Originally created by: BilgeGates
Originally owned by: BilgeGates
ChessVision is limited to the 23 Lichess piece sets. Fairy chess composers (who work with pieces like Amazons, Nightriders, or half-white half-black knights), themed content creators, and coaches with custom visual materials cannot render their positions in ChessVision — they have to composite pieces manually in image editors.
Extend the piece rendering pipeline to support three tiers:
1. Fairy / hybrid pieces — Built-in glyphs for common fairy chess pieces (Amazon, Chancellor, Archbishop, half-white half-black knight) mapped to extended FEN characters following YACPDB conventions. This closes the gap with the existing YACPDB database search integration introduced in v6.0.0: composers who find positions via YACPDB can now render them accurately.
2. Themed sets — A small curated library of aesthetic alternatives (e.g. minimalist, retro, fairy-tale) selectable from the piece set picker alongside the existing Lichess sets.
3. User-uploaded sets — A settings flow that accepts a ZIP of SVG or PNG files named by piece identifier (wK.svg, bQ.svg, etc.), validates the set, and registers it locally. Uploaded sets persist via syncStorage for signed-in users.
All tiers integrate with the existing pieceImageCache.ts key scheme and must render correctly in the board editor, Export Studio, and batch export without breaking the 64-square re-render budget.
