My ui skills (and still are) limited and I didn’t know how
to show a tapped card. At the time cards
on the battlefield were displayed only as colored boxes, which you can see if
Forge cannot find the card picture. My
solution was to stick the word “tapped” inside of the colored box. In a way it was very ugly but at least the
user wouldn’t confuse tapped and untapped cards.
After I got a basic ui working, I knew that I needed a
strategy to handle the mouse and it was going to be a pain in the neck. How was I supposed to restrict targeting
possibilities for cards like Terror – no black or artifact creatures or
Assissinate – destroy target tapped creature?
And how do I combine the card code and the mouse code? Thankfully I found the state pattern. At first the state pattern was a little hard
to understand (grok) but after writing some simple code and running it,
everything made perfect sense.
(I wondered how other Magic programs handled the mouse and
did they also use the state pattern?
More than likely they didn’t but I have no idea how to handle the mouse
without using the state pattern. You can
read more about the state pattern and how I applied it to the mouse here,
here and here.)
After I got a basic user interface and mouse working, I
added the phases which only consisted of a message stating the phase name. Just clicking the OK button and watching
Forge cycle through the phases was very exciting even though the program didn’t
actually do anything yet. After that I
worked on the card class and the “card detail window” which is on the right
side and shows all of the card information.
(Ideally the card picture would be created on-the-fly like Magic Online and
would have all of correct text information like if your creature was pumped up
with Giant Growth.)
Even though the user could see all of the card information,
without seeing the actual card picture the user interface was especially
bland. Since I couldn’t display the card
picture on the battlefield because I didn’t know how, I had the bright idea to
show the card picture in a panel by itself.
While this was only a small step, it really made Forge seem like a real
program.
Tanks for reading,
mtgrares
p.s.
--Actually I did know how to resize the card pictures and
put them on the battlefield but I couldn’t figure out how to rotate them. Thankfully, after a few months somebody sent
me a nifty one line fix.
--I tried to use as many design patterns as I could. “End of turn” effects used the command
pattern. The quest data was saved using
the memento pattern. My advice is to
always save data as primitives (ints, Strings) instead of saving whole
objects. That way when you want to
change how your data is saved, you can easily read the primitives versus trying
to read an older version of an object.
--Forge
is probably my 4th iteration at programming Magic. The first three
projects collapsed because of fundamental archetecture problems.
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