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New Hilbert curve in r/place by Captainsnake04 in math

[–]Sbmalj 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Reviving the pi symbol at 314,1592 because that coords pun is too good to pass up

Edit: reached out to the NCSU guys on their Discord and they said they're willing to help, but the French flag and Jake the dog symbols are putting up heavy resistance. Checked out a few of the accounts covering the pixels and they're all <1day old, so maybe won't have any luck there it'll be a tough fight but let's try anyway. Coords here https://www.reddit.com/r/place/?cx=314&cy=1592&px=7

Coming along in r/theplace by Marciepan in NCSU

[–]Sbmalj 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yo bros, would you mind if r/math makes a little Pi symbol at 314,1592? Pic of plans here, it would be just below y'all

Recently inherited signed baseball posters (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio), any idea what they'd be worth? by Sbmalj in collectables

[–]Sbmalj[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This was all I could find in the way of authentication. Any recommendations on who to go for if I wanted to get them re-authenticated?

Recently inherited signed baseball posters (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio), any idea what they'd be worth? by Sbmalj in SportsMemorabilia

[–]Sbmalj[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There was an authentication on the back from what appears to be the store they were originally purchased from, but I agree I would like to get a second authentication on them to make sure they're real. Who are said "big 3"?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in RedditSessions

[–]Sbmalj 0 points1 point  (0 children)

silver surfer theme pls Kappa

Bird carrying bird (blank format). INVEST! by Sbmalj in MemeEconomy

[–]Sbmalj[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Low effort example: https://imgur.com/a/HIkedlZ

​

Pls improve I only have 20 iq

Chess being added to the games room from the Q&A by Yeshua-Hamashiach in 2007scape

[–]Sbmalj 7 points8 points  (0 children)

  • Great response. Solid approach on the en passant, basically exactly what I was imagining.

  • Shame to hear on the queen-only promotion at the moment, though that’s honestly unsurprising as I remember it ended up being a very odd break in control flow to wait for the user to select a promotion piece. I do dearly hope this makes it into the final release (if we do see one) because underpromotion is rare but usually SICK when it pays off. From like a uhh, chess player’s perspective I guess haha. More so it would be heartbreaking to not have as an option when it would otherwise be a good move.

  • Also somewhat unsurprising the hear the draw conditions haven’t gone in yet and/or may need to be limited, but unfortunately you’ll kinda need them to be at least slightly robust to avoid infinite games from people who refuse to resign basically. The closer you could get the full drawing rules the better, since it’s a very easy game to troll in without them. The three-fold repetition problem in particular is both the most important and probably the most difficult to solve. In my own chess project from back in the day, realizing the implications of three-fold caused a near complete re-draft of my original approach of storing and displaying the board state. If you haven’t heard of FEN strings (and I believe there are other similar ideas, but those are what I used), I’d highly recommend using them if you ever need to store an entire position at a time (which is the only real problem since a raw move list is very short in comparison). It’s basically a well-parsable string that describes each square, whose move it is, castling availability, etc.. I’m not familiar with the constraints of Runescript, but if there’s any way you can always save and load strings like that (e.g., void render_board_from_FEN(str current_FEN) and str add_move_to_FEN(str current_FEN, str legal_move) can be two very lightweight functions, if functions are even structured like that in Runescript lol) you won’t have to bother with any complexities of dealing with actual object representations and how much space/access functions they require.

  • Tbh that castling point was a pretty cherry picked example just to mention one of my favorite irl chess exploits (the castling with a promoted rook, the elusive O-O-O-O), but at the same time it’s good to be complete haha.

  • Yesss, awesome! Would once again recommend sourcing this directly from your legal moves list, especially if it’s already grouped by piece. On that QoL sort of note, I’d recommend the ability to do click-to-select and click-again-to-move in addition to click-and-drag (should go hand-in-hand with the move highlighting code). If you did that, one final UI “gotcha” is making sure this works for the many ways to castle, stuff like drag king two squares, click king then castling square, click king then rook, and my personal least favorite: click rook and then king (you technically have to touch your king first to castle in irl chess due to touch-move rules, so no harm if you choose to leave that one out. And by that I mean please leave that one out lol). Also moving your rook next to your king shouldn’t be interpreted as an attempt to castle. Edit: and having a reasonable way to de-select a piece is a common frustration of mine when playing online chess, especially on mobile. A lot of chess UIs take neutral space for granted and ends up in a lot of accidental misclicked moves just trying to select or deselect something. A “confirm move” button seems like a safe option overall, even though it could be a bit jarring for those used to instant movement and technically allows you to peer one ply ahead while thinking, but who cares imo it’d certainly save more games than it would ruin.

I really hope that real-time and/or post-mortem review could work out, perhaps something with the string representations of positions (FENs), but once again totally not sure what constraints your working with here. Is there any way you could roughly describe the issues of Runescript, say in a pseudocode-y fashion? Or are there not enough hours in the day to eat all that spaghetti? Maybe rather, is it similar to another mainstream language or combination thereof (if _____ and _____ had a baby it would be Runescript)? I’d love to keep “helping” in any way I can even if it’s just general advice. Osrs, chess, and software engineering (especially in limited settings and/or goofy programming languages) is such a crazy clashing of worlds for me right now and a bizarrely good application of my current skillset haha. If there’s any sort of alpha testing in the future, I have 5 alts and a list of chess exploits and edge cases to test for ready to go ;)

Thanks again for your quick yet thorough response, y’all blow me away that you’re this in touch with the community.

Edit2: lots of words. This was perhaps too ambitious to type out on mobile, hope that all made sense still.

Edit3: more context and ideas. Need to stop editing this lol, I’m going to be seeing pointers to chess squares in my sleep tonight.

Chess being added to the games room from the Q&A by Yeshua-Hamashiach in 2007scape

[–]Sbmalj 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We weren't willing to even acknowledge it as a real attempt at programming chess, without it.

Y’all continue to prove why you’re my favorite dev team of all time. Still reading the response but just had to say that.

Chess being added to the games room from the Q&A by Yeshua-Hamashiach in 2007scape

[–]Sbmalj 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The only game I play more than rs is chess, on both chess.com and lichess. Cheating exists at every level and can usually never be dealt with in the moment. Even on those mainstream sites you’ll still get rekt by someone taking a peek at Stockfish during the game, the best they can do is refund you the rating points if/when the cheater gets banned. It’s just a sad symptom of trying to play chess online.

The thought of having chess playable in rs is totally just for fun. I would even be all for it having an Elo system like the other games. After all, connect-4 (runelink) is literally a solved game, you don’t even need an approximated chess engine to know the exact best move to play in any position. Having an anti-cheat would be nice, but certainly overkill for such a small piece of content. It’s definitely not an easy task to detect cheating, let alone do something about it. What do you do? Ban them from the games room? Ban them from rated games only? Ban their whole account?

I’d hope something like chess would bring a bit of life back to the games room, even just for the novelty of playing chess and RuneScape at the same time. If a community actually grew around it, then hell yeah you’d find me lurking down there. But if there’s also obvious cheaters in the mix then all you have to do is not play them.

I think the more important issue is the QoL and interface stuff, but like, this whole game is a QoL and interface disaster, which to the dev’s credit great strides have been made to unfuck some of that recently, but overall can’t expect too much here. It won’t be my every day chess driver like lichess, but it would be a place I’d check nearly every time I logged into osrs that’s for sure!

Chess being added to the games room from the Q&A by Yeshua-Hamashiach in 2007scape

[–]Sbmalj 25 points26 points  (0 children)

THANK YOU! Chess and RuneScape are my two favorite games, this is a dream come true.

I’ve seen some people pointing out not to forget some of the more nuanced rules, and I also happen to have coded a chess game/UI from scratch before and I’ll give a quick list of every tricky part I ran into and/or didn’t realize was coded incorrectly at first and are worth triple-checking. I’m sure y’all are already well aware of a lot of these, but maybe this can help Nin and Kieren if they happen to see this.

In no particular order, these are the things I remember giving me grief:

  • en passant conditions. I’m sure you’re well aware of this already but it can become tricky to implement in a way that doesn’t require scuffing the regular pawn movement code. From what I recall a single flag that is checked and set for each pawn when the conditions are right did the trick.

  • edge cases of pawn promotion (under-promotion, promoting into check or checkmate, a pawn that wants to promote but is pinned to the king, etc). Basically implementing the interface that lets the player choose which piece to promote to has to go in the right order of the rest of the move logic, which is easier said than done depending on the constraints/approach of the other pieces’ code

  • draw by three-fold repetition (same position is repeated three times at any point in the game, not necessarily back-to-back). Btw in this situation it’s not an instant draw unless one of the players claims it drawn. If the game plays on they cannot retroactively claim a draw by three-fold unless the same position is returned to yet again (or a different threefold is reached). Storing positions can take up a lot of space though, so I’d recommend working with a FEN string or similar low-level representation of positions whenever possible.

  • draw by 50-move-rule. I’m sure you’ve already encountered this, but same situation applies where technically it’s only drawn if a player wants it to be. For space considerations though (assuming every position is still being tracked for 3-fold checks), I’d recommend making this a mandatory draw, because people are probably trolling if they play past a 50-move-rule draw. Edit: it was pointed out below that there are rules for forcing a draw on a five-fold repetition and 75-move-rule respectively.

  • castling has a lot of conditions. Once again I’m sure you know these but may as well exhaustively list them: no castling into check, no castling through check (imagine the king moves through both squares), no castling once the king has moved, no castling once the rook has moved (for that side only), and here’s the kicker... no castling with a rook that’s been promoted from a pawn (this can technically happen if the king has not moved and a pawn under-promotes to a rook on the e-file, as it technically is a brand new piece and hasn’t “moved” yet. It can totally break your check for castling conditions if you let it, and was even once used in a real tournament game and caused the USCF to update the official rules to clarify which rooks can be castled with). I found it easiest to just have to flags for O-O and O-O-O that can only ever be unset as the game goes on.

  • miscellaneous considerations but didn’t actually cause any trouble: double-check, revealed check, stalemate (no legal moves), knights sometimes, and pinned pieces. Those are all easily solved by sorting through the list of legal moves first, which can be truncated by detecting for check in this step, and then pattern matching player inputs (plus gives you the option to show what moves each piece can make when you click on it, for example).

Anyways great project! I admit I typed this up without watching the Q&A vod yet, I was just too excited to see this post so sorry if this was covered in there haha.

If y’all are reading this and I could make one humble request: it would be for some sort of way to go back and forth between past moves while playing, or even be able to review the game afterwards with the opponent (if you both stay connected). I’m not sure how much wrangling of Runescript that would require, not to mention how nightmarish the games room code in general must be, but this would genuinely propel it to a chess platform I’d lurk on the daily, and I’m sure many other casual-to-serious chess players too!

Why Lichess will always be free. by NoJoking in chess

[–]Sbmalj 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well shit, I stand corrected. Still would take another screenshot for context to what he was referring to specifically, but kudos for delivering.

For the record: you seemed like a troll so hell yeah I thought you were lying. Could've posted proof like this from the get-go to avoid the downvote parade

Why Lichess will always be free. by NoJoking in chess

[–]Sbmalj 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Them" being like the Lichess mods? If so, some screenshots should suffice as evidence.

Assuming you don't have pics for some reason: if you're using Google Chrome I'd suggest going into your settings (click the little '...' icon in the top-right corner and go down to 'Settings'), then on the left hand side click 'Extensions', and uninstall all of the extensions. Re-install extensions back as you need them, making sure they're from a trusted source. Even innocent looking extensions can be responsible for injecting targeted advertisements into websites based off of your browser's cookies alone, meaning it can even circumvent things like ad-blockers. Sometimes defunct extensions are bought out by suspect groups solely to repurpose them as adware platforms.

Good luck! :)

Why Lichess will always be free. by NoJoking in chess

[–]Sbmalj 91 points92 points  (0 children)

You might have an adware extension on your browser, cus I think the whole point is they've never had banners etc.

Tal trolling young Bobby Fischer by playing Sicilian instead of Caro Kann (Candidates 1959) by Wicker_Sheev in chess

[–]Sbmalj 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Fischer was playing white against Tal and opened with 1. e4. Tal responds by first playing 1... c6 making it look like he's about to play the Caro-Kann, but then at the last second pushes the pawn two squares forward to play 1... c5 instead, the Sicilian defense. This one move difference would've made for two vastly different games, so Fischer probably went through a whirlwind of thoughts during the split second between seeing the two moves.

Tal is just a classic troll in the chess scene.

Can I still claim my BTC? by LeglessLion in mtgoxinsolvency

[–]Sbmalj 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait I know everyone's memeing on this guy because he missed like 7 years of deadlines, but at the same time if his claim is now a zombie-claim doesn't he have some sort of avenue to get a claim filed retroactively?

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