I’ve been working on this idea for two months and it’s playable now. In short, pieces can switch sides if they’re challenged twice, but then at that point they can return in just one move. I thought it’d be a cool hobby project to do (it was) but I’m mediocre at chess and I’d like to know what high level players think of the mechanics.
It was very interesting and soul breaking at the same time to work on the bot part of the engine because it kept blundering major pieces after searching through all the move options. I think I managed to get it to behave properly-ish now, but it’s very slow in return. I found the chess programming wiki quite late on, so I didn’t implement the optimisations it talks about but that’s what I plan on continuing with after a much needed break.
If you convert a pawn, does it start moving the other direction? Does it promote on the far rank?
Yeah, it starts behaving as your pawn completely, and promotes as if it was yours from the beginning. This is one of the things I’m unsure about because while it could be annoying in theory, it looks like it encourages the player (read: myself while testing) to push their pawns more eagerly to avoid having them turned on themselves.
