| Author |
Message |
Patrick S. Duff (Pduff)
| | Posted on Monday, October 16, 2000 - 12:39 am: | |
Even after writing several games, I still get confused when I try to use cascade, and I have to stop and carefully think through the order in which I do things, and where I should put the cascade(s) relative to everything else.
I keep running into cases where I want to do a cascaded move inside a (drops ...), or a cascaded drop inside a (moves ...). This is really tough to do in Zillions. (Or maybe it's just me; I have trouble figuring it out.)
For example, I recently attempted a move generation block which could end with either an add or an add-copy, with a cascade preceding the add-copy branch. I kept getting an error message from Zillions that I had attempted a "to" move without having a piece on the "from" location. It then let me continue without placing a piece on the "to" location. (I would have preferred getting the warning, but upon continuing, to have a piece placed on the "to" location anyway.)
I'd like the rules language extended to make mixing drops and moves easier. I'm not sure exactly how this should be done, so I'll leave this as an exercise for the developers. But to get them started, let me suggest they consider adding a "cascade-copy" command for adding drops inside a "(moves ...)" and a "cascade-from" command for adding moves inside a "(drops ...)".
At the very least, the help file should be extended to include more instructive examples, or perhaps have pointers to particular games which illustrate various interesting situations. |
Jeff Mallett (Jeffm)
| | Posted on Monday, October 16, 2000 - 9:20 pm: | |
The reason Zillions didn't place a piece on the "to" location anyway is that, not having a "from" location, it didn't know what to place there.
Perhaps the best way for a cascade-copy command is to have a new primitive to create a new piece on a position, just like you can capture a piece on a position now.
If anybody has generally instructive tutorial material, please send it to us and we can post it on the site or include it in a help file. |
Jeff Mallett (Jeffm)
| | Posted on Saturday, December 14, 2002 - 2:00 am: | |
>I keep running into cases where I want to do a...
>cascaded drop inside a (moves ...).
...
>Perhaps the best way for a cascade-copy command is to
>have a new primitive to create a new piece on a position
Zillions of Games 2 adds this feature. With the new "create" command you can effectively do lots of drops with a single moves block "add". |
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