PortablePiecepackNotation

The Portable Piecepack Notation (PPN) is a human-readable plaintext file format for storing board games. A preliminary draft of the specification is available at:

https://trevorldavis.com/piecepackr/portable-piecepack-notation.html

It is currently in active development but a prototype parser is available that can be used to generate diagrams and animations for games written in it.

Warning the "portable piecepack notation" specification is in alpha and non-reverse-compatible changes will likely be made. It is a good idea to play some games in it to help test it out but probably not a good idea (yet) to mass convert games into this format for long-term storage.

Examples

A simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe with no automatic setup:

---
Event: Example Tic-Tac-Toe Game
Result: 1-0
...
setup. t@b2
1. S@b2 1... M@a2 {? (1... M@a1)}
2. S@c1 2... M@a3
3. S@a1 3... M@c3
4. S@b1 {X wins}

A game of Four Field Kono with automatic setup:

GameType: Four Field Kono

1. b1:b3 1... d3:b3 2. c1:c3 2... a3:c3 3. c2-c1 3... b4:b2 4. a1-b1 4... b3:b1
5. d1:b1 5... c3-c2 6. a2-a3 6... b2:d2 7. a3-b3 7... c4-c3 8. c1-d1 8... d4-d3
9. b1-b2 9... d2:b2 10. b3-a3 10... b2-b1 {Player 1's loss is assured with the
 separation of their two remaining pieces and they should resign in a real game}
11. a3-a2 11... b1-c1 12. d1-d2 12... c1-d1 13. a2-a3 13... a4-b4
14. a3-a4 14... b4-c4 15. a4-b4 15... c4-d4 16. b4-a4 16... d4:d2 {Player 2 wins}

Prototype Parser

There is a prototype parser that has been made available in the ppgames R package. One can read in games with read_ppn, make image diagrams of moves with plot_move, make plaintext Unicode diagrams of moves with cat_move, or make a GIF animation of a game with animate_game. plot_move and animate_game can (optionally) be passed a piecepackr "configuration list" in order to customize the appearance of the piecepack in the images.

PPN viewer web app

The ppgames package includes a PPN viewer web app. The Center for Ludic Synergy graciously hosts an instance of the viewer: http://www.ludism.org:3838/ppn-viewer/