Re: [Bug-XBoard] [bug #39971] fix configure switches misbehaving

[h . g . muller]

Op Di, 1 oktober, 2013 10:18 pm schreef Tim Mann:
> Ah, those look nice, at least in that size. Well, the knights' eyes look
> strange in XChu.png, but fine in Lion1.png. Or are the "knights" in XChu
> actually fairy pieces that have different looking eyes on purpose?

Indeed, these are the symbols designed to represent 'Nightriders'. In Chu
Shogi, which is still a bit improvised, I use them for the 'Blind Tigers'.
Chu Shogi has no pieces that move like a Knight in Chess, so it is one of
the few symbols I did not use. In the other link you can see the normal
Knight.
>
> The challenge with the original pixmap pieces was to tweak the smaller
> sizes to look good, as Metafont didn't do a good job of that (well, maybe
> the Metafont program was missing "hinting"-style information that would
> have made them look better), and of course the pieces weren't
> anti-aliased. The 21x21-pixel "tiny" size needed extensive editing. With
> today's typically much bigger screens, and anti-aliasing, I imagine SVG
> looks great for sizes people actually use.

Indeed, the anti-aliasing makes it MUCH easier to get acceptable quality
even at small sizes. 21x21 is stretching it, however. I just made a
screenshot of that:

http://hgm.nubati.net/TinyChu.png

There is this Japanese game Taikyoku Shogi, which uses a board od 36x26
squares, for which 21x21 square size is about the maximum you can afford.
I designed special piece set that still displays very well at 21x21 (and
perfectly at 33x33), and also gives a reminder of how the pieces move.
(The usefulness of which cannot be underestimated if you are dealing with
more than 250 piece types! :-) ) They only work in WinBoard thoug (which
synthesises them on the spot from components):

http://hgm.nubati.net/pieceset/pieceset.html




>
>
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>> Op Di, 1 oktober, 2013 9:49 pm schreef Tim Mann:
>>
>>> .... It would be cool to have the old familiar piece shapes as SVG.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Yes, we do have an SVG set, and I think Arun copied the pieces by hand
>> from the original xpm pieces (and the extra ones I made for variants).
>> So
>> they look as similar as you could expect. One obvious difference is that
>>  the SVG pieces are anti-aliased during the rendering, making use of
>> gray-scales even when they were defined in glorious black & white.
>>
>> To get an impression of how the pieces look nowadays, the following two
>>  links are fine. (They are for 49x49 square size, which is not too
>> large.)
>>
>> http://hgm.nubati.net/XChu.png
>>
>>
>> http://hgm.nubati.net/Lion1.png
>>
>>
>> These two screenshots were taken from the Xaw version; The following
>> link gives a summary of how the GTK windows look:
>>
>> http://hgm.nubati.net/gtk
>>
>>
>> H.G.
>>
>>
>>
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>