Castling issue

[DarinCBrown]

Hi, everyone

Minimal computer knowledge (beyond a few programming classes 25 years ago) and very new to FSF -- just trying to learn everything on my own. I only use the playground so far.

I wanted to try out a conservative variant of orthodox chess. Here is the ini file I uploaded:

[ourtestvariant:chess]
knight = -
bishop = -
rook = -
queen = -
customPiece1 = n:NmF
customPiece2 = b:BmW
customPiece3 = r:RmF
customPiece4 = q:QmN
promotionPieceTypes = nbrq

After compiling, I get

uciok
Parsing variant: ourtestvariant
No castling rook for flag k
startFen - Invalid starting position: rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1
id name Fairy-Stockfish [commit: 014622b8, upstream: , emscripten: 2.0.26] LB
id author Fabian Fichter

If I add "castling = false", then it compiles with no issues and plays exactly as intended... except of course, castling isn't allowed.

I've tried several workarounds, but no luck. Any help is appreciated.

[ianfab]

Hi. If you want to enable castling with a non-rook piece you need to define the castlingRookPiece in order to tell it which piece the king should castle with. After that I assume it should work.

What might be confusing is that the default already is specified as "r". However, the piece labels generally are resolved at the time a variant is defined, so when you inherit from another variant the "r" was already resolved as a rook for that variant. Therefore if you redefine "r" you also need to explicitly redefine the castlingRookPiece as this new "r" piece.