Monday, July 28, 2008

Deck Editor

The one part of MTG Forge that I haven’t heard any complaints about is the deck editor. This fact is very interesting. I’ve had numerous grievances against the user interface, errors with cards, and other things but nothing negative has ever been said against the deck editor.

My theory is that the deck editor is easy to use. It mimics Magic Online’s deck editor, version 2. I worked hard so that cards can be sorted by name, rarity, mana cost, type, or color. It even sorts ascending or descending. The deck editor should be easy to use and it is. Putting together decks should be as fun as possible, even though it is always hard trimming your deck down to 40 or 60 cards.

Getting feedback from the public about a book, movie, or videogame is very interesting indeed. People email their negative thoughts and (usually) not their positive ones. It is often hard to understand what people like about your project.

I just saw the new X-File movie and I was waiting for a something exciting to happen, then I saw the credits. The whole movie seemed to stretch a 5 minute plot into 90 minutes. The negative aspect of the movie overshadowed my joy of seeing Molder and Scully together again.

So let me thank you for NOT e-mailing me about the deck editor. The best pieces of software are often overshadowed and easy to miss because they work so well. I’ve gotten many positive e-mails about MTG Forge. I do know that MTG Forge isn’t perfect but it certainly is “good enough.” If I was trying to make MTG Forge perfect, I would have never gotten it finished.

p.s.
I still never use the deck editor. I’m too lazy, so I just use the “generate deck” option.

6 comments:

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

I must beg to differ. You may have not read the email I provide with comments about the deck editor or have forgotten...but I did have some:

1)The editor does not save/read draft files correctly all the time. Particularly when loaded directly after a draft.

2)The reason I sent you the link to http://omd.sourceforge.net was so that you would see what I consider to be useful interface features fore a deck editor: namely being able to filter out: colors, types, and costs. This would be a vast improvement and make the editor superior.

Not that it is bad now. But more functionality beats less any day with this sort of client.

Also being able to save and or load decks to a user editable format (HTML/TXT/XML even) would be awesome as one could port one's decks from MTG FORGE to other clients and vice versa.

Just to remind you...I would not be posting such critical remarks if I didn't like the program. Keep up the great work.

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

Nevermind my typos btw...I seem to have an infestation of typo fairies tonite.

Forge said...

The deck editor does seem to have a problem when saving on Macs. I don't have a Mac to troubleshoot on, so I'm not sure how to fix the problem.

In the future, you should be able to download and upload decks. Which I think should be a lot of fun.

Anonymous said...

I have a macbook (With OSX Tiger) and MTG forge's mac version won't work at all with it. I don't know if this is the program's problem, or one of a mac's many firewalls. Thank god for my XP.

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

To be clear Im not using a mac...(Im using XP on Windows) The save problems are purely with the way the drafting works.

As far as loading and saving decks to editable file formats I vote for txt since that is clearly the easiest for all. I loved writing decks for Appr32 way back when in Notepad and then sending them to friends to play with...much better than the silly editor in that client (unless you failed to remember the names of the cards you wanted).

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

Er Windows XP on a DELL*

...stupid typo fairies continue to beleager me.