[CODE] Counter Improvements (Now Included in SVN)

[wololo]

Thanks a lot, I'll try to integrate your patch asap

[salmelo]

Your welcome .

I've decided that the next step to making this particular feature more useful is to incorporate the counters into the display of the card somehow, either the small card, the big card, or both. I'm thinking either both or the big card, as the big card has more room for the counter name. Or it could be made an option for the player i suppose. Anyway, that's what I think i'll be working on next, don't know for sure when i'll start, probably some time tomorrow though. I have far too much free time .

[abrasax]

Hi,

Great, Great and more than great...

If you plan to add visual Candy for our eye, I think we could use the mana icons png, because you basically have in this images 5 mana in clear and shadow and 2 icons for land and artifact that don't have any "shadow" so it means we could use the "shadow" emplacment for artifact and land for counter and evtl for "poison counter" (an other feature that is currently missing). Is just an idea, but I think it could be use for this purpose.

Grü

Abra

[salmelo]

As for using images to represent counters, that could be cool, except for two problems.

The first (and most important) being that I don't feel up to trying to do it, as I imagine it would be harder than just text.
The second is what do you do if there are more counters than you can fit the icons on the card? Admittedly, it's a very unlikely situation, depending on the size ratios involved, but it would need to be answered just in case.

Anyway, so far I've got it displaying "[countername] counters: [numberofcounters]" after the card text, with a blank line in between. I do not know exactly what it would look like with images, I'm pretty sure it would render the text ontop of the image, but that might not look very good, especially if the images text ends up being underneath it, which it could easily do, especially with flavor text. I'm thinking, maybe I'll try to do something with that. If i can come up with what.

[abrasax]

Hi,

I was just thinking something as simple as the mana display for cards... meaning something like a very small round background with a number on it... So no multiple visual display of the counter just the counter symbol with a number on it. If first thought that the counter name should be "irrelevant" because in most of the case the cards text should tell you which kind of counter there is on the card... but it is not always the case (as you can sometime add counter to a card or move counter from a card to another).... and I did not thought about it in my first post...

Anyway, we could surely add some kind of "countername.png" file (also a specific images for the corresponding counter) with an images that would be readable enough to see a numbered text on top of it. You can see the land and artifact icon I made in my last version of the MTGO theme to get an idea of what I was thinking about... (also both images are just plain gray circle with some light transparent "Future Sight" icon representation of artifact
and land.... we could think of something similar like biohazard icon for poison counter, which in fact is one used in MTGO for poison counter... and similar iconic light representation for each kind of counter)...

I think we could keep the text display and the image display, one for the normal default view and another for when you got images.

Anyway, I think you work is great (did I already mentioned it ?) anything you do on top of that would only be a cherry on the top...

Thanks,

Abra

[Yorien]

Yorien says:

Also, if eyecandy is wanted, first adding the counter icon then a x[number of counters] might be a possibility.

[salmelo]

Yorien says:

Also, if eyecandy is wanted, first adding the counter icon then a x[number of counters] might be a possibility.

this, which I now believe is what abrasax was saying as well, could probably be done. although, the icon would need to be bit smaller than the land mana color icons, just because some of those (from some themes at least) tend to cover most of the card, and we would still want the p/t to visible if it's a critter.

Putting something like that on the big would also be nice since that would probably more visible than a line of text that will probably end up on top of another line, if your using images at least.

However, i do not possess any measurable level of graphical finesse, so I won't be making any icons myself. but, if anyone wants to provide some, I'll try to incorporate them as best I can.

Off the top of my head, some common counter types that images would be cool for; spore, charge, +1/+1, and -1/-1 (I know currently those are displayed only by their changes to the creatures power toughness, but it might be nice to be able to see how many counters there are on it, in case you don't know what it was to begin with or something)

If you can think of any others go ahead and include those as well. I skipped poison on purpose as those generally only appear on players, not creatures, so are outside the scope of what I'm doing, but I suppose having an image for them to use whenever they get put in wouldn't hurt.

[salmelo]

It would seem that I my mind is not as efficient at decyphering the code related to resources and images and such nonsense as it was at rendering text and making abilities.

I am wondering if maybe someone could point me in right direction as far as getting counter icon things.

Mainly I am attempting to discern what I need to do get the images into the cache or manager or whatever. I am hoping it's just a matter of sticking the file in a folder and editing a line of code or two, or something like that, but I have been unable to figure it out. I think from there I should be able to reverse engineer what to do from the code for mana icons on lands and such. Hopefully.

Thanks again for any help anyone may be able to provide.

On a somewhat related note, I've finished the code for displaying the number of counters in text, but am not sure whether to submit it as is then another one when I finish icons, or just wait for icons and submit only once. Do those in charge have any particular preference?

[abrasax]

Hi,

I've no idea about the visual mana display, as I've never really looked at this portion of the code. I think you should submit what you have, at leat we could already test which cards we can or can't add with this addition...

Regarding the visual "counter" display, I've prepared a small image file to explain what I was meaning. You will see that I added two counter images one generic and an other more "customized" (could be use for spore or poison for example), the two top right images of the mana icon png are not used atm, so we could use them, that is what I was trying to explain.

Image4.png (22.77 KiB) Viewed 416 times

Grüssi

Abra

[salmelo]

Now i see what your saying. I may look into that if I ever manage to wrap my brain around the graphical code. Although, my preliminary thoughts are that it might be better to use separate files for the counter images, since unlike with colors, we can't be sure there will only be so many counter types available. Perhaps a counter.jpg file for generic, and then if you want a specific type to have a specific image make a [countername].jpg file.

anyway, I'll go ahead and send along a patch for my currently implemented text display.