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Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Jan 11, 2024 05:29 PM EST in reply to H. G. Muller from 04:41 PM:

You might have forgotten to press the 'Start Position' button after seting up the pieces.

I surely wouldn't forget to do something I never knew to do in the first place. But now I've done this, and it produced this fen code:

hgscksghpppppppp32PPPPPPPPHGSCKSGH.

I put this in this preset here:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DExperiment%26settings%3Dfpd-experiment1

The board looks accurate when you click on the link, but if you click on Edit, the board will look very different. Here, without running the GAME Code, it has some question marks, and the only pieces it gets right are the Kings and the Pawns.

It would be less confusing for someone creating a preset if there was no discrepancy between how the board displays in Edit mode and how it displays while playing the game. This can be done by relying on a set instead of defining the pieces in the Pre-Game section without reference to a set. You could use an auto set, which makes it easy to calculate the label from the file name, or you could make your play-test applet more integrated with Game Courier sets, though that would require writing some PHP to find out what is in the set. So, using an auto set is probably the easier way to go. The general rule for an auto set is that each label is the piece name extracted from a file name after removing the side prefix and the image format extension, all in uppercase for White, and all in lowercase for Black.