Check out Smess, our featured variant for February, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Oct 10, 2017 08:40 AM UTC:

Indeed, this is no good. Part of this is Nicolino's fault, by using too dark shades for the normal board checkering; it seems his light shade is already as dark as what I use (and is default) for dark squares. But especially yellow, used to highlight non-captures, is too bright to show up well in grey scales. I guess color coding is not an ideal method on grey-scale devices, unless you are very careful in selecting the colors.

It seems to be difficult to detect if you are running on a grey-scale device from JavaScript. My e-reader still reports screen.colorDepth 16, as opposed to my laptop, which reports 24. Perhaps I should have the diagram use a darker shade of yellow (or perhaps of every color) when running with colorDepth <= 16, assuming most color displays nowadays have at least 24-bit 'true colors'.

[Edit] I have now modified the script to detect colorDepth (after the initial rendering), and adjust the square shades to pure white and very light grey if this is <= 16, irrespective of what the user defined. A darker shade of yellow is then used for 'move or capture' highlights. Ufortuately I don't know how to test if this is satisfactory; I have an old and cheap model Kobo e-reader, it has a browser, but I do not know how to flush its cache. So it keeps using on the old, cached script...

  • #FFFFFF: Light squares
  • #E8E8E8: Dark squares (grey scale)
  • #E0E0E0: Dark squares (default)
  • #FFFF00: Move or capture (color)
  • #F0F000: Move or capture (grey scale)
  • #FFE000: Jump move or capture
  • #D0D000: Initial move or capture
  • #00F000: Move only
  • #00B000: Initial move only
  • #00FFFF: Locust capture (destination click to follow)
  • #FF0000: Capture (only)
  • #0000FF: Capture own piece
  • #505050: Forbidden King move

It does help a bit that some colors will only be used on empty squares, others only on occupied square. The move-only and move-or-capture colors will only be used on empty squares. While playing on the diagram (locust) capture will only occur on occupied squares. Unfortunately in the move diagrams capture is also indicated on empty squares; perhaps I should switch to displaying a dummy black piece on the target squares in that case.

[Edit] What also helps is to not use checkering of the board at all when displaying a move diagram. I guess there is no need at all for checkering in that case; the checkering is only useful when you are playing, and want to know if a distant diagonal mover now hits one of your pieces. In a move diagram diagonal moves are highlighted themselves.

Another trick I learned: I can safely use floating style for a diagram in a comment, when I put the whole comment inside a 1x1 table. Then it will ever stick out into the comment below it, not even if you open the legend below the diagram. I tried this in the Wildebeest diagram; I needed the floating style to be able to get the pieceList and board in the same view, so that I could touch the pieces in the list and see their diagram appear, as my e-reader as a portrait-shaped screen, and the diagram and list would not fit side by side.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Interactive diagrams

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.