Comments by benr

Initial thoughts (mostly the ones I had but didn't post a couple of months ago; sorry):

I like the tool a lot; thanks for creating and sharing.  For individual piece(clopedia) pages, I wonder whether something static would be better.  I think the whole table is a lot more in-depth than many of our piece pages, so maybe a summarized version (if necessary for a couple of board sizes?) would be a better fit for those.  (On that note though, I have at various times wanted to expand on and standardize piece(clopedia) pages...)  I think the entire tool itself would work well as its own page, maybe listed as Primary (so displayed at the top of searches) in the Piece(clopedia) page type?

That depends on the meta-information you provide when you submit the game.  I think I've fixed them both.  (This game was listed as 8x10, but with 96 cells, and WAD Chess was listed as 8x8.  I added both to the Large category.)

You should address Aurelian's question, here and on the rest of your batch of preset submissions.  (I added such links to one of your submissions and approved it, before another editor approved the rest.  You may want to consider creating Game pages for them, unless they are still in testing?)

That's all pretty much how I was thinking of how to implement it too.  Since the Piececlopedia is fairly small, I'm inclined to just edit by hand.

I've been wanting to database-ify some Piece information; maybe linking to the applet page with piece Betza notation, drawn from such a table, would be a good starting point.

(Further comments, made during the creation of this tool, can be found in this Subject thread.)

The BN piececlopedia page now has a blurb (in the Notes section) as suggested by H.G., passing the appropriate information to the limited EGT page.  If it looks and works fine, I will try to include similar links in the other Piececlopedia pages.

I currently have this page set as a Piececlopedia page, but that seems somehow unsatisfactory.  It strikes me as best categorized as Reference or Problem/puzzle/1-player, but those are not highly publicized.  Maybe the link from the minimal tool (from Piececlopedia pages) is enough?  Or perhaps a direct link from Topic Index is warranted?

I agree with Greg.  Since this is derived from your Yangsi, maybe the name could reference that.  "DeWitt's Decimal" would work, but it seems like you like your other decimal game better.

You needn't bother moving the content to another page just for the naming.  Since the page is pretty young, we can modify the relevant references without too much trouble.

I don't see the "either side can move first" as being particularly noteworthy.  You've eliminated the white/black advantage, but the first/second player advantage isn't changed.

Personally, this seems to just be a decimal subvariant of Fergus's Gross Chess; the rule adjustments seem to just be conforming to the smaller board.  The further piece reduction to your other game (in particular using the Leo in place of the Pao and Vao) seems a more separate variant (while still clearly inspired by Gross, with the compounds and Omega pieces and hopper[s]).

While it's easy enough to guess your intention by looking at the Shako and Balbo pages, this page should mention the powers of the elephant and cannon, pawn starts and promotions.  (I guess castling is pretty obviously out.)

John, please feel free to email me with any questions about the submission process.  I'd be happy to help you, and even happier to know of any pain points we might be able to simplify.

I might be able to play...

Since I cannot imagine anyone actually voting to play TessChess, maybe I'll put forward Tim's 3D Chess; it's 3D, so may tempt folks to try other 3+ dim games like Tess, it's not 4D itself, and it's a little slicker IMO than Raumschach with the two kings.  I should be able to adapt my Raumschach rules-enforcing preset for this, if someone can help me figure out how the two royal pieces should be done.  [If not, maybe I'll just pick another from my Favorites or Recognized.]

@Aurelian, the list of games is on this page we're commenting on.
I think if both players miss an illegal move, then that's still "fair"; however, it sounds like there are several people ready to work on rule enforcement on presets, so hopefully this will be moot anyway.

Inventor changed.

I've unhidden, but the movements need to be made clearer.  At first, I thought this was just a different visualization of hexagonal chess; but the game is included in the Classified Encyclopedia, apparently with different bishop and knight movements.

From how long ago do you mean?  What pages/items do you have a hard time finding?  What is going wrong with GC?  "Alfaerie: Many" is still around.  (I'm less likely to be able to help with GC issues...)

@Kevin:

The icon for page types correspond to the Item Type (see the query forms to get a list of them).  The submission form doesn't currently give you all those choices, but an editor can change the page Type later.  I could look into adding other Types to the scripts; the main issue is whether the page layout and database information would need to be highly customized for any of them.

That reminds me, you posted earlier about pages' item Types and I forgot to respond.  Unlike game Categories, a page can only have one Type, so sometimes we just have to pick the subjective best fit.

The "New" and "Updated" icons are generated automatically, when the content's creation date or modification date are relatively recent.  (But the rest of your comment makes me think you meant something else, that I don't understand?)

It wouldn't take long to compile the list of image icons and their associated Types.  On the other hand, some of the Types are so infrequently used, and possibly are better off being deprecated.  There are other oddities of the site, arising throughout our history (like pages with multiple games, and attempts to index each game therein) that would be difficult to remedy but should probably remain obscure.

That's just the default behavior for a new submission, since most user-submitted pages are their own inventions.  I've updated the information.  Thanks!

Neat!

Checkmating with the Dragon fly

Play with the Wyvern (The checkmating applet doesn't seem to like the jumping sideways rook component, putting the black king in check by that move.)

@sxg: Oh no!  I wasn't aware of any such problem, but I also don't know how to look into such local connection issues.  (We were down for about a week a little while ago, but nowhere near the months you're reporting.)

@wody: Many of our Piece articles describe many pieces, and our single-piece Piececlopedia articles are few enough that a random link doesn't seem useful.  But I have been wanting to expand on our piece decscriptions, including some new database tables; if and when I get around to that such a random link would be nice, and I'll be sure to add that.

@softburritoz: Your personal information page has you registered 4/19, but your comment dated 4/18.  Does that mean your problem is resolved (or maybe the dates are relative to different time zones)?

We've had some difficulties getting emails sent to certain domains in the past; have you checked your spam box?

Background images work for the "Custom Grid" Shape.

The menu-generated links to Ratings should be updated to include `/play/`, but inserting that myself still doesn't seem to pass the game parameter to the rating script.  I can try to fix this later if no one else gets to it.

On the other hand, directly entering 'Chess' in the form produces what seem to be reasonable numbers...?

I've fixed the header menu to point Ratings and Logs of a game to the correct locations.

The script here used `gamewcp` ("wild-card pattern", I assume), but at least some links are using `game` as request variables.  For now, rather than track down all usages, I've just allowed `game` to override `gamewcp`.

I've also changed the default Status Filter to Only Rated Games.

(This is in response to a few messages here.)

Also, @Kevin, I still can't recreate the problem with including all logs.  Using the game filter Chess shows only a few games per person, with Carlos at the high 40 and a few others in the teens.  Are you removing the wildcard (`%`)?

I agree that this looks interesting.

I've moved the discussion over from the homepage to comments here.  I've made the link description more descriptive, and corrected some of the categories (your choices were understandable, but most of them mean something different here; something we should clarify).  The formatting of this page should be cleaned up; I can do it later if you're not up to it.

I agree that this is getting pretty far from chess.  It has the same wargame/chess crossover feel of some other games here, but this is probably further out.  But, I've always thought this site should be pretty inclusive.  And the tactical portion of this game is fairly chesslike (in fact, it almost would work as a standalone variant).

I'll work on some more formatting here in a minute.

I haven't read all of the details, so maybe I've missed it, but: what does the terrain "strengthening" and "weakening" actually do?  How are they located?
Edit: Oh, I see, "strengthen" and "weaken" are not separate effects, just a note about how the terrain affects pieces differently.

(And I might as well mention again that I don't particularly like publishing variants without the inventors' real names, but that ship has sailed.)