Check out Modern Chess, our featured variant for January, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Feb 5, 2021 03:47 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Thu Feb 4 02:23 PM:

This is an interesting project. I'm not sure about using Betza notation for the primary keys though.

Although we can specify some rules, such as alphabetical order of discrete moves, I don't think that completely solves the problem of uniquely determing the notation for a piece and applying the rules isn't really "user friendly" (assuming people will be selecting these values - if it was only a database primary key, it could just be an integer.)

But a bigger problem than uniqueness is that, for some pieces, the Betza notation is so user-unfriendly that it is really only suitable for programming. For example, one notation for the Falcon is "afafsKafsafKafraflKaflafrK". Or consider the Advancer - the XBetza is a multi-leg move to move on top of the victim and then back off one space so it's pretty ugly too. I think "Falcon" and "Advancer" are far more user-friendly identifiers.

You have a table to allow specifying that pieces have different names in different games. I think we can have one standard name used for internal identification and, in most cases, it is pretty obvious what this internal name would be. In ChessV you can call any piece whatever you want in any game but each pre-defined piece has an "internal name" which is used for global identification. I generally had no problem deciding what internal name made sense. The only place I remember having some difficulty was the Griffin/Aanca pieces. For these I settled on calling them Ferz Then Rook and Wazir Then Bishop, which are admittedly non-standard, but at least very clear. Overall this approach has worked well. I have probably close to a hundred pieces defined - I'll dump a list of the names...


Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.