Psyringe wrote:This number would imho be sufficient - I'd expect you to have won a game before a display limit of 90 creatures becomes relevant.
I have a couple of token decks where you can reach that number very quickly. Especially if you are playing against a good deck, or a deck that just happens to be formidable to a token deck. Those are the matches I love the most, the ones that drag on way past the 5th turn, because both players are keeping the other in check. Its like tug of war. I manage to do this with the AI because I built unfair decks for it (for example it one deck has no lands but 20 black lotus) in order to compensate for its stupidity.
Psyringe wrote:Home / Select probably, but it's not that much of an issue for the zooming proposal imho, because (if I'm assessing the situation correctly) players will not switch between zoom levels much anyway. Actually an auto-zoom feature (zoom out automatically when a card gets printed outside the visible area) might do the trick pretty well.
Well using the home button would be a bad idea. As for auto-zoom, I think thats a bad Idea too (unless you still have a manual zoom) since one you reach that point where its hard to discern a cards attack and defense, you would want to zoom back in.
Psyringe wrote:Well, the whole point of a zooming display is to prevent creatures from going off the screen in the first place.Or, to put it differently - instead of first failing to display all relevant info on the screen, and then applying a visual cue to inform the player of this problem, I'd rather prevent it from happening in the first place.
People are going to want to be able to zoom back in to some degree (not necessarily all the way) in which case cards will be off the screen, in which case you will need a scroll bar. Having cards off of the screen isnt a problem, not being able to scroll or zoom to those cards is the problem.
In my opinion this is good enough, and I think it would be unwise to give people a less efficient display for 16-90 creatures in order to give them a better display for 90+ creatures.
The thumbnails are not that big as is. There is no way you could fit 90 thumbnails on screen and still tell what they are without having to select it. The power/toughness is almost the entire width of a card, you could shave off a few pixels before the power/toughness of different cards begin to overlap each other. While you can shrink the squares that represent the cards, you cant really shrink the numbers, or you wont be able to read them. The thumbnails are pretty close to the smallest practical size already, if not, they can still be made a few pixels smaller and then implemented into a scrolling environment.
You seemed to miss is that, in a scrolling environment, you could still have 2 rows of creatures (tho this would not partner well with the stacking idea). The thumbnails aren't really big enough to justify a single row. In the current GUI you can have 12 creatures to a row (and this leaves lime 2 cm of screen space on both sides, which is a lot). That means you would have 24 creatures before you had to begin to scroll. Having 90 creatures in play wouldn't actually involve that much scrolling, because that would only be moving 33 spaces. That doesn't take much effort in the deck editor (where the cards are huge), so it certainly wont take much effort on the battlefield (where the cards are small).
Psyringe wrote:However - the whole discussion is a bit theoretical as long as nobody's there who's going to write code for either of the two solutions. Meaning - I do enjoy the discussion (and it helped me to sharpen my own understanding of the subject, so thanks for that in any case), but it might very well remain a theoretical one.
Implementing the scrolling interface would not be that hard, especially considering how the game already has one. I could do it myself, and if nobody else does maybe someday I will (tho don't count on me). Unfortunately right now I'm a little busy (18 credit hours of classes this semester). But really nobody needs to count on me to do it, since its not that hard. Like I said, the game already has one in the deck editor.
