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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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Other Programs  

lord of the pit

bwahahaha

When I started working on Wagic a year ago, I thought there was absolutely no program that did what I wanted to do : a MTG game with rules enforcement.

After digging a little bit, I discovered that there are actually quite a lot of attempts at doing that.

MTG Forge Has quite a lot of cards (around 700 I think), is an open source Java application. Its author is working hard, so the application has in dynamism what it lacks in professional-looking-ism. When I tried it several months ago, I didn’t enjoy it because I thought the AI was crappy. I think differently now that I have to code my own :p . The creator’s blog is very interesting, updated regularly, and the main reason I started my own blog for this project !

Deckbot is not open source, but has quite a lot of cards from recent editions. It is text based, but uses a form of Minimax algorithm for the AI. Haven’t tried it yet but I read the AI is pretty damn good !

Incantus is the new hot Magic project these days. All is written in Python, and the GUI is brilliant, even better than the official “MTG Online” sold by Wizards of the Coast. I have difficulties to understand the “open source or not” status of this game… Adding cards seems to be easy as pie, it manages lots of complex rules, but it doesn’t have any AI (network play).

There are lots of other games, the site slightlymagic.net tries to give a complete list of them.

So why would we need yet another Magic game ? Well, none of these could run on the PSP, due to the size of the screen and the memory they use. So a new one is definitely needed for portable devices owners !

Note: There is also a PSP port of Magic WorkStation, but I found the installation process to be complex, especially since the game didn’t do much at that time (2 players hotseat, no rule enforcement…). MWS without network support is not that interesting…so I didn’t try that hard to install it.

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