PDN 3.1 Proposal Requests

[igorlemasson]

Hi draughts community,

On last days I have discussed some technical and history issues about Spanish draughts with sultan_Ratrout

I verified that the GameType tag on PDN 3.0 specification isn't capable to represent the board position of the traditional Spanish draughts, for which historically the game is played on white squares.
Many people are still playing this variation instead of the most modern based on "Portuguese Draughts", a.k.a. "Damas clássicas", where the pieces are placed on black squares and bottom right square color is black.

Motivated by this exception, I'd like propose a little enhancement to Invert-flag value

PDN 3.1 proposal:
Invert-flag

0 = The bottom left corner is a playing black square
1 = The bottom left corner is not a playing white square
2 = The bottom left corner is a playing white square
3 = The bottom left corner is not a playing black square

PDN 3.0:
Invert-flag

0 = The bottom left corner is a playing square
1 = The bottom left corner is not a playing square


Regards,
Igor

[Rein Halbersma]

Hi draughts community,

On last days I have discussed some technical and history issues about Spanish draughts with sultan_Ratrout

I verified that the GameType tag on PDN 3.0 specification isn't capable to represent the board position of the traditional Spanish draughts, for which historically the game is played on white squares.
Many people are still playing this variation instead of the most modern based on "Portuguese Draughts", a.k.a. "Damas clássicas", where the pieces are placed on black squares and bottom right square color is black.

Hi Igor,

Thanks for your research. Do you have sources for your assertions?
So if I understand it correctly, Spanish and Portugese draughts have exactly the same technical rules of movement and jumping, board size and orientation, except that Spanish play on white and Portugese play on black squares?

I think in that case, that is not a property for PDN to care about. The notation is uniquely determined by the current parameters. If a particular game decides to paint colors blue or yellow, that doesn't change the PDN format, it's purely a GUI property. Wouldn't you agree?

Rein

[igorlemasson]

Hi Rein,

Yes, I do.
For while, we are trying get more details with a historian and writer.
On the past, Spanish draughts was played on white squares, instead of modern variant "Damas clássicas", in same manner of Portuguese Draughts rules.
However today most of players has played on modern way, unlike others who are still playing the old one.

I know that PDN 3.0 don't take in account the square colors, however to add this information could allow the GUI applications discovery the common board starting position
This improvement could be much useful to establish a board & pieces auto-discovery feature.
A GUI software would be able to load any PDN file, then parse the GameType and FEN tags and finally displays the proper board and pieces location.

I agree that square colors can be user-defined in any application, however it should be closer than real-world boards color patterns.

Anyway it's a minor improvement related to GameType comparing with the need to assign new GameType numbers to unsupported draughts variations.

Regards,
Igor

[Wieger Wesselink]

Hi Igor,

Thanks for your feedback!

If it is helpful I can add an extra column that indicates if the pieces are placed on the dark or on the light squares.

The biggest problem that I have in maintaining the the gametype table is that I have no way to check if it is correct. For most draughts variants there is no reliable source of information online. For example the entry for Zimbabwean draughts is based on incomplete information, and it is very likely that I interpreted it in the wrong way.

So I'm thinking about making one table with confirmed entries, and one with unconfirmed entries.

Regards,

Wieger

[igorlemasson]

Hi Igor,

Thanks for your feedback!

If it is helpful I can add an extra column that indicates if the pieces are placed on the dark or on the light squares.

The biggest problem that I have in maintaining the the gametype table is that I have no way to check if it is correct. For most draughts variants there is no reliable source of information online. For example the entry for Zimbabwean draughts is based on incomplete information, and it is very likely that I interpreted it in the wrong way.

So I'm thinking about making one table with confirmed entries, and one with unconfirmed entries.

Regards,

Wieger

Maybe a extra attribute can help to not only indicate the square color, but also indicate when the square is actually a intersection point, for example the Ossetian Draughts (Tama) board.
Such as:
0 - Black square
1 - White square
2- Uncolored square
3 - Grid intersection point

About the Gametype variation table, I think it will require a deeper investigation and re-think about which are the preferential variations to be added.

BR,
Igor

[igorlemasson]

I have created the follow form to check the responses for the PDN 3.1 specification proposals.

PDN 3.1 Proposal form

[Rein Halbersma]

Hi Rein,

Yes, I do.
For while, we are trying get more details with a historian and writer.
On the past, Spanish draughts was played on white squares, instead of modern variant "Damas clássicas", in same manner of Portuguese Draughts rules.
However today most of players has played on modern way, unlike others who are still playing the old one.

Note that many (old) books also display the pieces on white squares just because it makes the diagrams easier to print. On Jake Kacher's website there are links to scanned PDFs that contain examples of international draughts, pool checkers and straight checkers, all with the pieces on the white squares, but in the correct orientation where the official game rules say that there should be black squares. So the books just inverted the colors for reasons of printability.

[igorlemasson]

Hi Rein,

Yes, I do.
For while, we are trying get more details with a historian and writer.
On the past, Spanish draughts was played on white squares, instead of modern variant "Damas clássicas", in same manner of Portuguese Draughts rules.
However today most of players has played on modern way, unlike others who are still playing the old one.

Note that many (old) books also display the pieces on white squares just because it makes the diagrams easier to print. On Jake Kacher's website there are links to scanned PDFs that contain examples of international draughts, pool checkers and straight checkers, all with the pieces on the white squares, but in the correct orientation where the official game rules say that there should be black squares. So the books just inverted the colors for reasons of printability.

Hi Rein
I knew this printability cause, however some players are still playing Spanish draughts, in old fashion, where the pieces are on the white squares. Some softwares also implemented this traditional Spanish draughts variant (pieces on white squares). For while I knew only this example of square color interchangeability.
Maybe, the square color interchangeability itself is not a enough reason to expand PDN tags, however some other cases must be analyzed, for instance the variants that adopts intersection grid. similar to Alquerque draughts board, such as Ossetian draughts (Tama).