate use for them? Please point me to a page that does this, so that I have a better idea of what you are talking about.

And what about JavaScript embedded in the page? The CkEditor doesn't add any whitespace there; it is smart enough to only do that in HTML code where it knows the whitespace will be ignored.

It hasn't harmed your interactive diagram on this page. It does not remove all whitespace. It removes whitespace only from the beginning and the end of each line, and then it adds a newline character at the end so that lines do not run into each other. Losing whitespace at the beginning and ends of lines should not change how any JavaScript works. I guess the issue here is that CkEditor might not reformat the JavaScript when someone is editing it. I ran a test on this, and CkEditor properly formatted the JavaScript even though whitespace had been removed from the lines in the database. So, this doesn't seem to be a real concern.

Indiscriminately destroying the existing explicitly requested layout when you happen to load and resubmit an article for making an innocent change elsewhere basically makes the submission form unusable.

One of the problems is that CkEditor does this anyway. Stripping off whitespace undoes some of the damage and keeps things more uniform.

In particular, I could no longer use it to replace a static setup image by an Interactive Diagram without running a large risk to irreversibly damage the page.

I don't know all the details about how interactive diagrams work, but the one on this page seems fine, and it has had whitespace removed from each line. Maybe you could make sure that static setup images do not rely on whitespace at the beginning or end of lines.

It is far easier to delete whitespace you don't want than to add whitespace that got erroneously deleted, as you would not always know exactly how much whitespace there originally was, and where.

You can check an earlier revision to find out exactly how much whitespace needs to be preserved, and you can use NOBR or SPAN tags to preserve it. Also, deleting whitespace is not an easy job when CkEditor keeps indenting the HTML code. So, I'll disagree on what's far easier.

The most important property of an edit function is that when you activate it, alter nothing, and save, that you have not altered anything, and certainly not anything essential.

If I could figure out how to get CkEditor to behave that way, it would help a lot. Since it doesn't behave that way, it helps to rein things back in by trimming off excess whitespace.

I think the best solution to the addition of leading whitespace in textareas that are used as input for Game Courier is to have Game Courier itself strip off such whitespace. Just as I have done for the Interactive Diagram.

As I already described in my prior comment, there was another issue. The TEXTAREAs looked bad due to excess whitespace that was caused by how CkEditor formats the HTML by putting extra whitespace at the beginnings of lines.


Tiger Chess. A large game with fast-moving pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Jean-Louis Cazaux wrote on Sat, Nov 26, 2022 12:25 PM UTC in reply to Daniel Zacharias from Fri Nov 25 01:37 AM:

Yes, I think it is better. As it is right now, the text allows more moves than the diagram. Of course the diagram is clear in itself but it is never good to have a difference, one might wonder if the diagram is wrong.

I had seen somewhere (maybe in AI AI?) this piece defined as "leaps as a narrow knight then slides outwards vertically or leaps as a wide knight then slides outwards horizontally". But it can be argued that one needs to know what narrow Knight and wide Knight mean.

Whatever, I suggest to add something to remove the wrong interpretation.


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Nov 26, 2022 08:43 AM UTC:

That is no good. PRE tags are typically used for no other reason than to preserve indentations. The CkEditor adds such tags in WYSIWYG mode when you select 'formatted text' in the 'layout' pulldown. (I am guessing the English names, as I see them in Dutch; it is the control left of the question mark.) What you have done would cause every existing submission that relies on it to get utterly destroyed upon editing. And what about JavaScript embedded in the page? The CkEditor doesn't add any whitespace there; it is smart enough to only do that in HTML code where it knows the whitespace will be ignored.

Indiscriminately destroying the existing explicitly requested layout when you happen to load and resubmit an article for making an innocent change elsewhere basically makes the submission form unusable. In particular, I could no longer use it to replace a static setup image by an Interactive Diagram without running a large risk to irreversibly damage the page. And this holds for all editing jobs by CVP editors.

Please revert this as quickly as possible. The adding of whitespace can be annoying in exceptional circumstances. (E.g. I had to adapt the parser of the Interactive Diagram to remove the leading whitespace, as the Diagram's definition is within HTML tags.) But it is not nearly as bad as removing whitespace in the far more common case where the user explicitly requested it. It is far easier to delete whitespace you don't want than to add whitespace that got erroneously deleted, as you would not always know exactly how much whitespace there originally was, and where. The most important property of an edit function is that when you activate it, alter nothing, and save, that you have not altered anything, and certainly not anything essential.

I think the best solution to the addition of leading whitespace in textareas that are used as input for Game Courier is to have Game Courier itself strip off such whitespace. Just as I have done for the Interactive Diagram.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sat, Nov 26, 2022 01:22 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Fri Nov 25 10:05 PM:

I made the appropriate changes to the scripts for editing your own page. I figured that if someone really wants to use PRE with lines that begin with whitespace, the whitespace can be enclosed in a NOBR or SPAN tag to keep it from being trimmed off.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 10:05 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 08:35 AM:

Since your own edits also broke the Game Courier forms, I figured it might not be my use of htmlspecialchars and htmlspecialchars_decode. I determined the problem to be that CkEditor was putting extra whitespace in front of each line, and this was affecting how it processed the variable passed in the TEXTAREA. So, I modified Game Courier to remove the whitespace from each line of this variable. Then I used htmlspecialchars on the appropriate variables before displaying them in editmsitem.php, and I used htmlspecialchars_decode on them before copying them to the database in editmsitem2.php.

But one problem remained. The Game Courier forms included lots of extra whitespace before each line of text in the TEXTAREA. To eliminate this, I wrote a function to trim whitespace off each line of text in a string, and I used this function on the data before sending it to the database in editmsitem2.php. This will have the extra advantage of saving space in the database. However, this will make difficulty for PRE text, but I figure PRE text is no longer as useful as it once was, since most people don't use text-based browsers like Lynx, and because CkEditor reformats text, it makes using PRE text difficult anyway.

Unless people believe there is a need to still accommodate PRE text, I'll start making these same changes to other scripts for editing page content.


Ascension. 6x6 board with two Kings that promote to royal Queens.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 07:25 PM UTC in reply to Albert Lee from 05:55 PM:

You will have to be more specific, as for me this doesn't seem to happen. What exactly is the position in which the castling failed, and how did you reach it?


💡📝Albert Lee wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 05:55 PM UTC:

To the person who created the playable setup, thanks a lot.

However, when I was playing it, I noticed that there was a bug in the castling - the King disappeared!


💡📝Albert Lee wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 05:40 PM UTC in reply to Greg Strong from Wed Oct 19 11:23 PM:

Thanks Greg for your question.

I have not thought much about whether the royal Queen can move through a square where it would be put in check. Since in orthodox chess, the King can never move into a square where it will be in check even when castling, then it is a natural extension that it should also be true for a royal Queen. This will restrict the possible squares that a royal Queen can move into, and limit its power.

I will add a note in the promotion rules to clarify this matter.


Diagram Designer. Lets you display diagrams without uploading any graphics.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸💡📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 04:21 PM UTC in reply to Daniel Zacharias from 02:31 AM:

You can do that by replacing drawdiagram.php with diagram-designer.php while keeping the rest of the URL the same.


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 04:19 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 08:35 AM:

Yes, just put them back.


OctaChess. Chess with eight different armies with four classic and four modern chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Albert Lee wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 03:55 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Fri Nov 18 04:22 PM:

Thanks, Fergus. I've removed "Tournament" from the title.


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 08:35 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 02:15 AM:

I don't think the problem is how it is encoded in the database. What matters is how it is presented to the client browser. There cannot be any /textarea tags within the recalled text, or the submission form would not be correctly displayed. When presenting the existing text to the user for editing these must be deleted or replaced by something harmless, or everything following it would not be considered as belonging in the editable area. If that 'something harmless' is something the user would never want to be in the text, it could be automatically substituted back for /textarea when the server receives the submission form, before it stores it in the database.

Anyway, I edited the database to temporarily disarm the textarea tags in the Notes section (by replacing those with texxtarea) so that the article can now be normally edited. I inserted the Interactive Diagram in the Setup section, but the textareas are still disabled. I wonder what to do next. I could put in two smaller Interactive Diagrams configured to be game viewers for the specified sequence of moves on the page itself. But those would not work when JavaScript is disabled. So perhaps I should just put back the textarea tags, and leave it at that?


Diagram Designer. Lets you display diagrams without uploading any graphics.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Zacharias wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 02:31 AM UTC:

For editing diagrams from existing pages, it would be useful to be able to load the diagram designer settings from an existing generated URL


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 02:15 AM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from Thu Nov 24 09:51 PM:

I tried using htmlspecialchars for the form and htmlspecialchars_decode for inserting into the database, but something went wrong with the Game Courier forms on the page. So, I reverted things back. I'll try it again later in case I did something wrong.

If you want to, you can edit the database directly. I emailed you information on how to do that.


Tiger Chess. A large game with fast-moving pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Daniel Zacharias wrote on Fri, Nov 25, 2022 01:37 AM UTC in reply to Jean-Louis Cazaux from Thu Nov 24 10:08 PM:

I can see the potential confusion, but I don't like to make the description so complicated. What about The Pegasus leaps as a knight and may then slide as a rook in the outwardmost direction?


Bn Em wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 11:57 PM UTC in reply to Jean-Louis Cazaux from 10:08 PM:

It's ‘outward’ in the same sense that the Shōgi Knight moves ‘forward’; only the most outward of the directions counts.

Arguably could be specified more clearly, but the diagram does imo clarify sufficiently which sense is meant


Jean-Louis Cazaux wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 10:08 PM UTC:

The definition of the Pegasus is incomplete and confusing:

"The Pegasus leaps as a knight and may then slide outward as a rook" It should be said that "The Pegasus leaps as a knight, one orthogonal step followed by a diagonal step leaping the intervening square, and may then slide outward as a rook on the same orthogonal direction"

For example, a Pegasus on a1 may go on b3,b4,b5,etc. it may not go on b3,c3,d3,etc. which is also leaping as a knight and then slide outward as a rook.


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 09:51 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 04:12 PM:

The problem is that the Notes section includes some TEXTAREAs of its own, and when the first one closes, it closes the TEXTAREA the Notes HTML is being displayed in.

I had some problem using textareas in the editor for comments as well, a few days ago; it completely messed up the comment display, and I had a hard time recovering from that, as the edit/reply/view links at the bottom were also clipped off. So this seems a general problem. Is there any solution to it? I suppose this article is in the database, and not in a separate file that I could edit through WinSCP.

Perhaps the script displaying the edit form for submissions can be made to 'disarm' any text it fills the edit boxes with by substituting something else for the word textarea? Inconvenient, of course, as you would have to restore that every time you edit. But better than not being able to edit at all. Perhaps substitute by texxtarea, and make the reverse substitution when the form gets submitted?


Chak. A modern vision of what a Mayan chess would look like.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 05:15 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from Wed Oct 12 02:11 PM:

Please, where can I find these pieces?


Asylum Chess. 3 new unique pieces: fire-through rooks, double-capture knights, leaping bishops. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 04:12 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 08:09 AM:

The problem is that the Notes section includes some TEXTAREAs of its own, and when the first one closes, it closes the TEXTAREA the Notes HTML is being displayed in.


Caïssa Britannia. British themed variant with Lions, Unicorns, Dragons, Anglican Bishops, and a royal Queen. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸💡📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 03:55 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 09:38 AM:

Okay, it's looking good.


Accelerated Chess. Accelerating chess with a new board. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Max Koval wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 12:03 PM UTC:

The text was rewritten and the graphics were fixed. It is ready.


Caïssa Britannia. British themed variant with Lions, Unicorns, Dragons, Anglican Bishops, and a royal Queen. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 09:38 AM UTC:

@Fergus: I have moved the Interactive Diagram that was somewhere down in the comments section into your article, replacing the diagram of the initial setup. (Your original image is still there, within <noscript> tags for those who have JavaScript disabled.) It tried to mimic the original image as much as possible, without resorting to a dedicated background image of the whole board. I hope this is OK with you.

(N.B. Flush the browser cache to use the latest Diagram script, as the previous one did not 'bleach' the dark color for the odd files when displayiong a move diagram.)


ChessVA computer program
. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Aurelian Florea wrote on Thu, Nov 24, 2022 08:26 AM UTC:

Hello Greg,

I have 2 questions:

  1. How does the colourbound pieces bonus/penalty work when more pairs of colourbound pieces are involved?
  2. Does the endgame value of a piece influence opening exchanges, or is it just the middlegame value?

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