Friday, November 7, 2008

MTG Forge – New Version

I posted a new version of MTG Forge and you can get it here. This is only a minor update. You can now import and export any type of deck: sealed, draft, or constructed. When you import another person’s draft deck, it will be listed with your other draft decks, the same goes for sealed and constructed. When you import a draft deck it will only show the cards that the person picked, you don’t get to draft again.

The export deck option now creates a text file showing the deck’s contents. Below is an example of what the text file looks like. This should save some time when you post a deck. You can post and download decks here. Creating a new deck and posting it is really fun, I encourage you to try it out. You can even checkout some of my (lame) decks, lol.

And remember to save a copy of the file "all-decks2" since that holds all of the decks that you have created.

40 Total Cards

22 Creatures
-------------
1x Haunted Angel
4x Lantern Kami
4x Leonin Skyhunter
4x Mistral Charger
3x Radiant, Archangel
2x Serra Avenger
4x Suntail Hawk

2 Spells
----------
1x Glorious Anthem
1x Wrath of God

16 Land
--------
16x Plains

7 comments:

Tim said...

Hi Forge - small feature request -

I actually find it easier to play the game without images (plus some people might not have the spare bandwidth to download 30 MB of image data).

With card images, 7 cards in your hand fits onto the screen. Without images, the cards width is determined by the amount of text on the card.

Example

My request is: Could the text wrap more?

So instead of a line saying "Pestilence 2 B B" could it be split onto 2 lines "Pestilence" and "2 B B"?

Similarly, could "Legendary Creature - Kirin Spirit" be split onto 2 lines "Legendary Creature" and " - Kirin Spirit"?

Example

I know you're mainly concentrating on Version 2, but if this isn't too much work, it would make it much easier for me to play the game!

Cheers,

Tim

Forge said...

Tim,

Well you don't have to download the card pictures at all. You can play the game without them.

Thanks for the idea about wrapping the card text. The truth is that MTG Forge probably should have a ton more custimize options and the user interface (gui) has always been my weakest point.

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

The main thing about doing user interface stuff is to think like a user. :) The rest comes in tiny bits. No need to be grandious...a simple fix for simple problems works great...for example the easiest solution for this problem is to remove the text from the placeholders and use alt (tooltips) text to display the info in addition to the sidebar that normally shows the card pic and text. That way each placeholder can be a fixed size and not take up ridiculous amounts of screen real estate. :D

Unknown said...

I'm thinking about tim's request a little out-of-the-box. What if we used MSE to generate simple generic card images, which are same size as the reduced images?

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

Rob thats quite doable..what did you have in mind?

Unknown said...

Well, now that I'm thinking about it more, I'm not so sure it would work too well. To do it in MSE would require quite a lot of work making the frame images, and then the layout scripts. And the real trick would be copying the relevant portions from cards.txt to a set file. It would require me to write a VB converter. So if I'm going through those motions already... I have some image drawing code from another project of mine, that I could adapt to generate the images. Their generated size should make them smaller than the gatherer-quality ones we have now, but probably double-size of the in-game images to make for better quality.

Unknown said...

Here is the results of this little project -

Generic Card Pics Spoiler Page

If you want to download the pictures themselves, here's a zip: GenericPics.Zip (3.0 MB) It's 10% the download of the standard Wizards pics.

I'll copy this post to the forums, in case any of my links are bad, and I'll also post the source code, and provide an executable. I'm not sure that an installer with the requisite VB runtime stuff would be significantly smaller than just the pics. But you'll need it if you change the cards.txt.