December 2008

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This is a screenshoot I took yesterday while working on the code.

I think it’s very interesting because you can see several new and/or cool features at a glance:


(click on the picture to see the real size)

So now you can either try to guess what’s new or read on :)

The most obvious I think is the cool theme. As you may or may not know, it does not require any single line of programming to tweak Wagic’s graphics, and I’m actually surprised we had to wait 3 months before someone came up with such a cool mod. I myself suck at design, so I’m always impressed when people create cool graphics. Many thanks to u0127907 for this mod, I hope this will give motivation for other people to create and share their own mods. You can download it on the forum

The second thing, less obvious, is the picture quality of the big card. Of course, this is the windows version, and there’s no way to achieve that on the PSP version, but what this technically means is that I’m working on removing the size limitations on cards pictures. This will allow people using the PC versions (Windows, Linux or Mac) to play fullscreen without having blurry cards. It will also allow people on the PSP to reduce the size of the pictures if they think it takes too much space on their memory stick. Currently, I think the size of the cards is 285*something, and reducing it to 255*… should divide the textures size (in RAM) by 2 without losing much picture quality.

The last thing is probably the one that will interest you as Magic/Wagic players: The actual name of the big card you see on the screen. Yes, it’s a wasp token, which means I more or less got tokens working in Wagic’s current SVN revision (the Hive is hidden behind the big Wasp card, tapped. For the purpose of the test, I set the mana cost of the hive to 0 and the tokens cost to 1). Icing on the cake, tokens are partially scriptable in _cards.dat, this is the code for the Hive :

auto={5},{T}:token(Wasp,creature artifact insect, 1/1,flying artifact)

Internally, Token objects inherit from the MTGCardInstance class, and a few specific dirty tricks are performed by the code when the token changes zone, or when creating the image name. I think using tokens in the current svn version creates a memory leak, but this will be fixed eventually.

Typical. Coding while I should be packing for my holiday, yay me !



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First of all, many thanks to Abrasax and J for their help, this new release wouldn’t be so full of new stuff without them. And thanks of course to the beta testers. Strangely enough, except a few card bugs here and there, most of the reports we got were “feature” requests (well, to some extent, some of them can be considered as bugs too…), so my guess is that this release should be quite stable.

So what do we have for you here ? Well, first of all, you’ll probably notice that the big jpegs are not in this release, only thumbnails. The game still handles the big pictures, of course, but you’ll have to find them yourself. The main reason for that is bandwidth, as this decision will allow us to put far more cards in the future, for a smaller zip file. It also allows us to put music and sfx in the package for a smaller total size. Oh yes, music is finally here, and a few sounds as well, so that Wagic looks (sounds ?) more like an actual video game now (the soundtrack is by Celestial Aeon Project). Overall, lots of new customizable contents have been added, and the card parser has been improved, which means more cards for you and less code for me.

Oh, I almost forgot, around 250 new cards (Wagic now officially supports around 700 cards, not counting the hundreds more available on the forum), new icons and a new logo.

And thanks to CrazyRazor for the avatars, that I included in the release.

enjoy a few screenshots and videos. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be on holiday during the Christmas season, so don’t expect many updates in the weeks to come.

Changelog

General

  • Added 240 new cards, including the ones from the Ice Age Mod by Abrasax, and cards from Shadowmoor
  • (PSP) Mp3 Playback fixed. (note : Mp3s can’t have an ID3V2 tag)
  • Added SFX (check the Res/sound/sfx/README.txt file for customization)
  • Shop Memory leak fixed. Going repeatedly to the shop should not crash the game anymore
  • The deck editor now has 3 scrolling speeds. You can switch by using the “select” button
  • (internal) Input system updated
  • (Windows) it is now possible to resize the window and play fullscreen
  • Added an avatar directory for the AI. Check Res/ai/baka/avatars/README.txt for customization !
  • The cards file parser has been upgraded, you can now add more cards by yourself
    • new keywords : lord , life ,foreach,bury all, destroy all, @, draw,…
    • target mechanism updated (attacker, blocker, colors, tapped, abilities…)
    • more info here
  • The AI should play Wrath of God and other such cards more “wisely”
  • You can now choose your opponent based on its deck name when you play against the AI. Difficulty is computed based on your victories against the AI with a specific deck.
  • (sources/internal): you can now play the game on Linux (if you compile it from the sources) (thanks J !)
  • New mana icons, new logo
  • Fixed a graveyard bug that made the game crash
  • A few ingame speed improvements

Cards – Bugs where fixed for the following cards:

  • Lava Axe
  • Control magic
  • Circle of protection (all)
  • Zombie Master
  • Spark elemental
  • Righteousness
  • Ascendant Evincar
  • Nightmare (10E)
  • Terror
  • Wrath of god
  • Some fixes for various Ice Age cards

Known Bugs

  • Brass Man and Paralyze tend to crash the game. Please don’t use them
  • Hybrid mana cost is not shown in the “text” version of the card pictures
  • Volume control does not work. Sound/Music is either on or off.

Download

Download here, as usual

If you plan to give the information to a news site, please make sure the game works on your own psp before, thanks ;)

PS: To people who still think this is an “incomplete” game: sure it is still work in progress, sure it is no Shandalar, but compared to a large majority of PSP homebrews out there, it has an incredible replay value, cool graphics, lots of customizable stuff, and it’s pretty stable. Don’t get confused by the “0″ in “0.3.1″, I think Wagic has reached a level where people can stop calling it “beta”.

A few screenshots  

We’ve been working a lot on Wagic over the past weeks, and I’ve not posted on the blog that much recently.

I was able to have the windows version display fullscreen, and fixed a few issues on the PSP, such as mp3 playback. So the next release should have music, yay !

These are few screenshots of the Windows version in windowed fullscreen. It’s basically the same thing as the psp version, just bigger.


Of course, lots of other things have been added/corrected, but I won’t reveal all the new stuff yet. And if you really want to know what’s new, just check the svn once in a while ;)

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