@darken said in #13:
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@gbtami Good to hear!!!
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> Personally, I think that the recently added pychess tournament feature and other future, general, site-wide and variant-wide features, are a much better use of limited developer manpower, and will increase
www.pychess.org's utility and userbase much more than adding yet another arcane variant that only 3 people in the world have heard of or care about. And the people that do advocate for said variants are of course always free to implement and code support for those variants themselves if it's that important to them, pychess being open source and all. Of course, it rarely is important enough to them.
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> When's the next S-Chess tournament?
Apart from the other website features in Pychess, a mobile app for Pychess would be good to attract more players and gain more user base in the long run.
Given the limited developer resources and the limited developer time, working on other website features and working on mobile app would not be as much as effort as developing the AI for a new chess variant.
A mobile app would be good to play Pychess tournaments moving around at home or while travelling on a mobile device. Currently, it is possible to make moves with Pychess in large tablets but not small mobile phones, although it would not be comfortable to use small mobile phones for making moves with Pychess and would very often lead to finger mistakes.
Diwaditya's Shogi board theme and piece set looks really good for chess players to start learning Shogi, but unlike other chess variants in Pychess and other websites, the piece colour of opponent is not changed in any of the Shogi variants, both in board theme and piece set that is shown in post #12 and post #14 (which is currently available in Lishogi), but only the background colour of the pentagonal tiles.
I should have also added in my post #7 that the piece icons for Dragon King and Dragon Horse is very similar to that of the chess knight. So, although Dragon King moves like a King + Rook and Dragon Horse moves like a Bishop + Rook, on seeing those piece icons, the first impression that comes to my mind and may be to the minds of other people also is that it moves like a Knight + another piece.
In the Grandhouse arena tournament that was held yesterday, cFlour mentioned about Shakohouse. Was adding that game in decision in the past when Grand chess, Grandhouse and Shako were implemented in Pychess? Just curious, was it dropped off because Shakohouse is not as interesting as game would end suddenly by abrupt checkmates with cannon drops? Otherwise, Shakohouse would be more interesting and long lasting than Grandhouse because Elephant and Cannon in Shako are weaker pieces than Chancellor and Archbishop in Grand chess.
For Darken, there might be one tournament of a given chess variant every month, currently a non-shield tournament but ultimately a shield tournament for every chess variant. Can every arena tournament be a shield tournament? Why or why not?
Next S-chess tournament might be held along with the second round of tournaments of all chess variants as soon as the first round of tournaments of all chess variants get completed up with. Have you tried out Musketeer chess, another gating chess variant like S-chess with 10 different fairy pieces Cannon, Leopard, Chancellor, Archbishop, Eagle, Elephant, Unicorn, Dragon, Fortress and Spider (movements of these chess pieces other than Chancellor and Archbishop are not available in any of chess variants in Pychess) to choose 2 from, instead of Chancellor and Archbishop always in every game? It is currently under development at
musketeer-chess.herokuapp.com and it might be added to Pychess later on once it is completely developed. Once Musketeer chess is added to Pychess, it would be as popular or more popular as S-chess to players at Pychess.
Musketeer chess was available for play at
jocly.com/#/about till 24.10.2018 when that website was shut down due to confiscation of game server by attackers. Earlier this year, that website got opened up again but it is impossible to connect to game server to play games with other human players, but only it is currently possible to play games against very weak AI. S-chess and Musketeer chess with 51 different fairy pieces against very weak AI can also be played at
musketeerchess.net/site/games.
Currently, it is possible to play human games of Musketeer chess at
musketeer-chess.herokuapp.com by logging in to Pychess account which is in turn linked to Lichess account, but the website is very buggy, with the games terminated abruptly as loss due to 'Invalid move', especially when pawns are promoted to fairy Musketeer chess pieces other than Chancellor and Archbishop.
Musketeer chess with other human players can be currently played without any problems at all at
vchess.club/#/variants, but there are only 7 fairy pieces (all of whose strength are between that of Queen and Rook) to choose 2 from, other than powerful Dragon, Chancellor and Archbishop. Would you be interested in giving Musketeer chess a try?
May be Centaur which combines the movements of King and Knight would be a good substitute in Musketeer chess for Dragon and in Metamachy for Lion. The strength of Centaur is between that of Queen and Rook. The Musketeer chess Dragon which combines the movement of Queen and Knight is more powerful than the Queen which in turn is more powerful than the Lion in Metamachy which can leap over other pieces and whose movement is limited to at most 2 squares in any given direction. The Lion in Metamachy is also, in turn, is also more powerful than the Queen.