Chess

[Wormopolis]

assuming I can master the notation. Im currently working on just the FEN one. but I havent made a lot of progress due t work commitments.

[blc]

Oct 31, 2013 1:54:57 GMT -8 Finlip said:

No, not play, just post drawings and a board where the moves that are written as text can be played through.

Are you discussing moves more than playing a game?

Is this similar to what you are looking for?



I realize that has pieces in place, but are you looking for a blank board that would let you put pieces or lettering in place for discussion purposes? Pieces would be better.

[Wormopolis]

recording the moves that each player makes so it can be played back at the end of th ematch. basically using a thread key to store the progression. but I havent mastered the notation for moves yet to encode it.

FEN is less work because its just noting where pieces are. I made that one a long time ago for a checkers enthusiast but never really published it it. and he angered me. there is just something about people asking for pixel size differences that sends me over.

the FEN code I had though, would allow you to choose from a variety of board styles setup by the admin (no, not allowing anyone to style their own board because it leads to people making black on black boards or neon green on neon yellow boards). the admin literally defined a style for a board and the poster chose which board style to view as. though in retrospect, storing the other player's choice might be good as well. the poster could also choose the size of the board from 1 to 5. where 5 was like 800x800 I think, and 1 was 50x50 ( I dont remember exactly).

[blc]

Nov 11, 2013 20:08:52 GMT -8 Wormopolis said:

recording the moves that each player makes so it can be played back at the end of th ematch. basically using a thread key to store the progression. but I havent mastered the notation for moves yet to encode it.

FEN is less work because its just noting where pieces are. I made that one a long time ago for a checkers enthusiast but never really published it it. and he angered me. there is just something about people asking for pixel size differences that sends me over.

the FEN code I had though, would allow you to choose from a variety of board styles setup by the admin (no, not allowing anyone to style their own board because it leads to people making black on black boards or neon green on neon yellow boards). the admin literally defined a style for a board and the poster chose which board style to view as. though in retrospect, storing the other player's choice might be good as well. the poster could also choose the size of the board from 1 to 5. where 5 was like 800x800 I think, and 1 was 50x50 ( I dont remember exactly).

Ok. I thought maybe they were discussing things like opening moves and various alternative moves that would stem from that. Dissecting various moves.

[blc]

Nov 11, 2013 20:08:52 GMT -8 Wormopolis said:

recording the moves that each player makes so it can be played back at the end of th ematch. basically using a thread key to store the progression. but I havent mastered the notation for moves yet to encode it.

FEN is less work because its just noting where pieces are. I made that one a long time ago for a checkers enthusiast but never really published it it. and he angered me. there is just something about people asking for pixel size differences that sends me over.

the FEN code I had though, would allow you to choose from a variety of board styles setup by the admin (no, not allowing anyone to style their own board because it leads to people making black on black boards or neon green on neon yellow boards). the admin literally defined a style for a board and the poster chose which board style to view as. though in retrospect, storing the other player's choice might be good as well. the poster could also choose the size of the board from 1 to 5. where 5 was like 800x800 I think, and 1 was 50x50 ( I dont remember exactly).

Ok. I thought maybe they were discussing things like opening moves and various alternative moves that would stem from that. Dissecting various moves.

[Wormopolis]

form what I gather, the FEN notation just puts pieces on the board, and then I guess there can be discussion about how the pieces move from that. Im not really a chess player to get into that so this thread is wide open to input from chess players on how this plugin should pan out.

[Finlip]

Sure, when I see a decent example, I will post it here.

[Wormopolis]

so for the first part, the FEN notation, I am looking at implementing this:

Piece placement (from white's perspective). Each rank is described, starting with rank 8 and ending with rank 1; within each rank, the contents of each square are described from file "a" through file "h". Following the Standard Algebraic Notation (SAN), each piece is identified by a single letter taken from the standard English names (pawn = "P", knight = "N", bishop = "B", rook = "R", queen = "Q" and king = "K").[1] White pieces are designated using upper-case letters ("PNBRQK") while black pieces use lowercase ("pnbrqk"). Blank squares are noted using digits 1 through 8 (the number of blank squares), and "/" separates ranks.

taken from wikipedia.

so an example would be:

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR

which would be starting board

then lets say a white pawn moved up 2 spots

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR

then a black pawn moves up 2 spots

rnbqkbnr/pp1ppppp/8/2p5/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR

then a white knight moves out

rnbqkbnr/pp1ppppp/8/2p5/4P3/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKB1R

[Finlip]

Cheers, sounds good.

[Wormopolis]

teaser of what it currently looks like:

[Wormopolis]

Here is preliminary version:

DOWNLOAD

here is how you put a tag into a post:

[chesstag]{rnbqkbnr/pp1ppppp/8/2p5/4P3/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKB1R}[/chesstag]


you can put multiple plays into a tag:

[chesstag]{rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR}{rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR
}{rnbqkbnr/pp1ppppp/8/2p5/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR}{rnbqkbnr/pp1ppppp/8/2p5/4P3/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKB1R}[/chesstag]

and it will put a prev/next button area below the board that will let you show each move.

you can change the size of the board, by putting an option in the opening tag:

[chesstag:size=3]

from 0 to (no limit set really, but will probably set it to be 10?) omitting the option defaults to size=4

the pieces themselves are options to replace with whatever images you want. but I suggest .png images so they sit on the board. they will resize to fit smaller board squares if they have to.

now about color....
what you see is the default. what I was planning was giving the admin the ability to create board themes by placing an option in to the opening tag. like style=2 or soemthing. in the forum CSS, or the global footer if you want it across all themes in one hit, you can define a board style with some CSS like

.chessdiv.style_1 table {border:2px #FF0000 solid}
.chessdiv.style_1 table td.boardCell {background-color:#DDDDDD;}
.chessdiv.style_1 table td.boardCell.alternate {background-color:#FFBBBB;}
.chessdiv.style_1 table td.labelCell {background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:10px}

but I havent ironed out all the details yet. it basically allows the admin to create a bunch of options that the poster can choose from, without letting the poster just put whatever colors he wants in there and making a stupid looking board out of lime green and dark purple with black text and 10 pixels boarders around everything. and no I wont be adding in that ability to let posters just throw in their own stuff. they can petition the admin to add it to the forum css. you could even setup a CSS group like

.chessdiv.style_wormo table td.labelCell {background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:10px}

and any board with the option style=wormo in the opening tag would get that applied


anyways. play with that and see what you think. it doesnt do any checking. you could fill a board with queens and it wouldnt care. it wont notice if your bishop moved straight instead of diagonal.

[Wormopolis]

ok the basic plugin is already done, meaning it can read those FEN strings from inside a post and convert them to boards. you can also group them together inside a tag and make a board with prev/next buttons to see each move.

but then I thought it might be difficult for someone to create a FEN tag from scratch, so I am working on a system similar to the tournament bracket code that brings up an editor that lets you drag chess pieces to the board. when you are done, a single button click converts it to a FEN string that you can paste into the text.

once I get all this done, I will put it into the library as version 1. the next evolution will involve two players being able to play a game, and store the moves in a thread key. once the game is won, it will convert it to a iterative board with prev/next so anyone can see the move history. I have to sit down and figure out how to govern piece movement though since some pieces are more complex in movement then others (and I have no idea how I would handle things like castling or the other special moves).

[Wormopolis]

Finlip blc Chris (tagged people I thought were interested)

in my dropbox is the 1.0.0 release. I will push a version to the library later after I find/make some images and fill out how to do the styling a little better in support thread. but I thought you might want to play around with the one I have done now.

the code will convert any [ChessTag][/ChessTag] tags it finds with FEN string inside in any board, but you can choose only certain boards to make the editor appear. it shows as a new tab down by visual/BBC tabs. It will bring up a blank board you can drag pieces to. I spent a lot of time getting the piececounts to work, so it wont let you place 2 kings or more then 8 pawns or more then 16 pieces of the same color. you can remove a piece from the board by dragging it to the trash. once you place a board, you can get the FEN string, and go back to the editor and paste it in between the chesstag tags.

if you place more then one FEN string between chesstag tags, it will create prev/next buttons below the board on display so that you can switch to the next view. basically you could throw in FEN strings for an entire game, and click through each move.

you can also optionally choose multiple sizes of the board display, as well as different color styles based on some CSS setup by the admin. the code comes with a default style, which can be overidden for all boards, or you can setup multiple alternate styles that can be chosen in the opening tag:


[ChessTag:size=5] would make a larger board then default (default is 4). it goes down to 0 (which is kinda small in my opinion) up to size 10.

[ChessTag:style=1] would cast custom colors onto the board which are setup by the admin in the forum CSS (which I have to type out all that instruction for)

[ChessTag:size=6,style=1] shows you can use both options if you wish.

I dont have anything working for an actual game between two players yet, but all of this work has laid that foundation since I only really need to record the moves between two players now... so soon hopefully.

[Chris]

I haven't tried it yet Wormo but that teaser image looks pretty good. I'll note that the PGN file format I mentioned earlier is simply a text file that sometimes uses a series of EPD lines (EPD is basically a superset of the FEN structure but with additional positional slots for things such as castling, en passante, which side is currently pending a move, etc.)

example: "rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1"

It is a pretty popular format given the vastly differing proprietary dbase systems championed by the major chess engines so would most likely be the source of your copy/paste operations for full games or even ICO positions and tutorials and would therefore be immensely beneficial to support that format directly rather than having the user manually convert each line to your curly brace format.

I too wrote a chess player for V4 using that EPD format so if you need help parsing give me a holla.

SPOILER: Click to show

[Wormopolis]

I saw that format in wikipedia, but I dont know enough about chess to incorporate things like castling and en passante in there. I COULD write it though, so that if you surrounded your example with curly braces, my function would still be able to read it.