Beta April 2021 - with early build of live chess with variant support

A new (early) open beta is now available for testing.

RedHotPawn Beta with early live chess and variant support

The normal conditions apply. :

* If you login with Social Media accounts, you will be unable to use this beta site.
* Image uploading should not be attempted.
* Blogs will appear incomplete (missing images)

This beta build is testing a new major revision of an UI framework RHP uses, but should still behave similarly to the current production version. (There are minor differences, and therefore still a little more work to do prior to a full UI makeover later this year.)

All correspondence play and other normal site functions should be reliable and stable, with only cosmetic problems to be found. IE users are left behind with this release though.

It also introduces the first version of the new live chess code, which was previously trialled as BlitzChess dot net.

Warning - this is early code, and although tested fairly extensively, you may hit issues as it has not been placed under any real load. Please report any problems!

On non-mobile devices, you will see the blitz icon now says "live", and this will show if a game is waiting - it is does not update in realtime for now, only each time you refresh the page.

Also, any complete games are recorded (or should be!) so even though you can't review played games - yet, and that is coming - they can be used in the future to establish ratings or for export. (Note : You can export a PGN of your game after it concludes now anyway)

The issues with phantom players being listed will be fixed over the next few days too.

Live variants, for now at least, are as follows :

Standard Chess
Chess960
Atomic Chess
Transcendental Chess
Antichess
King of the Hill
Racing Kings
Extinction Chess
Crazy House
Three-Check

Any PGN exported for a variant may be non-standard, so keep that in mind if expecting to export and import variant games.

Have fun breaking it!

Tutorials for the variants appear currently broken too - this will be fixed within the next day.

I have clicked the 'live' link at the top of the page at various times since this thread was started, and so far it has been a ghost town.

Maybe we need a place where those who are interested in giving this a test run can post a specific time that they will be there to try a game, and others can see that and plan accordingly to show up for a game.

Hey Russ, can you make the link blink on and off when someone is there waiting for a game? Then others can see it flashing and go there if they are looking for a live game. Or maybe make it change color if others are there? Or just give it one of those green dots whenever someone is there.

Does anyone have any other ideas or suggestions?

I have not seen anyone there.
Has anyone tried it?

@mwmiller said
I have not seen anyone there.
Has anyone tried it?

Right now, few people are using the beta in general, so fewer still have checked out the live chess.

What will likely happen is once the rest of the site is ready for production, the release can happen, and live beta can then happen in the production environment, where there is likely to be far more interest.

@mwmiller said
I have not seen anyone there.
Has anyone tried it?

I had a game offer up...but since I can't bee online there and on the main site it went away when I came back...Maybe I will go to another program and leave the offer open to see if anybody is picking it up (and I pick up the picking up)

1st bug I saw: I was alone there but the yellow field said: 11 players online

@Ponderable

My mission this morning - solve this bug!

Neither Neep nor Vanya have made a move yet.

Seems that a game offer is cancelled when I press "refresh" so see if it is still up...

In the game lobby when you refresh the browser it is effectively the same as closing the browser and reopening. (You have left and returned) All games are cleared up.
There should be no need to reload - everything will refresh dynamically.

When playing a game though, to avoid games ending prematurely if one player has a very brief internet connectivity problem during a game, it should even be possible to refresh the browser and the game reload as you were. I don't recommend this action though.

@russ said
In the game lobby when you refresh the browser it is effectively the same as closing the browser and reopening. (You have left and returned) All games are cleared up.
There should be no need to reload - everything will refresh dynamically.

When playing a game though, to avoid games ending prematurely if one player has a very brief internet connectivity problem during a ...[text shortened]... sible to refresh the browser and the game reload as you were. I don't recommend this action though.

A thank you. That clears things up. I will try again some time later

Well done Russ for trying to progress the site to appeal to more people.
As we know from life, nothing stays the same forever.
Personally the variants aren't for me but that's just me.

@russ said
@Ponderable

My mission this morning - solve this bug!

Somethings take a little longer than one morning. A right head scratcher, this one. 🙂