Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Does your website works with Firefox browser? I wanted to try out your game
(I was very interested because I am a Dark Chess fan), but was not able to
start a game.

I have tested only with Internet Explorer. If the game catches on, one of
the planned enhancements is support for other browsers, if this is
feasible. The issue I ran into when I tried it briefly with Netscape a
long time ago was the handling of overlappiing communications to the
server. (It needs two, one each way.) Meanwhile, do you have access to IE?

I tried play with myself using Internet Explorer 6.0, but failed to start
the game. After I clicked on the oponnent I only saw 'Waiting
www.vervechess.com' in both browser windows, but the game didn't start.
How long is usually delay before the game starts?

In that case, I might give it a shot if I could somehow dial in directly. That means disclosing the phone number associated with the website, and basically opting out of the worldwide web, and my eating the phone bills as they come due - as was the case in the olden days.

You can't imagine the number of people who have been trying to get me to click on their website so they can blank out my screen (it happens with alarming regularity) and pump tons of mysterious binary stuff into my computer (so it can be renamed subsequently and without my permission) makes me afraid of what on earth I might pick up at distant websites. If you can remember the olden days (so much safer and so much slower), you'll not wonder at my reluctance to go there.

Ok, now I was able to start the game against myself (using Internet
Explorer). My mistake was that I didn't select an opponent in both
browser windows. Here is my first impression of this chess variant,
certainly this could be different if I played with a real opponent.

The attempt to create a real-time chess variant is very original, may be
Verve is a first such chess variant. I first thought that Verve is a
variation of Dark Chess (if not count real-time way of play), but then
noticed that it has complete different visiblity rules. It seems that in
difference to Dark Chess in Verve too much information is visible, why
didn't you want to use elegant and simple visibility rules of Dark
Chess?

Also not clear why you need to delay the game play when both players
selected thier moves. I would suggest the following move
synchronizations:

* game starts
* player A makes a move 
=> the move immediately made on the board, because player B is not moved
yet, player B doesn't know that A already moved
=> player A can't make a second move before player B moved or 10 (or
whatever) sec are passed.
* 10 sec are passed, but player B didn't make a move
=> player A can move now
* player A moves, 
=> move immediately performed
* player B moves, 
=> move immediately perfromed
etc.

This is in reply to Matthew:

With respect to your security concerns, I have tried to minimize players'
exposure to internet risks by not requiring the downloading of any
executable software to players' computers. No executables, applets or
plugins. Verve does use scripts run by the browser, subject to the
browser's built in security restrictions (eg, no access to players' hard
drives etc). So Verve is about as safe to use as a web application can be.

With respect to using direct dial in instead of the web, that would be a
fundamentally different platform and I do not have any plans for going
that route.

This is in reply to Andreas:

Thank you for your favourable comment on the originality of the real time
aspect of the game. There is in fact another real time variant, Kung Fu
chess, although it is a very different game.

With respect to your question, why not use the Dark Chess visibility
rules? The short answer is that I was not aware of Dark Chess until
recently. I do believe the rules are similar: you see through the eyes of
your men, and your men see according to their movement pattern. The main
difference seems to be that in Verve they can also see additional squares
diagonally adjacent to squares they can move to. I did this for two
reasons. First, it ensures that endgames work properly, because a rook for
example, can see the enemy king when it is closely blockaded, not just when
it is in check. Second, it makes pawn ambushes harder, because a man can
see enemy pawns attacking the squares it can move to.

Your larger point seems to be that too much information may be available
in Verve. At the beginning it is certainly true that more information is
available than in Dark Chess, because of the larger fields of vision
(pawns that have not moved also see further than in Dark Chess, because in
Verve they get credit for their ability to make a two-square initial move,
and in Dark Chess I believe they do not). But later in the game, Verve may
actually have less information available because men temporarily go blind
when they move. Since this depends on the players' rate of play, my hope
is that players would adjust their rate of play so that just the right
amount of informaion is available, neither too much nor too little. But we
won't know for sure until more people have tried it.

I want to think a bit more about your comments on move synchronization,
and will reply later.

The general rule is not to change screen colors if you don't have to, and printing black letters on a black screen is sort of suspicious, even on a good day, and spinning somebody's harddrive for something I don't know what, is an even more suspicious sort of thing. It's certainly unusual expecting people to sit around and stare at a black screen. Maybe my computer already has a virus, it's hard to say. Probably nobody's fault, so far as I can figure. Your computer is probably tons and tons better than mine is, in which case I applaud you on your spending choices, and the degree to which you are computer savvy.

Anyway, it sort of brings us back full circle as to what the lowest common denominator may be, and what it takes to be able to get your computer to webbrowse somehow.

I hope to be able to click onto your website soon, and see what you've got. It's just a matter of time. It's probably just my computer having a tough time with what it finds at its port.

Matthew, it sounds like your computer has issues that have nothing to do
with me. My site does not use black as a background colour, and as I said
in my earlier post, I don't deal with people's hard disks, nor could I
using the browser platform as I do. Many people have accessed the site and
several have played the game without similar experiences. I have played on
a five year old computer running Windows 98 over a dialup connection to my
ISP.

I hope you are interested enough to try on a different computer.

Dave

Andreas, this is in response to the move synchronization suggestion you
made on September 23.

Thank you very much for the suggestion. I will incorporate an adapted
version of it into the game as soon as I can work out the user interface
implications and do the programming.

I believe that your suggestion is to change the part of current rule 3
that says 'Your moves must be at least 30 seconds apart' to:

A. 'After moving, you can not move again for 30 seconds or until your
opponent makes the next move.'

I have adapted this in two ways. First, just to clarify how this would
apply in the period of simultaneous moves at the beginning of the game.

B. 'After simultaneous moves by both players, you can not move again for
30 seconds or until your opponent also moves again.' This would appear
somewhere in rule 5.3 and would be in addition to rule A above. I believe
that it is completely consistent with your suggestion.

The second adaptation is to prevent a player from getting knowledge about
when his opponent has made an unseen move. Rule A above is changed to:

C. 'After moving, you can not move again for 30 seconds or until you next
see your opponent make a move.' I don't think that this makes a lot of
difference because it is Rule B, not Rule C, that will be most commonly
applied.

Later, after more people have tried and commented on the game, I may
change B in the same way that C changes A.

Do you need an opponent? I would be more than happy.

Dave