September 2008

Being busy with my private life, I didn’t have much time to work on wagic in the previous weeks, although I keep improving it regularly. In the last days, I received a growing number of comments on this blog and on the youtube videos, so although not much progress has been done, I feel the need to keep you updated : I just want to say that the project is still 100% alive.

The next release will only include a few simple changes (to all the people who sent me bug reports, I apologize in advance as this release probably won’t include most of the stuff you asked for) , but I won’t give the changelog until I am ready to release it.

I need to fix a bug with damage resolution (first strike will be one of the fixed features in this release) before I consider it “ready”. I’ll then test it for a few days before releasing. Expect some more news in the weeks to come !

Since the alpha was released, 3 weeks ago, Wagic has been downloaded around 1000 times, including lots of downloads from pspgen.com and a few from pspupdates.qj.net .

Pspgen being a french website, it probably has less audience than english speaking websites, but the high quality of their articles regarding homebrew seems to have a huge impact on the number of downloads. Their articles give all the details on how to install and run homebrews, with images, which is a great thing.

Regarding Qj, I must say I’ve been a bit disappointed that Wagic didn’t get a post on their main page. Wagic is a complex piece of software that needed almost a year of work, so I guess I was expecting some kind of recognition from this famous site. They seem to be completely clueless about what they put on their site though (recently a guy posted a fake update to the music prx and that got to the front page so…)

I’m getting lots of questions on what the next release of Wagic will bring, and , all I can say is : I don’t know. I’m keeping my promise of not working (too much) on the code until my wedding, so not so much has been done so far except a few bug fixes for some cards. I added a test mechanism that will hopefully prevent me from breaking existing cards when I add new ones. I also realized that the “color=…” in the _cards.dat is useless, since the colors of a card can be guessed from its mana cost.  So this line will be removed in future versions

I’m working on the code, but the features I’ve added so far are not really interesting for the end user. They just help me keep the code clean and debug faster

I have lots of ideas for the AI but that will take me a long time to implement, so the next version will probably not have much improvement in that area.