New variants and unplayed tournaments

Is it at least possible to add a new chess set for all the Shogi variants for people whoever are used to the western sets?
At least opponent pieces can be shown in different colour that is easily recognizable by the eyes without displaying any of them as inverted.

@gbtami Good to hear!!!

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.

When's the next S-Chess tournament?

#14 couchtomato pieces are lightning years better. So no.

@ramanvis1988 said in #7:
> The Shogi pieces are very confusing, which prevents me from playing any of the Shogi variants.
> I think that I will need a new set for players like me who are used to western sets.
>
> There is hardly any colour difference between white and black pieces. Inverting a piece to know that it is opponent's piece is not sufficient enough to play in the end game, when it will be congested with limited time available, or when it takes more time for players to recognize and distinguish between them.
>
> The piece icons for Dragon King and Dragon Horse are very similar, just facing different sides and they can often be confused if they are inverted.
>
> The piece icons for Gold General and Silver General can also be often confused because they are quite similar.
>
> Here are some of my piece suggestions with western set:
> 1. Lance: Same as Shinobi Lance.
> 2. Knight: Same as western chess Knight.
> 3. King: Same as western chess King.
> 4. Rook: Same as western chess Rook.
> 5. Bishop: Same as western chess Bishop.
> 6. Pawn: Same as western chess Pawn or Same as Empire chess Soldier.
> 7. Silver General: Crescent moon.
> 8. Gold General: Hollow circle with a dot in the middle.
> 9. Dragon King: Same as Duke of Rutland Crowned Rook as in Jocly, Rook with a royal plus symbol at the top.
> 10. Dragon Horse: Crowned Bishop, Bishop with a royal plus symbol at the top.

My feeling has always been that shogi is still very much its own game, and people who are playing should respect that enough to make the effort to learn it like one rather than treat it like a western chess variant. That's why I've always refused to do western sets for any game.

Regarding the colors, the game has been played for centuries with sides indicated by pointing pentagons. I already took it a step further by shading the two sides differently. I honestly don't think we need to go any further than that.

@darken said in #13:
> @gbtami Good to hear!!!
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

Because of limited developer resources, mobile app is not planned at all. We try to make the site to be as responsive as much as possible to be usable in mobile browsers instead (help is always welcome to fix issues of course). Engine development is ubdip's work and is totally independent from the site. I mean it is used by other sites like lichess.org, lishogi.org, xichess.com as well. See github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish

New board and piece themes are always welcome, but adding them needs agreement of developers. We regularly discuss about them on discord.gg/aPs8RKr #shogi channel.

Regarding shakohouse. In theory we can add endless combination of features provided by Fairy-Stockfish via github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Variant-configuration but as I mentioned above: "no more variants".

We plan to create regular tournaments not just for shields of course later, but implementing auto-scheduler needs to be implemented first.

Musketeer was closed as "won't" in github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/issues/32, similar in github.com/gbtami/pychess-variants/issues/371

In Lichess, there are at least 100000 people who are online every day. So, if auto-scheduler schedules tournament every one hour, then there will be sufficient crowd in each one of them.

In Pychess, with barely 35 people who are online every day, if auto-scheduler schedules tournament every couple of hours, then won't the scheduled tournaments run empty because each person prefers playing in their preferred time slot whenever they are online, instead of all players clumping together in one tournament?

If 2 tournaments of a particular chess variant are held in AM and PM, then all players playing the chess variant will be divided into 2 for playing in their preferred time slot whenever they are free and will not play in the other time slot whenever they are asleep, busy, tired, bored or unavailable.

I think that with auto-scheduler, given the current number of players who are online every day in Pychess, there can be exactly one tournament of some chess variant every day, which happens during evening in Europe, such that all people whoever are interested in playing a particular chess variant will eagerly wait for its arrival, starting and will accumulate together at that exact period of time. If there is another tournament that happens before sunrise in Europe, then that tournament will run empty. May be all tournaments can be shield tournaments running for 4 hours at a stretch, 3 PM to 7 PM UTC instead of 5 PM to 9 PM UTC?

This can be done in a round-robin style for 33 or 34 days out of 38 chess variants available at Pychess, dropping off Chess, Crazyhouse, Fischer Random Chess, Atomic and may be Shogi also? Shogi is a quite interesting chess variant and it may not be dropped in the rounds of tournaments at all. This comes to approximately one tournament of a chess variant every month and if there are two tournaments of a chess variant every month, then it would include the empty running second tournament of the day of a specific chess variant that happens before sunrise in Europe.

Just curious, developing new board theme and new piece set will not be too much of work as developing a new game engine, but what is the agreement for the developers to add them?

By the way, developing new board theme and new piece set is working with image editor like Paint Brush for Windows and it does not involve any computer programming at all.