Winboard as Shogi GUI

[hgm]

Now that I implemented Crazyhouse, Shogi was of course a piece cake. Western style it looks like this:



Of course those that are masochistic can also play it like this, if they can find the proper font:



(spot the error!)

[Dariusz Orzechowski]

There is a Gold instead of black King.

PS There is also interesting set of western pieces used on kurnik.
http://www.kurnik.pl/szogi/zasady.phtml
That page is in Polish language but only pictures are important.

[hgm]

And how about a game of "Crazyqi"?



Mandarins can only be dropped inside the Palace, and Elephants on their own side of the river, of course !

[Tord Romstad]

Hello Harm-Geert,

Awesome work!


Now I really have to speed up my work on Lucid Nonsense (the current name of my shogi program), and think about making a shogi version of PolyGlot.

Of course those that are masochistic can also play it like this, if they can find the proper font:



(spot the error!)

I guess you are referring to the fact that black has a third gold in place of a king, but actually there is another error which to my eyes is quite annoying: The pieces all have the same size. The pieces are supposed to have different sizes, with the most valuable pieces being the biggest (king > rook = bishop > gold > silver > knight > lance > pawn).

Your westernized shogi board looks nice, but perhaps you should consider swapping the black and white colors. Even though the traditional shogi pieces have a single color, the side that makes the first move is often called "black", and the other side "white" (possibly an influence from the game of go, where black makes the first move).

Tord

[nczempin]

Now that I implemented Crazyhouse,

Wow, harm-geert, you really are going all-out on the Winboard modifications.


Hats off!

[hgm]

Your westernized shogi board looks nice, but perhaps you should consider swapping the black and white colors. Even though the traditional shogi pieces have a single color, the side that makes the first move is often called "black", and the other side "white" (possibly an influence from the game of go, where black makes the first move).

I considered representing the side that moves first as white part of the Westernizing. Those that don't like it, can simply start from a FEN of the opening position with black to move, or use the extensive Winboard_x options to tailor the piece colors. Or use the assignment of fontcharacters.

I did not know about the piece sizes. But I guess a true Shogi font would take care of that. I did not plan to support any non-Westernized piece symbols as bitmaps. The ones I showed above are meant as a joke, and won't work in play, as all pieces are actually white. I could not find any public Shogi Font, however.

I am now making it such that the variant can be selected from the menus (file->new variant), and that each variant has its own default board and holdings size. If the /boardWidth and /boardHeight (and a new /holdingsSize) are given as -1 on the command line or winboard.ini file, these defaults are used. Other values overrule the defaults, though. So you can add holdings to any variant by giving it non-zero holdings size, to play it with piece drops. Pieces for which there is no room in the holdingssize are converted to Pawns (which take first rank in the holdings). Non-standard board sizes are transmitted to the engine prefixed to the variant name, like 9x10+6_xiangqi for the variant shown above.