Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Sep 27, 2023 06:28 PM UTC in reply to Bob Greenwade from 03:03 PM:

H.G., when you have a minute or two, could you take a look at this game's ID? I fixed the Wizard, and I think I got the Royalty right, but I'm really unsure about the Helepolis.

Another undocumented trick, originally intended just for debugging of the Diagram script: If you open the piece table, and click on the header of the move column, it switches to showing the guestimated piece values instead. And it also shows the (hexadecimal) value of the 'royalness' parameter for that piece, if non-zero. Using this it is easily confirmed that you made Prince and King both royal.

As to the Helepolis: combining 'transparent' and 'destructive' modes (such as m and c) in a non-final leg is something the old move generator (used only for the move diagrams if you specified newClick=1) cannot handle. For that reason it splits such moves during parsing of the XBetza descriptions. But the splitting only works for the first leg that needs it, as the old script could not handle more than a single locust capture in the first place. And for the Helepolis you have upto 14 mc legs...

But that is completely unnecessary. By basing the description on a Rook move instead of a Wazir, skipping of the empty squares becomes an implied possibility of each individual leg. So (caf)14R describes the same as (mcaf)14W (with the difference that the old move generator understands it too). What you did is a bit similar to defining a Rook as (maf)14W, making a separate leg out of each step. And that would be quite inefficient, as the modifier repetition would be handled by preprocessin the text description, expanding it to WmafWmafmafWmafmafmafW... Eventually the move generator, when it gets to generating the N-step move, would start testing the first N-1 squares to see if these are empty, while it already had obtained that information during the attempt to generate the (N-1)-step move. When described as R it would simply try to add another step to the last move it had, and once it encounters an obstruction it would be done with that direction, and never try any longer moves for it.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Vanguard Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.