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Hi Fergus.

Daniel's Tigrey preset (and Play Tester's Frog Chess preset) may have this inconsistency also, if I understand a little of what you are writing, and yet both their presets work. Is there some key difference you can see with my preset, when you look at either of their presets, when in edit mode?

Your preset is using alfaerie-many, which has $flip set to true and an entirely populated $flipped array. When it is black's turn, $rightsideup is set to false, and this triggers it to use the piece name from $flipped instead of $pieces when $flip is true and $flipped has an element with the provided array key. Although you have rewritten $pieces to use .png images, you have not rewritten $flipped. So, it is using the piece names already supplied in alfaerie-many, which are all .gif file names. If you set $flip to false, this may fix things, though I still don't see any point in you using alfaerie-many if you are internally defining a set using .png pieces.

@ Fergus:

I don't see the expression $flip anywhere in my Butterfly Chess preset's coding boxes, that I pasted stuff into from the Play-Test Applet. Do you mean I should set something by another name (or something saying 1) to false (or 0)? I'm pretty clueless about Game Courier coding/programming still.

$flip is normally set within a set file. Since you are trying to override the value given to $pieces in your set file, you would need to set it explicitly in your code like you are doing with $pieces. But if you change your piece set to something using .png images and use aliases instead of trying to define your own set internally, you wouldn't need to change the value of $flip.

Daniel/Play Tester used some sort of Alfaerie Sets (not 'Many'), without having the buggy issue I did. At the moment I cannot find an Alfaerie Set that's not png, nevermind having all the piece figurine pictures I want for Butterfly Chess, if it becomes necessary/possible (for the sake of simplicity, in my case) to replace my chosen Piece Set in this preset of mine.

Daniel/Play Tester used some sort of Alfaerie Sets (not 'Many'), without having the buggy issue I did.

Yes, it's not the use of Alfaerie images that lies at the root of your problems with alfaerie-many.

At the moment I cannot find an Alfaerie Set that's not png,

alfaerie-many is not png, and that is part of the problem you are having with it, because you have set $dir to /graphics.dir/alfaeriePNG in your code.

nevermind having all the piece figurine pictures I want for Butterfly Chess, if it becomes necessary/possible (for the sake of simplicity, in my case) to replace my chosen Piece Set in this preset of mine.

If all the pieces you want for it can be found in /graphics.dir/alfaeriePNG, then the misnamed alfaerie-allsvg might do. If not, auto-alfaeriePNG should have everything you need.

I went with now using the Auto-Alfaerie PGN set for my enforcing preset, and otherwise left things the way Fergus recommended against (still, thanks Fergus). The preset seems to work now, at the least in Move mode. However, the game log I have with Joe was unaffected, and I guess would be best deleted, and we might play another test game.

One minor(?) point. In my written rules as displayed by the preset I still call a Caliph a Flying Dragon (another standard name for it), as on my rules page for Butterfly Chess. So I still showed a picture of a dragon in the displayed rules - but the Applet may insist on using a standard Caliph figurine (bishop+camel compound generated by Alfaerie piece sets) in any [preset] diagram [during play], I suppose it's possible (speaking as a layman), as the Applet abbreviates Caliph with a C in the coding as well as its offered FEN.

edit: I think I vaguely know what to do to get a dragon figurine from the applet, since it is (fortunately in this case) in the Applet's piece figurine table. It would involve substituting a dragon from the table for a caliph, somehow. Note that on my laptop, I couldn't see the table's sidebar to scroll by, unless I reduced my screen view by going [ctrl -] to get it to 90% factor (from normal 100%). It may also be the Applet can still use a standard Caliph symbol, and then I could have somehow substituted a dragon for it in my preset's diagram for during play - if I can wrap my head around how Fergus (or maybe H.G.) have already maybe explained well enough elsewhere.

I've added an edit to my last post.

Based on a prior post by Fergus, without looking at GC documentation, I think maybe all it takes to substitute a Dragon for a C (Applet's Caliph) in a preset is (using Auto Alfaerie PGN set):

Alias ...C D c d...

Where D stands for Dragon and d stands for dragon, in the Auto Alfaerie PGN set.

Leaving out some stuff (with ...), but I hope Fergus (and H.G.) get my drift.

When using aliases, you also have to make sure that your code does the proper translations between the aliases used for notation and the piece labels used for displaying the pieces. Since the code in betza.txt does not contain the keywords alias or realname, I expect it is working with the assumption that there are no aliases. The tutorial for the fairychess include file explains how aliases may be used, which may be of help to H. G. if he chooses to add support for them. In the meantime, you would probably break your generated preset if you tried to use aliases with it.

The author, Kevin Pacey, has updated this page.