Board Image Utility

Introduction

This utility will produce images of chess variant playing boards and game positions.
Currently boards with hexagonal cells and a shape derived from a regular hexagon, or with square cells and a shape derived from a rectangle, are available.

The utility is written in PHP5 and will form part of my planned eXtensible System for Chess Variants (xscv).

Available Board Shapes

Regular Hexagon Based

Rectangular Based

Equilateral Triangle Based

Examples

Shafran's Hexagonal Chess	McCooey's Hexagonal Chess
Brusky's Hexagonal Chess	Peanut Chess
Images and Arrows	Herichess

Changes

• 15-Jul-2007
  • Cells can be individually colored (currently only rectangular based/square cells)
    see Herichess example

• 14-Jul-2007
  • Suppport for rectangular boards with square cells added

• 13-Jul-2007
  • Added arrows - see example Images and Arrows

• 10-Jul-2007
  • Can now use gif and jpg formats in addition to png
  • Added ability to include external images. Currently only works with png format.

Planned Features

# Support rectangular boards with square cells (see comments)
# Support circular boards
# Support triangular cells
# Allow export/import of parameters as text files
# Allow cells to be individually coloured (Partially implemented)
# Support transparent background

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Nice.

Sibahi 1183824647|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Nice. I can make use of these.

I am currently working on a variant which uses a 7-based hexagonal board, with all six corner hexes cut out. Is it possible for the utility to have that? (And, as an extra feature, if it adds user-defined gifs as pieces and the abitilty to draw arrows and the like, it would be perfect. This would certainly help Charles Gilman in many of his exotic hexagonal variants.)

By the way, in a completely irrelevant note, Christian Freeling re-designed some of his chess variants on the hex board. I might implement them on the Game Courier any time soon.

Re: Nice.

Grayhawke 1183861777|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks for your suggestions. All feature/improvement requests are most welcome.

I have added the ability to cut from a list of rows in addition to cutting from a range of rows. I think this next image may be what you're after -

User defined gifs/jpgs/pngs should be available shortly.

last edited on 1183862110|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Grayhawke + show more

Square based cells

Grayhawke 1184296355|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Images and Arrows example from initial square-based code

last edited on 1184296661|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Grayhawke + show more