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📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 7, 2017 08:44 AM UTC:This page should be rewritten so that it can be understood by the average person reading a printed copy. Betza notation and interactive diagrams are fine as supplements to the content, but they should not replace an English-language description of how each piece moves. This goes for every page using Betza notation and interactive diagrams.
This is debatable. For games with excessively large numbers of piece types, English-language descriptions get extremely tedious to read. Especially if the pieces are so asymmetric as typical Shogi pieces. Good examples as to which this will lead are the Wikipedia pages on the large Shogi variants. People that think such a representation is useful can print the Wikipedia page. We can put links to these in the articles; it makes little sense to duplicate them.
IMO English text is a very poor method to convey the move information; it is an extremely verbose way to give very little and very simple information. A compact, easy to understand abbreviation will be highly superior. Betza description offers such an abbreviation, and the Shogi pieces only use the most elementary elements of it (forward, backward, vertical, sideway, R, B, F, W). This should hardly be beyond the grasp of an "average person"; readers can in general be assumed to be familiar with the concept of 'abbreviation'. If the issue is that F and W are too cryptic, a single line of text could be added to explain that these are just a 'one-step Bishop and Rook'.
In addition, the piece graphics in the image itself already encodes the moves; no textual description for individual pieces is really necessary. If you think the graphics is not entirely self-evident, the logical solution would be to include an explanation of how the graphics should be interpreted. Like:
The images used for the pieces in the diagram indicates how they move. Stepping pieces are represented by squares, with a 'bite' take out of them in directions where they cannot move. Longer-range sliding moves protrude out of these squares, and will be marked by a radial line if they have unlimited range. Absence of such a marking implies a range of maximally two steps in the corresponding direction.
I don't think it would be optimal to repeat this in every article that uses these graphics, though. A better solution would then be to write a separate article on the mnemonic piece set, and put a link to that in all the articles using them.
I can add that apart from the graphical encoding, and the description through the trivial subset of Betza notation, each of which should already have been entirely sufficient, the interactive diagram also contains a complete set of move diagrams of all the pieces, as a standard feature.
If I may be aloud to jump into this one, I tend to agree with HG here. After some size, let's say >144 squares, such explanations tend to become tedious and neatly packing them to some degree actually helps, it helps me at least :)! This is why I have never fully read the wikipedia page on the 25x25 and 36x36 shogi variants. They are way to tedious (as I see you are more passionate about this than me, maybe you could do something about it on this website allong with Maka Dai-Dai, and maybe the others, but that is definetly a hellishly tedious task for someone to undertake, your time is most likely better spend in other ways).
HG, anyway this way has it's shortcommings too :)! Many pieces have very special abilities that are in the best case difficult to represent with betza notation, and in many cases are outside the scope of the initial notation, which to my understanding was chess with different armies and regional variants :)! Anyway I see you took steps in that direction, too so mostly it is just me noticing rather than anything else :)!
Betza notation may be helpful to those who have actually learned it, but I'm sure that does not include most visitors to this site. I want each page to be understandable by an average visitor who is looking at a printout. The average visitor will not know Betza notation and will not take the trouble to learn it. When a page is printed out, interactive diagrams become useless. Although we may include links to Wikipedia, I don't want visitors to this site going off to Wikipedia because the pages we have on these games did not adequately describe the rules for them.
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 7, 2017 03:13 PM UTC:When a page is printed out, interactive diagrams become useless.
Not at all. They will show all the move diagrams side by side. If you were clever enough to print the 'print version', that is.
@Fergus,
The points you are making are good, but bear in mind that is very unlikely that large shogi games would be the entry point for a newcomber on this website. Also there is need for things to be done about proper expanations of the Betza notation, especaially in the context of HG's new aditions :)!
I checked the print preview and the PrintFriendly version available through the AddThis widget at the top, and neither one showed any of the move diagrams, much less all of them side-by-side. To make things worse, the so-called PrintFriendly version didn't even show the diagram. It showed a bunch of variable assignments instead. I also checked how it would look if I sent it to my Kindle with Push to Kindle, which is normally what I do instead of printing these days. It did not show any move diagram for any piece.
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 7, 2017 06:18 PM UTC:I know nothing about this AddThis thing; (Other than that it is often responsible for a large delay in loading the page.) I did not put it there, and I am not resposible for what it does. If you don't like what it does, you'd better repair it...
When you open the piece legend to the diagram, there is a link 'print version', and if you click that all move diagrams are shown at once. 'Side by side' actually should be understood as one above the other here. What you see is what you get. Even the average vistor here should be smart enough to first select what they want to print, before printing it.
This print version takes two links to get to. First, I had to click on the word "here" in "Click here to open/close/minimize a complete piece overview," and only after that opened up did I see the "print version" link. If I hadn't been looking for it, I wouldn't have found it. It's good that your interactive diagram can do this, but it would be helpful to display the "print version" link immediately without hiding it behind another link. It might also help to label it as "Printer version with all move diagrams." I checked that it showed up in the print preview, and it did. But when I checked how it would look when sent to my Kindle with Push to Kindle, the move diagrams did not show up. Since the main diagram does show up, and I presume that is done with JavaScript, I wonder if this could be fixed by giving the print version its own URL.
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 7, 2017 08:18 PM UTC:Well, this would be easy to do, but I doubt the logic of that. The print version is a print version of the 'complete piece overview'. It seems save to assume that people that are not interested in a piece overview are not interested in getting a move diagram for each and every piece. When they open the piece overview, they initially get the interactive version, where all move diagrams are shown on the main board, in response to them clicking on the piece name. Then they have the option to select all diagrams at once, for printing the piece overview.
As to the Kindle problem: I am not sure how this 'Push to Kindle' function is supposed to work, or how you activate it. It cannot be excluded that it just transfers the page source, and displays it with JavaScript disabled. The article does have a static image of the setup, in <noscript> tags, so that seeing it does not prove JavaScript is working.
It looks like Push to Kindle does not run JavaScript. When I looked at this page in its preview, the buttons above the diagram and the lines of text above and below the diagram were missing. I assume these are generated by JavaScript. So, it looks like interactive diagrams cannot be made useful for pages sent to a Kindle.
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Dec 7, 2017 09:04 PM UTC:It seems to me that the proper conclusion is "The 'Push to Kindle' function you are using does not properly handle pages using JavaScript". There doesn't seem to be any logical reason why it would be impossible to push the page to wherever, using the HTML that is being displayed at the moment the function is activated (just reading out the innerHTML of the page body). Reverting to the page source is just crappy. It should certainly be possible to push these pages to a Kindle, using proper software.
The buttons are actually HTML, but the trick I used is to put everything specific to the interactive version in a <div> section that has style="display:none", and then have JavaScript alter that style to "display:inherit" in the startup code. That way the diagram definition, and other stuff that would not work without JavaScript (such as the buttons), will not show up if JavaScript is disabled, and will be replaced by the static .png image in <noscript> tags.
Push to Kindle is available as an extension for both Firefox and Chrome, and in case you don't have a Kindle, it will let you download an EPUB, MOBI, or PDF version of a web page. In tests I ran with Game Courier, it did not work well with Game Courier diagrams, no matter whether they were tables, graphic images, or CSS. It also didn't work well with the Diagram Designer. But it did work well with a page that included an image drawn by drawdiagram.php, which is what the Diagram Designer uses.
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 8, 2017 07:55 AM UTC:Well, it sounds like a broken feature. Users would expect 'what you see is what you get' behavior from such a function, and there is no technical reason I can see why the browser could not provide that. There are plenty of pages on the web where you can, for instance, open or close sections, most of the sections starting closed. Especially the browser should be aware at any time of the HTML it is currently displaying, even if client-side scripts modified it from the original page source.
Is there a preset for this, and if there isn't would any be interested in playing if one was made?
I would be interested in playing although I think I prefer Tenjiuku Shogi :)!
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Mon, Mar 9, 2020 01:27 PM UTC:When I try to promote a Dragon King, it promotes to a Tokin instead of a Soaring Eagle. However, this can be easily fixed by making the King the last piece and changing the parameters accordingly.
I got multiple 404 errors from images on this page today:
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:41 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/w1stg.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:41 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:42 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/w1ab.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:42 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:42 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/b1stg.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:42 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:42 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/b1ab.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:42 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:57 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/b1ab.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:57 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:57 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/w1stg.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:57 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:58 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/b1stg.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:58 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogi
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:58 UTC] 404: https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSmacadamiashogi/w1ab.png
[15-Feb-2023 12:11:58 UTC] Referred by https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dai-shogiAt least this is easily understood; images of the Stone General and the Angry Boar appear to be missing in the pictogram representation.
[Edit 2-16 I now rendered the missing XBoard pictograms, and uploaded those under the required name.
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This page should be rewritten so that it can be understood by the average person reading a printed copy. Betza notation and interactive diagrams are fine as supplements to the content, but they should not replace an English-language description of how each piece moves. This goes for every page using Betza notation and interactive diagrams.