December 2009

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Portuguese and Italian translations updates, and translators needed

December 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | 18 comments

Users vesgo and icarus respectively updated the Portuguese and Italian translations of Wagic, to better match version 0.10.1. If you want a better experience in one of these languages, download the corresponding file and put it in your Res/lang folder in Wagic:

Portuguese Update for Wagic 0.10.1

Italian Update for Wagic 0.10.1

I also see on various forums that people expect the cards to be translated in Wagic. This is actually doable, and quite easy, we only need motivated people to work on this. The system is fairly simple, and you have examples with French and German in the foler Res/lang. Just have a look for example at Res/lang/fr_cards.txt

Looks easy right? Name of the card, “equals” symbol, then translation in your language. Just name the file **_cards.txt (for example it_cards.txt for Italian) and put it into Res/lang, and you’re done. Of course, if you go through that kind of work, don’t hesitate to post it on our forums so that other players can enjoy your work too. By the way, the French and German cards are not entirely translated either, so if you want to help updating those, that will be greatly appreciated too

Fake!! JPEG “Exploit” on OFW 6.20 by tontunaspi

December 27, 2009 in security | 4 comments

Damn I miss the days when we would all rely on Freeplay to debunk lame youtube attempts at “hacks”. Anyways, since Freeplay’s youtube Channel is gone, somebody’s got to do the job.

So, you might have seen this video on major PSP news sites:

Well, too bad, it’s as fake as fake can be.

cypriotbro gave me enough information to understand that this thing is fake, but a video says much more than text, so here’s my own hack:

Pretty cool, huh? Too bad it’s a crappy fake. The “Fake” file is courtesy of Ruyor at upsp.ws’s forums. You can download it there and try for yourself.

It seems the “thumbnail” generation function on the PSP has some kind of bug: A black image can have a green thumbnail in some circumstances. I wasn’t aware of that bug, so the fake almost got me when Magixien showed me the video. I turns out the bug doesn’t happen on older firmwares (I was testing on 5.00 m33).

So yeah, nothing to see here people, you can go back to sleep, and insult tontunaspi on his youtube Channel, lamers deserve it. Datel’s exploit is much more interesting.

As usual, you should not trust something unless you can test it by yourself, or if the people announcing it have been long enough on the scene to be trusted. Remember: so far, the PSP has never been hacked by somebody who “came out of the blue”, only by people who were “known” on the scene.

tontunaspi

Wagic donations – Where the money goes

December 26, 2009 in Wagic | 5 comments

I want to thank people who have donated in the past and who will donate in the future for Wagic.
I have a job that pays for the server so money is not a problem for me, but as a matter of principle, I want Wagic to be able to provide the funds for its own needs. (You have probably seen that I put ads recently on the website to help with that).

That being said, I don’t use the donations money for the server. The donations received in 2008 were initially supposed to go to team Typhoon for the release of the HEN, but they agreed on this money going to the Red Cross instead. I thought this was a very cool idea.

Here’s how the money received in 2009 was used:

A donation was made to the Wikimedia foundation. The Wikimedia foundation is the association behind Wikipedia. I’ve been using Wikipedia for years, and I strongly believe in the freedom and sharing of knowledge. Wikipedia is one of the most famous sites in the world, and people can easily forget how fast it could disappear if it ever lost its independence.
A major part of the donation money was sent to the Red Cross, again. It is one of the rare humanitarian organizations that accept paypal donations. If you know other trusted organizations that accept paypal, please give me their name. I am especially interested in organizations that dedicate their work to children.
I bought a book called “La Bataille HADOPI”. It is a book about the recently voted “three strikes, you’re out” law in France. I strongly believe that the current copyright laws in many countries of the world are completely obsolete and should be thought again. I think that the recent laws voted in Europe such as the French HADOPI law make things even worse. The benefits for this book were sent to the French association “La Quadrature du Net“, which fights for fundamental rights on the internet, including the right to share culture. (I unfortunately can’t recommend the book, as most of the articles inside are extremely biased)

I’m extremely happy if Wagic can contribute to good things. It feels like I brag about it, but I mostly want donators to know where the money goes… Wagic was built using shared knowledge and tools, and I think this is a way of “giving back” somehow. Well, that, and the fact that Wagic is free and open source, of course

One of the donators suggested that I buy a Mac and start working on an iPhone port. I am far from having enough donations for that, but the idea of an iPhone port (through cydia, of course, not an official app) is nice, so if you’re an iPhone dev and think you can work on a port, please, please do so and/or contact me, I’ll gladly help! (On a side note, there are games on the AppStore named Wagic, they are NOT related to us in any way)

Merry Christmas – Wagic 0.10.1 released!

December 24, 2009 in release, Wagic | 13 comments

MTG10

Ho ho ho, here’s our present to all Homebrew fans: A new version of Wagic, full of Christmas joy!

MTG5 We’ve worked very hard in the past two months to fix bugs and add features, so I hope you’ll enjoy this new version. Many thanks go to the people who have given their time for this release, especially Abrasax, Daddy32, Dr.Solomat, Ilya B, J, Jeck, Lakeesha, Leungclj, Psyringe, Yeshua. I also especially want to thank Raphael for fixing the purple screen bug, a bug that had been in Wagic for several months now.

What is wagic?

Wagic is a fan-made heroic-fantasy card game, in which you fight with your army against the computer. As you win battles, you earn credits that allow you to improve your deck and unlock more cards, and extra game modes. Wagic started as a small project, but has grown over the years, and is now often compared to commercial video games for its replay value and its high quality graphics.

Wagic is free, runs on Windows, Linux, and the Sony PSP. It is available in many languages, and fully customizable. you can create your own themes, your own cards, and even your own rules. Because Wagic is community driven and open source, it gets regularly improved with original contents and mods.

What’s new?

MTG3

MTG4

MTG2

It has become difficult for me to summarize a release. It’s not only about new cards anymore, every release seems to bring more new stuff than the previous one! The major new features for this release are the “trophy room” and the “tasks mode”. The trophy room is a cool place where you can see details about all the sets and modes you have unlocked. The tasks mode is a very fun way to get more credits when you play: In the shop, press “start”, and see the “available tasks”. They are usually pretty clear on what you need to do to get extra credits. The tasks require you to build very clever decks that have a very specific purpose, such as winning a battle with insane amounts of life

Of course, we also added many (many!) cards in this release. Actually, we added as much cards as we could, and Wagic now has more than 5000 cards you can play with, in more than 50 sets.

You think that’d be enough for a new release, but we didn’t stop here. Wagic 0.10.1 has two new themes included: Final Saga by Ilya B (that’s now the default theme), and the Christmas theme by Lakeesha. There are also 50 new opponents, which brings the total of AI decks to 100. Overall, unlocking all the modes/cards and “beating” Wagic should take you a fair amount of time, definitely more than it takes to beat Uncharted 2

And so many other things: ingame music, bug fixes, language selection (no need for international players to wait for a patch anymore)…

Complete Changelog:

More than 1500 new cards. Wagic now allows you to play with 5149 cards, from more than 50 expansions, including Magic 2010, Zendikar, Revised, Alara, Conflux, shadowmoor,…
Added a “cheat” mode (don’t ask, I didn’t add it, I can’t tell you how to unlock it )
Deck statistics improvements
Bug fixes with audio
InGame music
Language is now an option, no need to wait for patches, you can choose English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese
New parser abilities: PreventAllcombatDamage, becomes…, horsemanship, myTurnOnly, asSorcery, myUpkeepOnly(and similar…), 0 mana activated abilities now work, equipment, threshold, cycling, protection from(target), nofizzle, autohand, autograveyard
Minor AI improvements, and bug fixes
New theme: final Saga (thanks to Ilya B)
New theme: Christmas (thanks to Lakeesha)
External rules system now allows you to create your own rules. Check mtg.txt in res/rules
“Purple Screen of despair” issue solved, thanks to Raphael and Yeshua.
New feature: Trophy Room
New feature: Tasks. Get more credits by fulfilling the quests given to you by the shopkeeper!
hundreds of bug fixes for specific cards

Note for beginners:

Wagic requires you to know the basic rules of the game that inspired it. If it’s you’re first time playing, you might feel that the decks of your opponents are too tough. I suggest in that case to play against the 10 first decks of the “choose opponent” list, as these decks are historically less strong than the other ones. Good luck

Download:

If you like Wagic, please consider making a donation. I do my best to use the money wisely. Thanks in advance!

Go to the download page

As usual, enjoy Wagic!

Confirmed:Datel hacks all models of PSP & PSPGo for Christmas

December 24, 2009 in security | 35 comments

Before PSPGo owners start jumping of joy all over the place, let me be clear: this information is probably not useful for you if you thought you would get the joys of homebrews and underground PSP on your PSPGo or on your PSP3000 or on your TA88v3.

A few days ago Datel announced a new Action Replay software, compatible with all models of PSPs, including the PSPGo. The PSP scene was quite suspicious regarding this announcement. Today the product page features a Demo that anyone can download and try. I tried this Demo, other people tried the full product, and, yes, Action Replay runs on an official firmware.

It means that Datel wasn’t bluffing, and it also means that their code is signed. Only Sony is supposed to know how to sign EBOOTs, so we could think that Datel has some kind of agreement with Sony, but the documentation of the Action Replay is clear on that part:

Action Replay PSP is a 100% unofficial product and is NOT sponsored, endorsed or approved by Sony, nor any games developer or publisher.

To further confirm this, after installing the demo, you can have a look at your memory stick: Action Replay gets installed in the “UPDATE” subfolder of GAME, which is usually reserved for official Sony updates. It therefore means that Datel has figured out how to encrypt/sign EBOOTS, but needs their product to be in the UPDATE folder for some reason (easier to encrypt? Use of some specific access granted to this folder?)

Now, this is not very useful for hackers (and even less for pirates, ha). Yet another encrypted EBOOT to analyze will not bring anything. However, Action Replay allows users to patch memory with codes, so maybe something can be crafted in order to inject unsigned code in the PSP through Action Replay, which could unlock (at least) user mode (and therefore homebrews).

For the time being, it seems Datel has done what hackers have been trying to do for almost 5 years: figuring out the PSP’s encryption process. I’ll quote Silverspring here:

Seems they have done it for real. If so, it’s finally game over for SCE. There’s nothing they can do to stop it.
Probably fw updates will attempt to block it, however all Datel need to do is release an new update. They can sign any code they want now.
They’ve finally done what was the ‘Holy Grail’ of the PSP scene. Pretty impressive work

Who knows, maybe Datel will now come up with their own Custom firmware…

Christmas Theme by Lakeesha

December 23, 2009 in release, Wagic | No comments

This is probably the first time we get a seasonal Theme for Wagic, and this one not only perfectly fits the Christmas season, it is also very well done and funny, so I hope you’ll fall in love with it the way I did.

I’ll cut the crap, screenshots and a download link are all you need:

MTG0

MTG1

MTG2

MTG3

Download

To install, just unzip the Christmas folder to your WTH/Res/themes folder, then in the game, go to options > User and choose the “Christmas” theme

don’t forget to go to the original thread and thank Lakeesha for this awesome work!

By the way Wagic’s next release is coming real soon, so stay tuned

Datel’s Action Replay on the PSPGo?

December 21, 2009 in pandora, security | 16 comments

Did Datel hack the PSPGo? n00b81 sent me this interesting link today.

Datel is a company known for their various tools for many consoles. Their most famous product is probably the “Action Replay”, a series of software tools that allow you to cheat in many games (extra lives, extra gold, extra weapons, that kind of stuff…). Action replay is available for many console, and Datel have sometimes been criticized for making easy money on open source software (such as some code by Booster and the Prometheus team, related to the PSP IPL).

Datel was supposed to release an equivalent to the Pandora battery for the PSP 3000 in 2008, the “Blue Lite Tool”. Their press release, made on the site Maxconsole.net, was apparently only a buzz, as the battery was a standard pandora battery (it worked as expected on old PSPs, but didn’t do anything more than a regular battery on PSP 3000 models). It is still unclear if their Blue Lite Tool was a fake from the start, or if the lawsuit they got from Sony at that time was related to the tool.

Today Datel announce that they have a way to run the Action Replay software on the PSPGo. From the page in the link above:

Works with the original SONY PSP the PSP 2000 & 3000 plus the new PSPgo.

For such a tool to work on a PSPGo, it means that either Datel has become an official Sony partner (I highly doubt that), or they found a new way to run unencrypted code on a PSP Go, or their product description is lying (which happened in the past with the blue tool).

No doubt the hackers will get their hands on this product and debunk the scam if it is one.

Thanks again to n00b81 for the info.

5.03GEN-C for HEN

December 16, 2009 in release, security | 10 comments

I thought PSPGen’s site was extremely slow today.

I believe it’s because they just released a new version of their custom firmware for the PSP3000 congrats to Team GenyUs!

If you have difficulties downloading it, here’s a mirror. Don’t distribute that link, or I’ll remove it. Instead, just tell people who have issues downloading from the Gen site to come to this page. Thanks for you understanding

source

Introducing Miki

December 13, 2009 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Some of you already know about its existence, but wololo.net now hosts a Wiki page for Wagic related stuff.

On our Wiki, you’ll find up to date information on Bugs, and Supported cards, as well as more technical stuff such as How to compile the game on various platforms or the Test suite.

This blog is still the only official source of information for Wagic, but I’ve been lacking time to update some pages of the blog, and the wiki is here for that

Let’s hope it grows as a great source of information and contents for Wagic

The Games that inspired Wagic

December 11, 2009 in magic, Wagic | 7 comments

I was recently looking for good homebrew games on the PSP (I might start a subject on that in future posts…), which reminded me of games I used to play on the PSP when I started seriously thinking about Wagic.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it is funny how these games inspired me when I started coding my game.

But before talking of PSP homebrews, I’ll start with the obvious inspirations. Of course, Wagic is inspired from Magic the Gathering, but more specifically, the two following games:

Shandalar

shandalar1

shandalar1-3

Shandalar is an old Microprose game that allowed to play quests in an heroic fantasy world, while fighting against other sorcerers with Magic cards. Although I never played the game, I was always impressed by the idea of “progressing” in a game, fulfill quests, visit shops to buy cards, and stuff like that. This game was much more than a MTG simulation, it was a real game relying on the rules of MTG with goals to achieve, which is why I think it was (and still is) succesful. The whole idea of the shop in Wagic (buying cards/unlocking sets) comes from this. Actually, the initial goal for Wagic was that you’d travel on a map and fight ennemies with your cards… I haven’t given up on this idea yet, but it clearly means creating a whole RPG, which is a huge task.

Shandalar was made to run on screens that didn’t have the cool resolutions we have nowadays. Keeping this in mind helped me work on the initial designs of Wagic. With the size of the PSP screen, we always have to have an interface that allows to show lots of information on a very limited space.

For those who don’t know, Shandalar is maintained by a group of fans, under the name Manalink. Manalink handles Momir Basic, which is where I got the idea of implementing it in Wagic as well

Forge

screenshot-3 In 2007 when I started working on Wagic, Forge (it was called MTG Forge at the time) was the only “mainstream” open source game that allowed people to play MTG against an AI. Other solutions existed, such as MagMa – Magic Machine – but weren’t easy to access – at least the source. Forge is written in Java while other freeware programs were either closed source or not portable. My initial goal was to see if I could port an existing freeware game to the PSP. Forge doesn’t have the best interface or the cleanest code in the world of open source, but it was the proof that creating an AI to play MTG was doable. I quickly gave up on porting it though, as I needed to rewrite it in C, and I disagreed with most of the design choices mades in the code. In the last months, Forge has been getting lots of improvements. I must admit I haven’t played it in a while. The screenshot above is neither recent nor old. The version I played two years ago couldn’t show the card pictures on the board. Forge lacks eye candy, but it’s getting better, and it’s probably the most active open source MTG project currently.

Defense Station PSP

ss_1 DSP was a PSP homebrew made by coder Danzel. Not only was it quite fun to play, it didn’t use any fancy 3d and was a full game with lots of customization. By “full game”, I mean it was more than a proof of concept. A problem with most homebrews on the PSP is that they only have one level. Or no end. Or no goal at all… which makes you play them for 10 minutes then throw them away. DSP wasn’t one of those. You could play it, play it again, download packs with different levels. It was extremely fun, and if you like tower defense I recommend it. (I also recommend Comet Crash on the PS3 if you’re into tower defense, by the way). When I saw lots of people contributing to DSP with maps and new graphics, I new I wanted Wagic to allow the same kind of customization

Spider solitaire

9563_spider_solitaire I’ve spent countless hours on this game. It made me realize that it was possible to do a fun game without any incredible graphic skills (which is my main issue). While playing this game I realized creating a card game on the PSP wouldn’t require me to draw anything but rectangles. Yet I wanted more strategy in my game, which is why I went with the concept of TCCG. The very simple gray tone was clearly the inspiration for the main menu in the first versions of Wagic (I can’t show them to you because they used copyrighted graphics, but people who played the early releases back in 2008 probably remember a gray gradient with mana icons. It was very sober and I loved it).

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