What happened to the Chess strings?

[KongKing123]

Around 1000 bizarre new Chess strings have suddenly appeared, even though the game does not seem to be under active development.

Is there a reason for this and if not, can they be removed? https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=70246

[Nastaa]

These strings are the starting positions of the chess variant "chess960". In this variant, there are exactly 960 possible starting positions of the main pieces (all except pawns). If the positions are not in the translation system, they cannot be translated to different languages (the letters representing the pieces are not the same in all languages). I think that ideally having automated translation rules applied per language for these strings would be very convenient because of the repetitive nature of these strings, but I don't know if that can be done easily (maybe it is not worth it, if it is only for strings of one variant of one game).

[KongKing123]

Thanks, that makes sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess and https://www.mark-weeks.com/cfaa/chess960/c960strt.htm

If I'm not mistaken however, the variant was already implemented and working, so I fail to see why they would suddenly be needed now? Surely the goal is not to let you pick one of the 960 yourself in a gigantic combo box? It being random is the whole point of the mode.

Even if they are needed somehow, I don't think anyone who has "translated" these strings paid any attention to the letters, but instead just copied everything over for an easy 10 months of free Premium. Hence I would still suggest removing them and using the English notation, or symbols: https://chess960.net/wp-content/uploads ... itions.pdf

[ufm]

Even though developers remove totranslate() wrap from the option strings, they are wrapped again automatically. Can't help.

[Een]

Thanks for reporting this, side effect of rebuilding the game recently. I'll look into it, these strings should not be marked for translation (but as noticed by ufm it might need a specific case, as normally all option labels should be translated...)

[Philoupino]

Hi!

I think this is coherent to have these chains in the translation system.
For example, the chain #0 (BBQNNRKR) stands for (Bishop-Bishop-Queen-Knight-Knight-Rook-King-Rook)
and a proper translation in French (for example) should be #0 (FFDCCTRT) for (Fou-Fou-Dame-Cavalier-Cavalier-Tour-Roi-Tour), no?
So sounds coherent and logical to translate them, as BBQNNRKR could be hard to understand for non-English speakers

HOWEVER, I don't think that many people will want to translate letter by letter all these 960 strings, without doing any tiny mistake.
And I just looked in the German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese translation strings... and they were only copied and not "translated" for the moment

[Een]

Fixed.

While indeed it could be seen as useful to translate them, 1000 strings * 42 languages is a lot, so that's not really applicable for translation. And the idea of the system is not to give points for copy pasting. Players who did that will just have wasted their time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Actually the best is just to use the unicode character for the pieces. I have just done that.

(also, Chess960 is not played a lot, only 1 game over the 540 currently ongoing)