Zillions of Games - Capabilities

Capabilities

Zillions represents boards and pieces with bitmap images; these can be remapped by the user. The boards may be arbitrary directed graphs, but standard grid-like boards are easier to produce and have built-in support for detecting collinearity. The available win, loss, and draw conditions include checkmate, stalemate, repetition, piece capture, absolute configuration, relative configuration, and various types of piece count. These allow the creation of a variety of different games and puzzles.

Besides defining how pieces move, Zillions can define how pieces may be dropped. This is for introducing new pieces into a game. It is not useful for shogi, which "drops" captured pieces stored on the sides of the board. It is for games like Go, Reversi, and Tic-Tac-Toe, which routinely allow users to add new pieces to the board. As with piece movement, this is defined algorithmically, and it can be something as simple as letting a new piece drop only on an empty space or follow more complex rules.

Since version 2.0, Zillions has had the additional ability to enforce maximal capturing rules (used in some versions of Checkers) and a full-featured Go-playing engine.

Zillions includes a "random player" which selects from its available moves at random; this can be used to simulate dice in race games and Backgammon relatives.

The standard AI engine can, if need be, be replaced with user-created engines. These engines can then use opening books or other features unavailable to the standard AI.