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About Game Courier. Web-based system for playing many different variants by email or in real-time.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Excellent. Excellent. At least. An outstanding effort and definitely an enhancement to the site. This allows both game developers and players to enjoy playing almost any Chess variant in an easy to use and appealing format, with full functionality. Thanks again, Fergus!
Fergus, I´m greatly impressed with the PBM system and the improvements I have seen in the last days. The adjusted word I can say: Extraordinary!.
Great system! but in the 'My games' section I noticed when I entered my User ID beginning with a lower case letter, it does not list all games I'm actually playing. But If I enter it with a capital letter starting, it lists my other games. Is there a way to view them all without having to do this?
There is now. I already told you by email but will mention it for the benefit of others. String comparison on userids is now case insensitive.
Hi there Fergus...I have a favor to ask you. Could you please put a new piece set together on the Game Courier site? I'm putting together a new preset for a game and need additional colors. What I need for the preset are: Just using alfaerie pieces: Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, King, and pawn in four colors: white, blue, red, and yellow. So you should only need 24 pieces for the set. Maybe call it Alfaerie: Different Color Armies. Thanks so much! Travis
Okay, I made a preset called 'Alfaerie: Four Colors'. I used the colors David made pieces in, which are red, green, blue, and white. I assigned the red and green pieces letters that I hope are mnemonically helpful. Here are the mnemonics. C is for Castle, a common term for Rook. D is for Dame, the French and German name for the Queen. F is for Footsoldier, which is what a Pawn is. H is for Horse, which is what the Knight's name means in most languages. L is for Laufer, the German name for Bishop, or Loper, the Dutch name. S is for Shah, the Persian name for King.
If anyone is interested in having a Preset for Game Courier made for a game they have invented or are interested in, please let me know by a return Comment or e-mail. -- Tony
Hi All,
<p>I have made small modifications to the moves in Courier chess and Courier Spiel, If anyone is interested in trying them out (One of the advantages in the way this game system is set up compared to Zillions! :}), please challenge me!
<p>In the first one, the ferz/queen is also allowed to move straight back 1 square, and the Elephant/Bishops gain a 1 square diagonal move.
<p>In Verney's update, I give the Man a 'castle' (renniassance Castle) move instead: Like a chess Knight, or leaps to the second square horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
<p>Perhaps these small modifiers will make these good games better; I have
found it so! :)
<p> Eric V. Greenwood id = cavalier
<p>[email protected] Gimme a holler if you like! :)
Hi again! :) Renniassance Chess may be played on Richard's pbEm, so don't worry about the headaches of presetting it here. However, The Tamerlane Variants (with the 12 files and the added pieces) would be most welcomed! All 5 proposed variants use the same pieces and setup, so you and your opponent can choose which rules you like the best. Eric P.S. Variant #2 is my favorite; I will welcome any challenges made if and when the preset is approved/implemented! ( I am new to this; if someone knows how to 'set it up' so a game can be started, please do so-I love the game, and it's been awhile since i played my last one! :[ )
<html><font color='royalblue'>Hello Tony,<br><br> I am the Inventor of <a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/link2.dir/imposterchess.html'><b><i>Imposter Chess</b></i></a>, and new to the Courier. I'm interested in any help you can offer with creating a preset for this game.<br><br><center><font color='#FF00FF'><b>Thanks,<br>~ Laila</b></center></html>
Fergus,<p> I am currently in the middle of a Pocket Mutation Chess game with Andreas Kaufmann. However, neither of us can make our next move because when we click on the link to do so, the following error message appears: <p>'R h1-@ is an invalid move, because @ is not a known coordinate. Go back and enter a valid move.'<p> Could this be a glitch in the Courier?<p>Thanks,<p> ~ Laila
Fergus, The fact that I can use 'the shortest possible distance between two points on the surface' to connect points on both planes and spheres does not tell me that it is appropriate to refer to both types of constructions as 'straight lines'.
Hi,
<p>I'm not sure, but I think we've arrived at a mate in a Shogi game. It's the first game either of us have played here, so we're not sure how to proceed. Does game courier detect a mate? If not, what do we do next?
<p>thanks,
steve
Yes, Black has checkmated White in your game. Game Courier cannot detect mate. Adding this ability would greatly increase the overhead of the program, because it would have to consider all possible moves, and it would have to check the legality of each one. What Game Courier does do is check whether the single move someone tries to make is legal. Once a player is checkmated, he will find that any and every move he tries to make will be illegal. When you checkmated your opponent, you should have changed the status of your game from 'Ongoing' to 'Steve Jones has won.' Since you didn't, I have now done it for you.
Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Oct 14, 2004 03:07 AM UTC:Thank you, this is a very handy new feature. It is now much easier for me to 'cut out' opening lines from Game Courier games for inclusion into ChessV.
Fergus, I'm using Game Courier to play a non-serious (no time control, I think) game of Rococo with gwduke. We're just giving it a shot to see how the game goes. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to write down a move for Rococo where I move my Advancer straight across a rank, moving it towards an enemy Cannonball Pawn, but then stopping short by 1 square. This ought to be enough to capture the pawn. I was hoping the 'verify' button would draw the board with the Advancer moved, and the Cannonball Pawn deleted. It doesn't do it. The Cannonball Pawn is still there. To explain this more fully, there is probably a help file somewhere, but slow page loading makes it very difficult to locate. Here are the moves so far: 1. a2-a3, g7-g6; 2. c2-b3, e7-e6; 3. e2-f3, a7-a6; 4. h2-g3, h8-d4; 5. e1-e2, f7-d5; 6. a3-c3, d4-a7; 7. g1-g2, a6-b6; 8. b2-a2, e6-c4; 9. h2-h4, e8-e7 White's ninth move is a check. Is it permissible to put a plus sign in, or is that unnecessary surplusage? For White's tenth move, I tried to move h4-d4, capturing the Black Pawn at c4, but the Verify button doesn't seem to implement the capture properly.
Okay, I think I figured out what I did wrong. It was the notation. I should have entered 10. h4-d4 and then joined an extra move to it with a semicolon ;@-c4 So that your parser will store a zero into the position on the board where the Cannonball Pawn is. I naturally assume you are using some kind of a byte map to store the board, and then the parser comes along and ANDs off the superfluous bits of the script byte, before storing the result into the map? Thus the @ character turns into a zero that you can store into the byte map? Hmm. Okay. I prefer the form of notation where the many captured (and resurrected) pieces are listed, enclosed inside of parentheses, rather than connected as miniature moves joined by semicolons.
I missed the Rococo question when it was first posted. Since I didn't write the Rococo preset and don't play the game myself, I can't answer any specific questions on how the Rococo preset handles things. If the preset doesn't enforce the rules, then you would have to manually remove any piece captured by a means other than displacement. Dropping an @ on the space will remove the piece, and so will moving the piece nowhere, as in 'c4-'. A third way is with the capture command, as in 'capture c4'. I can answer your question on how Game Courier stores the board. It stores it as an array, not as a bytemap. It is a one-dimensional array indexed to coordinates. Dropping an @ clears a space, because that is the symbol it actually uses for an empty space. This is an artifact of the intermediary process of first converting the FEN code in the preset to an extended string representing every space individually. Pieces are stored as the symbols used to represent them, which are normally various letters of both cases, though they may also be longer strings. The style of notation used by Game Courier, which separates component moves by semicolons, is due to the fact that Game Courier moves are all actually entered as programming code. The - and * operators, which are most commonly used for moves, are operators of the GAME Code programming language. If you cared to, you could write complicated moves by writing complex algorithms in the Move field. If you wanted to capture many pieces at once, you could use the capture command with multiple arguments, each argument a different coordinate. If you wanted to add the same piece to multiple spaces, you could do it more quickly with the add command, as in 'add P all c1 c2 ...', where P is the piece, and all arguments following the 'all' keyword are coordinates. A good automated preset should make all this work invisible to the user, so that all he has to enter is a single move, but Game Courier does allow people to create presets that don't automate games in any way, and then players must do everything manually.
I am thinking of adding ratings to Game Courier. These would be for individual players on a game by game basis. For example, you might get one rating for Chess and another for Shogi. I could go with the Elo method, but I would like to use something that is better suited for calculating a rating from a collection of logs. The Elo method, as used in Chess, gives each player a number, which gets modified after each game he plays. This is suitable for something as large and uncentralized as Chess competition, because it doesn't require full knowledge of all Chess games played between people, and it is simple to keep track of when you simply modify it after each game. But since I plan to write a script that will have access to all logs, and since datestamps on logs can sometimes change, especially if the site ever moves, I'm thinking a simultaneous, holistic rating system would be better. This would freshly calculate a rating based on all game logs without consideration of what order they were played in. Does anyone know of such a system already in use anywhere? Or does anyone have any ideas on how to do what I have described?
To get things started, the script would read in results from a set of logs for finished games whose game name matches a given wildcard. This could be * for all games, a specific game name, or something that includes some different games, such as *Chess. The rating would be calculated from all the logs read in. It would be most meaningful for a specific game, but it could also be calculated for all or several different games. The Data would be stored into a two-dimensional array of pairwise wins and another of pairwise draws. Alternately, a draw would simply count as half a win for each player, and I would record everything into one array. The question I need to answer is how to use these arrays to calculate individual ratings for the players whose wins, losses, and draws are recorded in them.
I have a better idea of how to do this now. I will basically use the Elo method for calculating ratings, but instead of calculating ratings in chronological order of games played, I will do it in an order that is optimized for all-around accuracy. I will work out the details of the sorting function as I do the actual programming.
Players may now choose which background images they want to use in games using background images. This does not apply to games rendered by tables or drawn from scratch by Game Courier. If your game uses a background image, you will see a drop-down menu of background images. These have been limited to images whose height and width are the same as the background image you're already using. Select the one you want to use. I have recently added new background images for Shogi, Korean Chess, and Chinese Chess.
In addition to changing the background image, players may now also change colors, the rendering method, and the scale for individual games. Games cannot be switched from using colors to using background images or vice versa. A game will use one or the other, and it will let players customize the appropriate feature. The GIF, JPG and PNG rendering methods are available for all games. The CSS method is available for games using background images, and the Table method is available for games using colors. The scale value works only with the GIF, JPG and PNG methods. This lets you change the size of your board and pieces. This is useful in case you play from library computers that have broadband connections but which lock the screen size to something unreasonable like 800x600. Without reducing the size, some of the boards fit most comfortably on a 1024x768 screen.
Bravo! for the new display options, and also for the new background images, some of which are very nice.
One problem: when I change the background image in a game of Xiàngqí or Shogi, the 'Verify Your Move' page shows the new image, but the 'Background' field is empty, and when I submit the move it reverts to the default image.
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