Seems like it got the hug of death from many users - few interesting quirks I saw while it was still running:
* You need to actually capture the king to win. Check/Checkmate does not apply here
* You can't move the same piece twice in a row (I think)
* You can actually skip a turn - This is somehow more strategic than it sounds, but I'm not sure how to use it - maybe just wait with your "venus flytrap" and then capture the pieces?
The last bullet point reminds me of the description from a game in China Miéville's Kraken.
> The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was... It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.
Even tho I can't see the site, I love the idea of rule changes. We live in a golden age my friends; computers, automation and a massive online player base opens up so many opportunities to tweak the rules of existing games and see what falls out.
Maybe my rule change idea has already been implemented, but, other than building it myself, is there a way to play / automate chess / checkerboards of arbitrary sizes? Bigger / smaller boards, odd numbers of tiles, rectangles, etc. How about adding and removing pieces, an extra rank of pawns for example. Letting it run / learn for a million games or so and see what comes out.
Please let me know if yous guys have seen something similar.
Good. The entire check system is a pointless bolt-on esotericism. Not being able to place your king in check has never improved a single game of chess.
What about the rule that the king is not allowed to castle if one of the squares moved over by the king is under attack? If you allow the king to be placed in check then you surely would also allow the king to step over squares attacked by opponents peaces? But this would change the game in the sense that it will not be equivalent to chess any more.
Just played my first game; the dynamics here didn't take long to get used to and it's brilliantly fun to play. Bugs aside, at least.
A few people pointed out that the king and queen are in the wrong positions, but if you think it through, you'll also note that this is entirely cosmetic when both players move at once. If anything, it might be easier to fix this by swapping the assets and mirroring the board rather than swapping white and black, at least depending on how the game's written.
I have not played this specific instance because it is being HN-hugged to death, but I've played this rule change before--there used to be a website that called it "xymyx". It was interesting because you could move pawns diagonally by attempting to capture a pawn that moved that same turn. Lots of other cute little side effects.
I hadn't known of xymyx when I made chess2! Xymyx looks pretty interesting too - I wanted to attempt to make an interesting variation on chess with minimal changes to the classic rules!
It’s trivial to survive HN traffic with a static site (assuming you know in advance that the site needs to be prepared for HN traffic) - just stick it behind a CDN.
I found HN front-page to still be less than about 1 user action per second. Ie. Pageload.
That means if your site loads fast, you typically won't ever be serving more than a single user at once, so unless you're serving it on a burstable CPU and you run out of burst capacity, you should be fine.
Yeah, my site which is hosted on fly.io's smallest VM with 256MB RAM and only part of a CPU core was on the HN front page the other day and I was surprised to see that it barely even registered the resource usage: consuming just 50MB RAM with a 0.2 load average.
It is a fairly simple webpage, and it's rendered in Rust so it's probably more efficient than most. And perhaps it didn't get as much traffic as other things on the front page, but I was still expecting worse given how much some sites seem to struggle.
> It’s trivial to survive HN traffic with a static site
It’s fairly trivial to survive HN traffic, full stop. I’ve seen the RPS live from several “#1 on homepage” posts with hundreds of comments (let alone upvotes) and as another commenter stated, it’s at most single digit requests per second.
Edit to add:
I’m not judging harshly hobby projects for not surviving it, it was a hobby project after all, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s fairly trivial to handle if you set that as a goal.
> If you're serving a lot of traffic I'd consider switching to a faster server
I don't think anyone with a small personal site should spend too much time planning for that single, improbable, day when traffic might increase by several orders of magnitude.
With most hosts I've had, that type of increase would just trigger DDOS protection and/or take down the site with its itty bitty quota limits.
Looking forward to checking your site later gershy (and placing this comment as a reminder :P ), but I'll admit I'm glad in a horrible sort of way that it means I was able to see this article.
Doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Console shows this error:
An Error lacking a "stack" property:
Form: TypeError
Desc: TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Keys: [ fileName, lineNumber, columnNumber, message ] html.room:49:9
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Firefox kan geen verbinding maken met de server op wss://chess2.fun/?trn=sync&hutId=000000LFCzgqdaBb.
I made a whatsapp group with a friend then kicked them so it's only me, then I message myself all the links I need to check out after work. Works relatively well
@gershy: Very fun, thanks. Now that the rush is past, are you still reading Hacker News comments? Is this the right place to give feedback and suggestions?
I just now have been hoping for a match, and the display says "Two players matching" which implies to me someone is out there besides me waiting to play", but I never got matched. Does this seem like a bug?
Also, it would be handy to have a chime when a match occurs. I'm willing to have my 'matching' state be long term in a separate tab, as I surf.
Unfortunately I can't play due to the HN hug of death, but I just want to say that this is a great idea. Chess is a wonderful game on its own, but having a synchronous element to the game and information asymmetry seems like it could add a lot of depth.
I played some 10 games or so, before I couldn't reach the server anymore.
Pretty fun, I like it! I'm going to try it tomorrow with a friend of mine that's about my level and see how it goes, hopefully those practice games will serve me well ;)
I assume it works just like Diplomacy. Meaning they both bounce. Unless one of them has support to move by another piece, and that piece itself is not under attack.
So how does castling, En Passant, and moving one's king into a checked (but wouldn't have been checked, but for the move of the opponent) position work?
I was very confused when I was in check mate, but the other player didn't capture my king for some reason.... so in the end I won. Didn't expect that. They probably just didn't see the check mate even if it was obvious to me!
A clever way to escape checkmate is to move your king towards or away from the piece that placed the king in check (as long as your new square doesn't also place you in check by a different piece you should be able to avoid the initial capture and still be safe since they won't be able to move this same piece right away).
Your opponent may have disconnected, giving you the win by default! I've gotta make that wording a bit clearer... right now it always says "checkmate".
Yes...I started playing and then realised none of the moves work...then the other player left the game but there was no way of me knowing they had left.
As true as this is, it's also immaterial to the game itself. Since both white and black move simultaneously, the only difference in gameplay is literally which side your king and queen start on.
So yeah, it should be fixed, but it's also a purely cosmetic bug. And I imagine it's probably safer to fix it by swapping the assets and flipping the board rather than actually remapping white and black pieces.
Can't try it because it is being hn-hugged to death.
So, I will just comment that I've really enjoyed chess.com's fog of war variation. Basically, you can only see the squares where you are legally allowed to move, adding a whole different level of strategy to the game.
IIRC the Lichess dev isn't too fond of random people adding big new features. They tend to be a bit sloppily written (by people who don't have as much Scala experience as other languages) and then people ditch the project and don't maintain what they built.
And he said it's really difficult to remove features. The smallest most obscure thing will have at least one user. Removing a game mode or big feature makes loads of people angry. But he hasn't got time to maintain the millions of things people submit and then never touch again.
"Neither player moves first" The way that's phrased makes it sound like no one ever gets to take a turn, but they actually meant that players move at the same time.
* You need to actually capture the king to win. Check/Checkmate does not apply here
* You can't move the same piece twice in a row (I think)
* You can actually skip a turn - This is somehow more strategic than it sounds, but I'm not sure how to use it - maybe just wait with your "venus flytrap" and then capture the pieces?