Click on the name of a piece to see its move diagram
The autoGate option
I added a new option to the Interactive Diagram,
to make it possible to use brouhaha squares also for Musketeer-style gating.
This is mainly an AI thing:
in the manual use of the diagram it was already possible to drag the pieces that should be gated from the brouhaha square where you put it to the board as a separate move.
The design choice of not enforcing any turn order in the diagram was made precisely do allow that kind of double moving.
The only thing that changes here by specifying autoGate=1 is that highlighting of the normal moves the piece has from the brouhaha square is suppressed on the extreme ranks.
But when the AI has to think ahead it has of course to know that the pieces are gated as side effect of any move of the piece in front of it.
And the AI should not kinck in when the user has moved his back-rank piece before he had time to also perform the accompanied gating.
This should now also work.
The Musketeer Chess demo
The diagram above gives a reasonable representation of Musketeer Chess,
taking into account that we are not dealing with a program dedicated to a specific variant,
but merely with an 'electronic chess board' intended to be a virtual representation of your woodware board at home.
That it can indicate the pseudo-legal moves of the pieces you grab is merely an aid to the memory,
which in chess variants can be pretty useful.
To use the above diagram as a Musketeer Chess demo,
you can drag the selected Musketeer pieces from the piece table to the gating ranks.
You would have to do that for both sides;
the generic AI only knows how to push chess pieces over a board,
and doesn't support any variant-specific stuff like selecting gating squares.
After you placed the pieces, you can start the AI and play against it.
Click on the name of a piece to see its move diagram
The autoGate option
I added a new option to the Interactive Diagram, to make it possible to use brouhaha squares also for Musketeer-style gating. This is mainly an AI thing: in the manual use of the diagram it was already possible to drag the pieces that should be gated from the brouhaha square where you put it to the board as a separate move. The design choice of not enforcing any turn order in the diagram was made precisely do allow that kind of double moving. The only thing that changes here by specifying autoGate=1 is that highlighting of the normal moves the piece has from the brouhaha square is suppressed on the extreme ranks.
But when the AI has to think ahead it has of course to know that the pieces are gated as side effect of any move of the piece in front of it. And the AI should not kinck in when the user has moved his back-rank piece before he had time to also perform the accompanied gating. This should now also work.
The Musketeer Chess demo
The diagram above gives a reasonable representation of Musketeer Chess, taking into account that we are not dealing with a program dedicated to a specific variant, but merely with an 'electronic chess board' intended to be a virtual representation of your woodware board at home. That it can indicate the pseudo-legal moves of the pieces you grab is merely an aid to the memory, which in chess variants can be pretty useful.
To use the above diagram as a Musketeer Chess demo, you can drag the selected Musketeer pieces from the piece table to the gating ranks. You would have to do that for both sides; the generic AI only knows how to push chess pieces over a board, and doesn't support any variant-specific stuff like selecting gating squares. After you placed the pieces, you can start the AI and play against it.