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As the matter of fact, why don't you update that page "Play Chess Variants with Jocly" which was listing all available games until last year?

The problem is that it is a matter of taste what 'available game' means. The Jocly applet itself allows you to select any game that is implemented, through the 'other jocly games' link. But this applet is not able to show rule descriptions or credits, which are also available for most of these games in the Jocly source package.

Therefore Fergus created separate HTML pages for individual variants, which embed the Jocly applet preconfigured to run the corresponding variant, with a rule description. The overview page you refer to contains links to those individual game pages.

In general the reason for there being no link to a certain variant in this overview page is that there doesn't exist such a separate HTML page for that game yet. Someone would first have to create those pages.

Hectochess now works, albeit with a few sprites missing. I just need to upload the sprites and diffusemaps for the Chanpion and Wizard.

Edit: Also, Hectochess doesn't have the 3d Queen, Marshall, and Cardinal for some reason...

Edit: Also, Hectochess doesn't have the 3d Queen, Marshall, and Cardinal for some reason...

Indeed, I noticed that too. I did upload a newer fairy-sprites file, and that made the Champion and Wizard appear.

[Edit] OK, that should be fixed now too. Hectochess was using the proper-*.js files for these 3d pieces, which differ from the original ones by a scale factor, to give them a more natural size. But these were not present on CVP.

[Edit2] I now moved a lot of the new 3d pieces to the CVP Jocly install as well. I had never payed much attention to the version here as far as updates go, because the CloudFlare caching made it pracically impossible to see any changes. But now that Fergus has exempted Jocly from this, it makes sense to bring the version here up to date as well. Makromachy already works. For Minjiku Shogi some of the promoted pieces seem to be still missing.

Therefore Fergus created separate HTML pages for individual variants, which embed the Jocly applet preconfigured to run the corresponding variant, with a rule description. The overview page you refer to contains links to those individual game pages.

While I used to make separate HTML pages for individual variants, I replaced this practice with a PHP script that gets called through a semantic URL whose relative part starts with "/play/jocly/". If you want to review its code to see how it works, you can find the script at "/play/jocly/control.php". It relies on certain files being in place to display the description, rules and credits. It should work with games that have not been indexed yet, and if you do use it with unindexed games, you can, as an editor, add them to the index.

For some reason, the 3d graphics for Seireigi and Chu Seireigi are only showing as blank Shogi pieces, and in the case of certain Chu Seireigi pieces, not showing at all. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I noticed a bug in the Hectochess file, where, when castling, the Champion starting square is not checked to see if a piece is there or not.

There appears to be a mismatch between the shogi graphics on CVP and that in the current source code. On CVP there are directories .../chessbase/res/shogi and .../chessbase/res/shogi2. The first contains the tile meshes and diffusemap for mini-Shogi, the second for Chu and Tenjiku Shogi. The current source code was derived from the latter, even though it reorganized the location where the diffusemaps are stored.

The problem occurs because the newly made Seireigi diffusemaps are made according to the Tenjiku design, (and placed so the view files can find them), but use the mini-Shogi tile mesh files. And it appears that these mesh files specify the use of a different part of the diffusemap for painting the top face: the mini-Shogi tiles use the top-left quarter, while the Chu-Shogi tiles use the bottom-left quarter of the maps.

I fixed the problem by editing the chu-seireigi-view.js file, to make it use the mesh files from the shogi2 folder. The kanji then appear. But apparently not all mesh files used by seireigi are there, as some of the pieces now disappear completely.

[Edit] The problem was in the map files: some Seireigi pieces use the diffusemap of Chu-Shogi pieces, and these are in a different location on CVP from where they are in the current source code (and have different filenames too). I adapted the path for the diffusemaps of Copper, Kirin, Phoenix, Lion and Queen to where these images are on CVP, and now the initial position of Chu Seireigi is correctly displayed.

Thanks.

Can you also do the same for normal Seireigi? It has the same problem with its 3d Kanji pieces.

@François Houdebert,

I noticed a bug in the Hectochess implementation. When castling, the starting squares of the Champions and queenside Knights (b2/b9, c2/c9, and i2/i9) are not being checked to see if a piece is occupying them or not, allowing castling when it should not be possible to do so.

better like this ?

That's perfect.

I suggest you update jocly with HGM's version of capablanca and my timurid's version: they now have a prelude allowing you to select a sub-variant.
this will remove the need

• carrera, janus, gothic
• babur, wild mirza,wild babur, wild timurid

You could also add Fantastic XIII and bigorra.

We could also ask the more general question of not keeping anything other than chess variants. Something to think about.

We could also ask the more general question of not keeping anything other than chess variants. Something to think about.

Indeed, that occurred to me too. We could easily delete all lines in the jocly-allgames.js file that do not refer to chess variants.

OTOH, the preferred access to the variants on this website appears to be through the Jocly overview page, not through the 'other Jocly games' link that the applet always shows. It is a bit silly when you first have to select a variant you don't want to play, and then switch. And the switch works in the applet, but not for the rule description page we embedded the applet in.

But the overview page also needs refactoring; listing the available variants by date is not helpful at all to the unwary visitor of this website. I am not sure what the best presentation is, though. I suppose alphabetically, even though this competes with what you could do (with some more knowledge and effort) in the site's alphabetical index.

I am also thinking of 'modernizing' the install here. By replacing jocly.game.js the Jocly core is already fully compatible with the recent source code. The only variant in the CVP install that has not been back-ported to source yet is Tenjiku Shogi. Since all game-specific model and view files include a version of the chessbase model and view, there is no harm in different variants needing different versions of these.

So we could replace all model and view files in the chessbase folder by those from the most-recent compile, and the images and supporting info file these use in the chessbase/res sub-tree as well. I think Tenjiku Shogi exclusively uses sprites, mesh files and diffusemaps from the shogi2 subdirectory, which does not exist in the source tree. Only jocly-allgames.js must be made to always have the extra line defining Tenjiku Shogi, compared to the version created by building Jocly from source.

the command to filter chess game would be :

gulp --no-default-games --modules src/games/chessbase build --prod

@François Houdebert,

I've noticed for a while that for the 2D Classic Jocly sprites for Seireigi, all the promoted (red) kanjis being mirrored rather than being rotated 180 degrees like they should be, which looks a bit ugly and may confuse certain players, especially those who are used to single-kanji graphics.

Attached is a spritesheet that fixes this, which I would like uploaded to the biscandine site.

www.chessvariants.com/play/jocly/dist/browser/games/chessbase/res/shogi/seireigi-shogi-sprites.png

copied

Thanks. It looks much better.

I made one last change to Chu Seireigi, making the Lion move like its Cazaux form (a Chu Shogi Lion that lacks multi-move capabilities). If you could implement that on the biscandine site that would be great.

I'll even make it real simple for you on what you need to do. You'll need to go into your http://chu-seireigi-model.js and look for the Lion definitions (searching for "sh-lion should do"), which looks like this:

				66: {
					name: 'lion-w',
					aspect: 'sh-lion',
					graph: this.cbDropGraph(geometry, [[-2,0],[-2,-1],[-2,-2],[-1,-2],[0,-2],[1,-2],[2,-2],[2,-1],[2,0],[2,1],[2,2],[1,2],[0,2],[-1,2],[-2,2],[-2,1]],[[1,1],[1,-1],[-1,1],[-1,-1]]),
					value: 10,
					abbrev: 'LN',
					fenAbbrev: 'N',
					initial: [{s:1,p:55}],
					demoted: 67,
					hand: 18,
				},
				67: {
					name: 'lion-b',
					aspect: 'sh-lion',
					graph: this.cbDropGraph(geometry, [[-2,0],[-2,-1],[-2,-2],[-1,-2],[0,-2],[1,-2],[2,-2],[2,-1],[2,0],[2,1],[2,2],[1,2],[0,2],[-1,2],[-2,2],[-2,1]],[[1,1],[1,-1],[-1,1],[-1,-1]]),
					value: 10,
					abbrev: 'LN',
					initial: [{s:-1,p:168}],
					demoted: 66,
					hand: 18,
				},

Set the Lions values to 11 and replace the current graph definitions with the following:

					graph: this.cbDropGraph(geometry, [[-2,0],[-2,-1],[-2,-2],[-1,-2],[0,-2],[1,-2],[2,-2],[2,-1],[2,0],[2,1],[2,2],[1,2],[0,2],[-1,2],[-2,2],[-2,1],[1,1],[1,-1],[-1,1],[-1,-1],[1,0],[-1,0],[0,1],[0,-1]],[]),

Once that is done, the biscandine Jocly preset should play at least somewhat reasonably.

Done.

Check your rabbit in daiseireigi. they are promoted by default in stag.

Thanks. I know you may be a little frustrated, and I apologize if you are, but it is an unfortunate truth of development for my more complex games that updating them can be quite laborious and tedious, especially when several options exist for playing them. As a general rule, I want my games to be well-thought out and high in quality, so I am willing to make changes like this to try and make my games better.

Check your rabbit in daiseireigi. they are promoted by default in stag.

Can you elaborate further on this, please? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.

I did check the Running Rabbit in the diagram and the text, and everything seems to be in proper working order, including the text that shows the legal moves of the piece when clicked.

false alarm : it was a cache issue

I'm actually starting to lean back towards the Bishop + Squirrel move for Chu Seireigi and Dai Seireigi, since in my test game of Chusei with you, if the Lion had the KNAD move you would be able to force mate in 3 with just the Lion, and I don't want one piece to steal all the show from the others.

Edit: Looking at the current position you can still force mate in 3, but you need to get more pieces involved.

I think I've mentioned in our game chat why I prefer KNAD (or, to me, KNS) for the Lion: it does at least have some history. I don't know of anywhere else where a Lion is BNS. (Even so, if it had an adjective on the name, reflected by a compound in the Greenwade graphic, I could deal with it.)

@François Houdebert,

I made one last change to Chu Seireigi and Dai Seireigi, renaming the Lion to Lion Hawk to avoid confusion with the Chu Shogi Lion, while also keeping the Bishop + Squirrel move from before, whose Jocly code is shown below.

graph: this.cbDropGraph(geometry, [[-2,0],[-2,-1],[-2,-2],[-1,-2],[0,-2],[1,-2],[2,-2],[2,-1],[2,0],[2,1],[2,2],[1,2],[0,2],[-1,2],[-2,2],[-2,1]],[[1,1],[1,-1],[-1,1],[-1,-1]]),

(Keeping the Lion Hawk's value at 11 is reasonable, as it is basically equal in strength to a Queen, and may sometimes even have a light advantage)

In case you are wondering what a "Lion Hawk" is, I imagine it as a Japanese version of a griffin.

For the new diffusemap, simply use the Tenjiku Shogi Lion Hawk diffusemap.

For the 2D sprite, the best choice in my opinion for this piece may be the sprite two spaces to the left of the "gem" image in this spritesheet, as it resembles a griffin head with cat-like ears, at least to me. (If for some crazy reason you plan on implementing Dai Seireigi in Jocly, I would save the "falcon" image used for the griffin in other Jocly presets for the Flying Falcon or Cloud Eagle).

If you can implement these changes on the biscandine site that would be great.

P.S. Thanks for playing that test game with me. It helped me finalize the Lion Hawk's move.

I made the change.

I've also been looking for ideas for a lion hawk icon distinct from the griffon icon.

If there were an acceptable candidate, it would probably still take quite some time to  to finalize.