Journal Entries
Back Again
Posted Apr 9, 2000
Sorry for the absence folks. Unfortuantly I'm working at the moment, back in a pub. Which means my on line time is extremely erratic.
A little thingy has been brought to my attention. If you make a Castling move, the Rook won't move automagically. Sorry. I'll work on this, but in the mean time if you make that move, let me know and I'll code it in manually. This will slow the games down a little for the time being I'm afraid.
On the plus side though, I've currently set up two different ways of undoing moves. So, in case you make a wrong of illegal move there is a way in place of undoing it. As soon as I've decided which way works better I'll put it into place. Due to the way that the programme works, this will go straight over the top of any current games and you won't have to start again.
Also, in any spare time I have, I'm reworking the graphics now that I've got the hang of a decent art package. Thanks by the way to Sporky for the h2g2Chess funky font writing on this main page, better than I can currently d
So, also you can hope to expect better looking playing peices in the near(ish) future.
Pastey
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Latest reply: Apr 9, 2000
Digest, sort of.
Posted Mar 27, 2000
Well, we've had a front page mention
On Friday (I think it was) the h2g2Chess Programme was listed in a Peck of Peta's Picks. We've got a few moer players now as well, and I can see it growing, at least I hope s
The IE5 refresh bug is still looming I'm afraid. All I can suggest is that when you've confirmed your move, just believe that it has actually done it. Either that or use Nutscrape when playing, I have no idea why, but it works better on this one.
I'm currently working on an undo button as I've noticed that at the moment there is no way of undoing an illegal move, which there should be really. It shouldn't be hard to put in, it's just getting my butt in gear and doing it
I have been asked about having a sort of knock-out competition, and I think this is a great idea, although I do think that we need to iron out these last few bugs like putting in an undo feature first.
Another feature that I keep meaning to look at is a way of notifying players on their homepage when it's their turn to move. I will get around to it
Pastey
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Latest reply: Mar 27, 2000
And so it has begun.
Posted Mar 10, 2000
A couple of games have started and a couple of bugs have been found.
Firstly make absolutely sure that you've put the right move into the lists. I made this mistake and it still move the pieces, but there's no way of moving them back at present. The programme doesn't check to make sure if it's a legal move, so if you're not careful you may end up with pieces all over the board, and at the moment the only way to fix an error is for me to go in and alter the code.
Secondly if you are playing in real time as it were, with both players on line at the same time, waiting for each other to move, then IE5 has a browser refresh problem. I was sort of expecting this one anyway, but not as annoying as it is. If it isn't refreshing for you, just close the browser window down, open a new window and load the page into that The other way is to put the page into the favourites folder within IE5 and reload from there.
Thirdly, my instructions were pretty useless
Now what we need is more games to be played.
Pastey
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Latest reply: Mar 10, 2000
Come one, come all.
Posted Mar 9, 2000
It's now fully working. All you need to do to play is email me with your choice of player password on [email protected] and I will set you up as a player
Enjoy everyone.
Pastey
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Latest reply: Mar 9, 2000
All the old stuff
Posted Mar 8, 2000
This will, when it's finished, be a centre on h2g2 where researchers from all over the globe can come and play chess with each other. Currently I'm still writing the code for it. It's now at the stage where one game is possible at a time. But I'm now working on a user password system so that multiple games can be played. When that's done I'll work on some other things as well. One thing I am intending to do is improve the graphics for the pieces, so that you can actually see the board behind them, but I wanted to make sure the coding worked first Pastey
The password system is now in place, so that's one step closer to being automated. The programme itself now actually works, and can be used to play a game. But to do so you need to have your username and a password registered in an array I keep off site on a different server. Maybe in time I'll find a way around this, but untill then it's not that much hassle. I was hoping to get this finished this weekend, but I've come down with a bit of a dose of flu. Nothing too serious, but it has meant I've found it difficult to concentrate on anything for any length of time. I have found a problem with the coding though that prevent Netscape browsers from being able to play the game, which is weird because I learnt JavaScript from the Netscape documentation. But on the plus side, I've found a quicker, and simplier way to call the different checks the programme does. But again on the downside, I've found a bit of a boo-boo that I hadn't even thought about. But, until you test these things, how are you to know? It shouldn't be a problem to fix, it's all down to the way it updates the page and where it calls the page number and details up from. Currently it calls them from the main rewriting script, that's fine for one match at a time, but for multiple matches to be played at once, using the same script, I need to get it to call it up from the match page, like it already does for the location of the Pieces and the Players names. So, that in itself shouldn't be hard. It all depends on how h2g2 assigns numbers to pages, and if I can get it to automatically grab the newly assigned number and put it in the code. If not, well, I'm sure I'll think of something Pastey
Well, braving the flu I've sorted out the Netscape Bug. It was all down to the way Netscape reads list options as arrays rather than direct inputs*?* Also I've fixed it so you can now only move your own pieces, and not your opponents, Sorry :¬) Now to work on the automagic new game creation thingy :¬)
Well, it's almost there now :¬) I'm just sorting out the final few things and it'll be ready to go!
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Latest reply: Mar 8, 2000
Chess Player
Researcher U113117
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