Friday, May 23, 2008

Landwalk

I haven't played MTG Forge in awhile, about a month. I guess it is similar to card designers who work on Magic all day, but may feel a little burnt out if they had to play Magic. I hope landwalk is working out, it could feel unfair at times. I played a few games but I wasn't familiar with all the new cards, so that made it harder.

Harder isn't necessarily bad but I didn't want to think too hard. Since Magic Online doesn't support Shadowmoor yet, I wish I could add more cards from the set but they are too complicated.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

See how such a small simple addition changed the face of the game?

Landwalk should probably also be factor into AI decisions... just like flyers are usually preferential targets in most spells' canPlayAI()....

I'm working towards providing a generic keyword "script language". It should become possible for a single line in the keyword list to be interpreted by my code, implementing the same code Forge already uses to perform routine tasks.... Like draw a card or deal damage. So most cards in forge that perform similar tasks can be taken out of the code and represented in cards.txt, along with all it's brethren that Forge hasn't already copy/pasted the code for.

I've begun a specification for the keywords, and have begun on some code to split up many permutations of costs, target restrictions and keyword-specific variables. I have become stalled while I familiarize myself with regular expressions. Java is also new to me, though I've been programming for 16 years, mostly in VB, so programming theory, I've got in spades. String parsing is something I've become sorta specialized in, I'm good at recognizing patterns, and writing a routine to extract data following those patterns.

I'm sure not ALL of shadowmoor is too complicated. There's gotta be a few cards that have been done before. On the other hand, I should probably try to kep up to date with the vanilla/french vanilla list with any shadowmoor stuff.

Unknown said...

I played a game last night, with the computer AI having a generated W/U deck with seemingly, nothing but flyers.... I recognized most of them as being my additions.... Damn them and a ground-based elf deck.....

Forge said...

Well rob cashwalker, it sounds like you have some great ideas. Since the foundation rules are already programmed (combat, playing a card, etc..) it makes scripting and adding keywords pretty simple.

There are a few Shadormoor cards I could add like R, put a -1/-1 counter on a creature and draw a card. It's not great but it would still be fun. I really want to add Godhead of Awe (all creatures become 1/1) and I would just make the mana cost 5.

Forge said...

"I played a game last night, with the computer AI having a generated W/U deck with seemingly, nothing but flyers.... I recognized most of them as being my additions.... Damn them and a ground-based elf deck....."

LOL, I love these moments. One time the computer killed me with land destruction, even though it is supposed to be weak in limited.

Forge said...

Most Shadowmoor cards can't be programmed into MTG Forge because the mana cost is too crazy.

Unknown said...

The generated decks are singleton, right?

Sometimes I get hit with almost the exact same group of cards from the computer. Those are some times when I actually might lose. Other times when it's an assortment of various creatures, it seems a little less desperate.

Now, if there was a way for the computer to generate a deck with some consistency, by using at least 3 of each card.... Then that would add some level of challenge.

Forge said...

The generated Constructed decks are singleton and generated Sealed decks are not.

Even with generated Constructed decks, I still sometimes play the same cards as the computer. The class GenerateSealedDeck and GenerateConstructedDeck are used.