WandererXII
Professional mode
A separate mode (available for both rated/nonrated standard shogi) where an illegal move that falls into one of nifu/pawn drop mate/moving king into check/repetitive check loses the game for the offender on the spot should be added. It won't affect other gamemodes - just an option for, say, tournament play where it's necessary to emulate OTB rules.
For standard game creating (e.g. from lobby) I worry about overloading users with options, making the ui less intuitive. But for tournaments this might work fine. One other issue with this I can think of is that people might be used to cancelling a move/drop by moving/dropping a piece into a not highlighted square, which would now result in a loss - it would create inconsistent behavior across different games. But if enough people request I think it's good as an advanced option for tournaments.
I think we can still "allow" illegal moves that fall into the category you said (as in, movable squares will still be highlighted by default and there is no penalty for moving a piece into an unhighlighted square) since other sites also employ such rules.
Earlier I had a similar suggestion for rated games #525 although I guess allowing nifu might not be necessary as long as players can understand the rules.
(Ditto about allowing top-rank[s] pawn, lance, and knight drops.)
We could also make it into a new variant 'Professional', that would allow all moves/drops and an illegal move/drop would be a loss. This would be simpler to implement and more clear to the players that something is different, than having a toggle somewhere. But it's pushing what a variant is supposed to be... and it would also be only for standard shogi, so other variants wouldn't get 'professional' mode.
I guess yet another option is something like ICS "noescape" - add a user preference and if both players consent, they can play using traditional rules.
We would be grateful if you guys can release the Tournament/Professional mode, as we are organizing tournaments with high stakes in Vietnam.
I would like to add a further request: to disable the choice of guided pieces (that is, internationalized pieces, pieces with arrows, etc.). This along with all other Professional mode functions can be activated/disactivated by the organizers per-tournament to allow for flexibility (eg. tournaments for new players and the likes). I would be grateful if you guys can let us know if it can be done and for how long, because our tournament system depends on it.
Thank you.
I tried implementing this - all squares are marked as valid destinations (except squares with our own pieces), making a move that is not valid will result in a loss, the illegal move is then marked by red arrow:
Check highlight is also disabled, premoves are also disabled, and as requested guided pieces are not allowed, we would default to the default piece set.
Currently I have this as an setting in tournaments, but I could add it to api and friend challenges.
This allows the user to make any move, not just - moving the king into check, pawn drop mate, nifu, etc. I can change that but this doesn't require me to rewrite move generation that specifically ignores only some rules, and second it's immediately obvious to the user that something is different and they need to pay attention to king safety, etc. on their own.
@WandererXII Extremely grateful for this! However I'm not seeing the settings yet. Is this still in testing? I would appreciate the regular update on the process. It's working great. Also would love if you can work on the issue of long-term tournaments (and with custom rules (i.e. brackets, round robin, etc) &/ pairings at that)
Yep, still in testing. I'm planning to release this together with the new tournament formats this week (hopefully).
Edit: I'm sorry, still need a few days.
Took me a while, sorry about that. Kept testing and kept finding bugs... But it's live now.