That sounds good. The only thing that worried me about it (and why I suggested what I did) was that it won't be obvious to beginners, but the message line should pretty much take care of that.
On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 6:16 AM, h.g. muller <[email protected]> wrote: > Indeed, there is an XBoard version with a graphical promotion > and edit-position popups, basically displaying the pieces you > can select on a small board with the same square size as > the normal board. But I was not very happy with it. It was > unwieldly large, escpecially in Edit Position when I wanted > to show both black and white pieces simultaneously, > (I have always hated the XBoard way of using the middle > mouse button, as my laptop doesn't have one), and especially > in variants with a large number as piece types. It would also > be a lot of work to port that to WinBoard. For these reasons > I was looking for a more elegant alternative. > > My experience so far is that you really have to try it out; what > looked good to me on paper was really awful when I tried it. > > I do have a solution that I like ery much now, though: > the detour "under-promotion". It cycles through the choices, > but not on a board square, but while you are dragging the piece. > This works very smoothly: > > When you click the Pawn, it stays a Pawn. But when you start > dragging it (i.e. as soon as it umps to the mouse pointer), > it gets represented by the default promotion piece (usually Queen). > As soon as you drag it forward, (which you cannot avoid to reach > the promotion square), it is fixed to this representation, and will > promote to it when you release it on the promotion-square. > So you see what you get; no way to make a mistake even if > you are suffering from Parkinson. But if you start pulling the > mouse backwards, it starts cycling through the pieces, > Q -> N -> B -> R -> Q. Because you started with the transition > P->Q immediately, you have to drag it back more than a marginal > amount to get the Knight as first under-promotion option. > Even if you are so inept to do that, you will see that it happened, > and can refrain from dropping the Knight on the promotion square. > There is no way to cycle through the pieces backward, but you > can recover by continuing to drag the Pawn backwards until > you get the Queen in the next cycle. > > If you release after pulling backwards, it counts as a first click > on the Pawn, which reverts to Pawn as it jumps back to the > from square, but the promotion choice is remembered, until > you click another piece, and you can finish a click-click move > by clicking the promoton square (but no preview then), or > do a drag-drop move that now starts with the selected piece > as soon as you 'lift' the Pawn. > > To solve the beginners issue, the message field will display > "Pull pawn backwards to under-promote", which should be > enough of a hint to figure it out. > > It also integrates reasonably well in the one-click schem > we used: a click on a 7th-rank Pawn will not be considered > a unique move even when the Pawn has only one target > square, because of the promotion choice. In the old way > you would get the promotion popup requiring a second click, > now you can drag to the to-square, possibly through a detour, > which should not be slower. Clicking the to-square will promote > auto-queen fashion, as in the old scheme. > > I also pushed this to hgm.nubati.net now (the WinBoard version > also works!). It also has to be run with -sweepPromotions true. > So far it is my favorite solution. > >
