Audeuro had suggested that, instead of making a piece disappear entirely when dragged around to move it, that it leave a translucent "ghost" piece behind to mark its' original location. This seemed like a pretty good idea, so a short modification to my resource preloader and I end up with something like this (again, I'm only using print screen so the piece graphic being set to the mouse pointer isn't shown):
You'll also notice that I've dropped a board border in there since yesterday, and also the rank/file marker images. I'm not sure how I'm going to allow it to be done properly on the finished product, but the "blar" verb that appeared since yesterday rotates the board 90 degrees clockwise and modifies the rank and file characters along the top and right side to match the board orientation:
The border and rank/file characters are all screen objects, since those all stay in a static location while the remainder of the map rotates with client.dir.
You'll probably also notice the new Chess Options tab which contains... well, chess game options. Presently only the "legal moves" highlight and right-click piece info options actually do anything, but the remainder isn't really that difficult.
What I'm fearing getting into again is the complexities of the king piece. Even though I did it once and have a few ideas on how to avoid some speed bumps, I'm not particularly looking forward to all the game considerations that have to be made involving the king piece. One of my least favorite areas is maintaining a record of every "threatened" tile that a king cannot occupy, which I used a second list for in the last incarnation of chess; one list of "legal movement" turfs, and a list of "king threat" turfs. Consider things like a rook one file away from a king blocking off its escape route, or an enemy queen preventing the capture of an enemy pawn. The reverse is also loads of fun, such as an enemy rook pinning a friendly bishop to the king (making the bishop unable to move due to putting themself in check). On the bright side, bitwise operations are going to make a little bit of the process easier, considering I can just take an enemy rider's (queen, bishop, rook) movement cells, all friendly pieces' legal movements, and & them together to gather which pieces can make an imposition move, which was an arduous process in the previous incarnation without that huge timesaver.
I can only hope what I've picked up since the previous incarnation of chess can help me out when I get to that point, since I'm not looking forward to the royal piece considerations in the least. ANy insights anyone has on the subject are welcome, considering the only way I know how to do it is making a secondary list of turfs for each piece containing areas they can't actually move to but would illegally cause check if the enemy moved a king there.