Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Laila,

Here is what I think might be happening. In verify mode, the movelist is
contained in a hidden INPUT element. When it gets passed to send mode,
WebTV may be ignoring the linefeeds in the movelist, passing what should
be multiple lines of text as a single line. If this is what is happening,
you will see your move on a new line in verify mode, but when you get to
send mode, the whole movelist will be on one line. Please let me know
whether this is what you observe.

Laila,

Try it again now. I have read that WebTV is very strictly standards
compliant, and that the standard newline indicator is CR+LF. So, in the
movelist, I have now ended each line with a carriage return plus a
linefeed instead of just a linefeed. Please let me know if this fixes
things for you.

The line you mentioned in sendmove.php is part of a for-loop. The error you
reported is probably caused by an infinite loop. Since this for-loop goes
through the lines of the movelist, odds are very good that my solution did
not work for you.

I have now tried a new solution. The script now encodes and decodes form
data. So linefeeds no longer even appear in hidden form values. Please let
me know how this works for you.

The problem should now be fixed.

As mentioned in my message to Laila, I made some changes to accomodate
WebTV. It now encodes and decodes form data. But I did not have it decode
form data early enough. I had it decode form data after reading the log,
because it was at this point that I was already assigning all the POST
variables. But this was only to override the values set in the log. PHP
naturally assigns all POST variables without any explicit assignment in
the program, and I was using some post variables to tell which log to
read. This is where it broke down. It tried to use the decoded form of the
game's name, and this didn't work for names with spaces in them. So, to
fix this, I copied the code for assigning POST variables to an earlier
part of the script. It should now properly identify which log to read for
all games.

I'll quickly mention some updates I made to Game Courier today. There are
now three kinds of automated move instead of just one. There is a pre-game
automated move that is performed only once before the game starts. There
is an automatic move that by default regularly follows each move. And
there is an automatic move that regularly follows the second player's
move. When this is set, the default automatic move is performed only after
the first player's move. Note that few games use automated moves, but
they're there for games that can use them, such as Motorotor and Brand X
Random Chess.

There is now a shuffle command, which is useful mainly for automated
moves. It should be followed by a series of space-separated coordinates.
It then shuffles the contents of these coordinates. I used it to randomize
the position of pieces in Brand X Random Chess. It will also be useful for
other random phenomena, such as Chess dice. But I still haven't tried
that out.

The results of past randomness in a game is preserved by using the same
seed throughout the game. Each game gets its own seed. The same seed is
used to initialize the pseudo random number generator, and the same random
numbers are calculated in the same order whenever a log is loaded.

For some reason, when the page auto-refreshed, it went to a regular chess
game, and I was playing Seperate Realms Chess.
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Help!

I wandered into this site trying to find an opportunity to play an email
version of a game we used to call 'blitzkrieg,' which someone tells me
is technically 'kriegspiel', which I thought was available here. What
does it take to get a new game added?

Also--another variant I expect has not been tried by anyone since my best
friend & I played it ~1962... It was played on a subdivided chessboard
(16X16) with the pieces set up on a paper board (the raft) in the center.
The raft moved every time a piece slammed into an edge, as far and in the
same direction as the piece had moved. A 'cutter' in the center of the
board would destroy or separate cells as the raft moved across it...
Perhaps the game started with the board already in halves, in the center
of opposite edges (It's been awhile.) As the board got more split apart
much depended on how quickly various pieces could move oddly-shaped
fragments...