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H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 21, 2023 07:01 AM UTC in reply to François Houdebert from Wed Dec 20 10:28 PM:

I suppose you meant 2D pieces. Indeed Board Painter has a nice diagonal cannon, and th Wikipedia non-royal King should replace my improvization. The Greek helmet also looks a useful addition, e.g. for the Omega Champion.

It is always a dilemma whether pieces should look to be reminiscent of their name or of their move. I usualy prefer the move. So Elven Chess uses a Lion for the piece called Wizard, because that moves like the Chu-Shogi Lion. The renaming was just to fit the theme. (And I had nothing that looked like an Elf or Goblin either...) Likewise, I would prefer the flying sliders to be similar to their normal counterparts, even when they are called Eagle or Raven. Since these are both birds they would look too much alike. (And I have no Bat anyway, and it seems difficult to make one.) A poor-man's solution would be to use larger or taller versions of Q, B and N, by transforming the vertex coordinates in normal ones with the aid of a program. (This is how I made the Nightrider.) But it should not be impossible for me to add wings to existing pieces, like I added spears to the Pawn to make Hoplits.

I never got to learn Blender, because at the time I got involved in Jocly the required export was no longer supported. So it seemed futile. I did study how the pieces are encoded, though. For simple, mostly cylindical chess pieces it would not be impossible to generate the mesh file with the aid of a simple program, which takes a list of  diameters and heights as input. I suppose I could even make windows bitmaps for the normalmap and diffusemap, and MS Paint should be able to convert that to jpeg. The main difficulty would be to calculate the darkness from the surface orientation. I created the shogi tiles from scratch, but these had only flat surfaces, so I could take a homogeneous normalmap and some wood image on which I wrote kanji for the diffusemap.

A Sword, Spear/Lance or Axe should also be relatively easy to make.

BTW, .js means JavaScript, not JSON.The piece mesh files are in fact just JavaScript objects.


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