I'm developing a web page with an interactive chess tree-diagram. Feedback?

Hello

I'm doing a graphical chess tree for traps and openings at www.chesstree.net.  I can add PGN files to the tree, and for now I have Bill Wall's 700 traps (thanks!) and I wrote few traps from wikipedia in there. I am adding a list of openings next.

I was thinking about adding features to that things as requested by people. 

Also, if you know PGN files I could and should use, that would be nice.

Feedback or requests?

The tree idea would be practicable if there were only 5 or 10 lines to cover. A tree with 700 branches gets a little unwieldy.

Hm. I think I will implement a search function that you can use to show specific lines, and maybe hide others. Will take a moment though.

Isn't "Game Explorer" or any database like Chessbase more or less a tree with most of the branches hidden?

Yes, although they are not presented graphically as trees.

No

You can grab all my pgn files - miniatures and others - at my web site at

http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/  under collections.  There are a few thousand games to play with, including the 700 opening traps in pgn format (and pdf).

Thank you very much. 

Promising design (including pieces that glide, something I find highly preferable in an interface).

One thought might be, as an option, to show players, openings, or other parameters in addition to the next move.

I've always been interested in a webapp that would let me store games of my own choosing with notes and analysis (prefereable with multiple databases/categories). Maybe it already exists, but I haven't researched it recently.

Another thought, particularly applicable to traps or openings: search by position or move string (such as 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 etc.).

jexrkes, I think this is very promising!

In some ways it resembles an idea I had for exploring openings graphically. That is based on the "icicle tree" paradigm, which you can try out here: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1005873 . Imagine this on left and oriented vertically rather than horizontally, with the chess board on the right (or vice versa). Each rectangle represents a move, and hovering over the rectangle would update the chess board, very much in the style of your explorer. Hovering could also highlight transpositions, i.e. other moves resulting in the same position.

In my scheme, the vertical ordering move rectangles, their size and colour could be set by the user, so that e.g. the most common moves would be at the top, with the size of the rectangle dependent on the number of following move alternatives (a natural choice) and coloured by computer evaluation (say). The choice of ordering/sizing/colouring would depend on what aspect the user wanted to explore. Obviously the number of potential parameters for these is large. It might include things like material imbalances, thereby highlighting gambits and sacrifices.

With icicle trees, there is also the possibility to expand or reduce the vertical space as required, so that e.g. the height of a rectangle is always related to the number of sub-variations, or alternatively the height of each rectangle is fixed when it it is at the "current level", but expands as deeper moves are selected.

Another possibility is to auto-zoom the icicle tree as moves are made on the board - a sort of reverse lookup. ETA: I see you have done this - brilliant! 

I don't know if any of these ideas are useful to you, but you are totally welcome to use them if you wish as I don't have time to implement them myself at present. (I envisaged using d3.js, as in the example given.)

@jexrkes

I really like your idea. I would only make the tree "movable" just like the board is. I have no idea how complicated that would be, though. Unfortunately, it looks a bit like a collection of my bullet games where I tend to fall into almost every trap possible. 

It's possible to move the tree too by clicking on the "background" and dragging it around.

An auto-zooming icicle tree would make that unnecessary, but looks quite different too of course.

@fburton

Thanks. It is indeed. 

Nice idea. Keep it up.

Very nice tree :)

I love your suggestion that I highlighted.  If users are able to have accounts it would be awesome for working with repertoires and/or game databases.

I understand it might be too much work, but it would also be nice if users could enter notes, perhaps under the board.  Finally, if you do make it where a PGN file can be pasted, it would be cool if the tree showed winning percentages for a move played (like a database).

Updates since the last time:

You can now save custom trees, with custom comments in it, and generate a url to it.

The popularity of the opening is shown among master-level games.

Search function implemented.

I attached a forum, if people have suggestions or notice bugs or such.

Fantastic! Imo, this is a really worthwhile effort. It'll be interesting to see where it develops.

great stuff! thank you for sharing Jex.