Board Size & Bitmaps

[Gabriel_Ruan]

Hello. Is it possible to play Shatranj at board size Large? I made 80px bitmaps that work in 'normal' chess but not variants it seems.

As an aside, I was wondering whether or not it is possible to use custom bitmaps in lieu of text at large sizes, in the case of Chu Shogi for instance.

Update: enabling font-based pieces allows me to scale the window as much as I want, but otherwise it is capped at size Medium for some reason.

Update #2: I created a second set of piece graphics for use in Shatranj at a size of 64px, which is reportedly the medium board size, but alas they don't display either.

Update #3: I can't make sense of the board sizes. I think they were capped at medium for some reason, but in fact smaller sizes don't work the way you'd expect them to either.

Thank you.

[Gabriel_Ruan]

I figured it out, kinda. It would seem Shatranj, unlike "normal" chess, is only playable at a few board sizes. I don't know what these board sizes are, except that all settings at or above Medium equal Bulky (bitmaps 72px wide).
It is therefore not possible to use high resolution piece graphics in this variant.

H.G.Muller, is there a workaround? Thank you.

[H.G.Muller]

I must have overlooked your initial posting on this; sorry about that. The sizes are Petite (33x33), Middling (49x49) and Bulky (72x72). WinBoard by default uses built-in bitmaps for the piece images, and only the images of the 6 orthodox pieces are available in all of the 18 sizes. The Elephant and Ferz that are needed for Shatranj only exists in the mentioned sizes, which is why WinBoard rounds the requested size to one of the mentioned in Shatranj and most other variants.

There is no need to do this when using external bitmaps, though. I thought I had disabled this rounding when a pieceImageDirectory is specified. But apparently not. I will look into it. One problem is that even in the WinBoard-AA package, which is configured to use external piece bitmaps, most fairy pieces are still only available in the metioned 3 sizes, in the bmaps folder. So rounding the size there still makes sense. But perhaps the rounding could be made subject to required pieces of the requested size not being available in the specified directory.

[Gabriel_Ruan]

Is it the case that not all piece graphics can be replaced, at all board sizes? What of shogi and the like? Thanks.

[Josh Pettus]

Don't know how bit of a tinkerer you are, but in this modern day of WSL, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get gtk xboard itself working on windows. In Xboard you aren't limited to specific board size as it will scale SVG and PNG files to any size. I for one should definitely give it a try.