Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Random Thoughts

I don’t have anything specific to talk about today, so I’m just going to ramble until I get 200-300 words. I haven’t worked much on MTG Forge version 2 recently. Real life is getting in the way of my hobbies, lol. I still think about version 2, I just need to sit down for about 30 minutes a day and just get something done. I enjoy programming because it is actually pretty easy. (Usually programming is easy, but trying to fix a specific bug is usually very hard.)

For version 2 I want to implement a better AI but if I can’t, you’ll just have to make do with the current AI. Artificial intelligence is very interesting to programmers and non-programmers alike. AI covers everything, so it is hard to learn a specific concept and apply to the problem that you are working on. Like a car racing AI can only race cars. The AI also is tightly integrated with the rest of the program, so you can’t really strip the AI out and use it for something else.

On a different front, Shards of Alara looks like a great set. It is dripping flavor and has several new mechanics to learn. I remember when Lorwyn came out and no one was sure how clash was going to work, the same thing goes for Ravnica and dredge.

p.s. The card picture is from the Jace vs. Chandra decks which have their own unique, set symbol.

p.s.s. Join me next week for two semi-decent AI articles :)

10 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm surprised you didn't comment on the Duels of the Planeswalkers game shots Wizards showed yesterday on Arcana..... Completely ripped us off!

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

Ripped who off?

Forge said...

Duels of the Planeswalkers is a videogame for PC and XBox 360, the link to Wizards is here

This is taken from the Wizards site "It's going to be available on XBOX Live in Spring 2009, and it will feature a Campaign Mode (single-player or co-op) as well as online dueling and 2HG. The PC game will be single-player Campaign only. There will be challenges and puzzles galore."

I'm happy about the PC single player campaign mode.

Anonymous said...

rob - are you serious?

Forge said...

I think rob is joking ;)

Unknown said...

Why so serious?

I think this was the project they interviewed forge for. Until now, we were in the gray area of legitimacy because there wasn't an equivalent Wizards product. As soon as this is released, I should expect our project to become squashed. And we'll be back to renamed cards.

Gando the Wandering Fool said...

Again a reason to change the way forge works to take card input as scripts/text. This way one does not violate anything as the program is independant of any Intellectual properties.

Anonymous said...

Rob, i doubt this was the position Forge interviewed for, considering this game was developed in the UK.

Unknown said...

Maybe it was developed in the UK only after they didn't choose forge to do it. ;-)

Forge said...

I interviewed with Wizards for just a generic programmer job. I think these new Magic games for PC and XBox were developed by 3rd party companies that Wizards partenered with.

Thankfully MTG Forge probably won't be quashed just because there is a PC game coming out. I presume that MTG Forge isn't on Wizards radar at all.