New Version - Improved GUI

New versions are great.  People get all excited and everywhere you look you see rainbows.  Forge now has 5,995 cards.  Thanks to the efforts of many people, Forge has 303 new cards and a wealth of user interface upgrades.  We had 15 people, who are listed below, that directly helped with this version of Forge.  This is our biggest number yet.

For a complete list of new cards, go to the post here.  Scroll down to find the text "Added many cards, including:" then click "Open".

Above is Forge's new look.  The current picture is just a temporary picture to give you an idea of what this will look like when finished. If you want to replace this picture then copy a new picture of your choice into the /forge/res/images/ui/ folder. The code will look for a file named "newgame_background.jpg" in this folder.  Wizards Wallpaper of the Week archive is a great place to find replacement art.

Let me briefly explain the options that Forge has.  The "Stack AI Land" option will make the AI a little better by stacking its deck so it doesn't get mana screwed or flooded.  The "Developer Mode" option allows people use very small decks, only 4 cards, in order to make sure that a specific card works correctly.

Above is a picture of the improved deck editor.  Each of the icons at the top represents instant, sorcery, etc..  Now you can easily search by card name, to see if Forge has your favorite.  The text search is very useful and I quickly searched for all cards that deal 2 damage.

To find cards that have alternate winning conditions search for "win " with a space.  If you only search for "win" you will finds cards like Windwright Mage that have "win" somewhere in their card text.  In the past the deck editor was slow when searching or filtering cards but now it is much faster.

A few of the interesting new cards are:  Boon Reflection (5W, Enchantment) - If you would gain life, you gain twice that much life instead.  Clone (3U, Creature) which is a great card because you can copy any creature and if I understand the rules correctly, Clone can also kill annoying legendary creatures. Cryptic Command (1UUU, Instant) - "Choose two — Counter target spell; or return target permanent to its owner's hand; or tap all creatures your opponents control; or draw a card."  Cryptic Command is impressive from a programming point of view because it is more complicated than your average card.  I programmed the red version, Incendiary Command, years ago.

Below is taken from changes.txt which was written by Chris H. (I have also stolen one other sentence which I used in this post.)

Sloth, Dennis and Choppic worked together to contribute a neat, new feature for the New Battlefield user interface. There are now three symbolic icons that will overlay creature cards. These icons are used to denote summoning sickness and whether a creature is attacking or blocking. Please note that you must use have the "New GUI" checkbox marked "yes". The battlefield icons are 32 x 32 pixel .png type pictures. You may be able to replace them with icons from one of the icon archives that can be found on the internet.

The constructed mode deck editor card filters are now icons rather than the old style checkbox type filters. The deck editor filter icons are now 24 x 24 pixel .png files. The constructed mode deck editor now includes three textboxes that you can use to apply additional filtering to the cards that are listed in the All Cards table. These three filters allow you to filter by card name, type, and text.

[Now back to me.]

Forge.zip (11 MB) - This is the 1/14 version which was released on the forums.

12-22.zip (115 MB) Card Pictures - Put these in your /res/pics directory.  If that link doesn't work try this.

This is most of the card pictures.  You can download the rest of them from Forge's opening screen by selecting "Menu", then "Download Card LQ Pictures".  LQ stands for low-quality.  Forge also allows you to download bigger, high-quality (HQ) card pictures.

Many people helped with this version. A special thank you goes out to them:

Dennis Bergkamp

Rob Cashwalker

Friar Sol

Slapshot5

Sloth

Hellfish

Snacko

Choppic

SoulStorm

Fnoed

Jaedayr

Gofishus

Sentient6

jhhh

Zirbert

Chris H

p.s.
--I try to avoid jargon but it is useful.  GUI stands for graphic user interface.

--This document was painfully constructed using Word 2010, which is horrible.  I don’t really think Microsoft is evil but the user interface is awful.  For some unknown reason, menus are bad and the ribbon interface is good, i.e. I have to hover my mouse over the little icons so I can see the tooltip text that pops up.  And for some reason Word double spaces things even when it should single space them and when I cut-and-paste it from Word into blogspot.com then it comes out single spaced.  

If I could revert Word's user interface to the previous, menu-based version, I would make millions.  Word 2010, the worst videogame ever.