User-Friendly Variant Creation software?

Hello everyone,

Does anyone know of, or is interested in trying to create really user-friendly chess-variant software? What I'm envisioning is something with no programming requirements, in which all or almost all variables could be user determined/selected including: board  (size, shape, 3d, etc.) pieces (able to create new pieces with point and click--ie this piece can move like this...) special rules and so on? 

Thanks!

Jacob Winkler

jacobmaxwinkler@gmail.com

Not that I know of. In fact there hardly exists any user-configurable variant software at all. Zillions of Games (commercial) is the most versatile, but the downside is that each piece description is basically a program in itself. Fairy-Max and a few other engines can be configured by editing a configuration file with often obscure piece descriptions.

None have a graphical interface for defining pieces, and I wonder if this is even possible. Not every piece is characterized by 'its moves'. Pieces can have different ways of capturing and non-capturing, their moves could have side effects on other squares (like e.p. capture), there might be special moves for virgin pieces (Pawn double push), moves could be different depending on where the piece is located on the board (Chinese Chess), pieces could promote to one or a choice of other types (Japanese Chess), they might be able to capture two pieces in a single move (the Chu Shogi Lion), they could paralyze neighboring pieces (Ultima), destroy all pieces neighboring their destination square (Atomic Chess) or just opponents (Tenjiku Shogi's Fire Demon) etc. I have difficulty imagining an interface that could handle all that, and still be easy to operate.

I think it would be possible on a limited basis. You could make a web interface for choosing the board size, basic piece movement, initial set up, and some common rules. From the choices you could generate the Zillions of Games zrf file.

It would need to be limited for a couple reasons. One, as Muller points out, there is an incredible variety to Chess variants, and even making an intelligible interface to capture all of that would be a huge (insurmountable?) challenge. Two, the ZoG code for some rules can be pretty complex, even for just castling and en passant, and trying to get too many complicated bits to work together in any combination would bog down the programming.

Thanks for your responses! 

The question is also: what would be the point? You create a game once, to play it hundreds of times before you master it. So what do you actually gain by having a fancy graphical interface to design the game? Having to edit a list of numbers to specify the pieces (e.g. in Fairy-Max'  fmax.ini file)  might take you a quarter of an hour as a one-time effort, which perhaps could have been reduced to a few minutes. That is only a fraction of the time you would need to design good game rules, or learn to play it.

This might not match 100% what you are looking for, since there is still programming involved, but you may want to have a look at Jocly (www.jocly.com).

There is a developer interface that allows creating your own game project as a copy of an existing one (like Chess), modifying the code and running it directly with a very decent user interface.

Some games are more configurable than others (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MActWGkUhKI ).

The Chess implementation is a bit more hardcoded but it is not that difficult to modify the code to change the rules.