Wagic

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Release: Wagic 0.15.1  

April 12, 2011 in Homebrew, release, Wagic | 24 comments

Wow, I must say it’s been a while. Yes, the last Wagic release was almost 4 months ago. I’m the lazy one here. Between real life, the genesis competition, the whole HEN crazyness that happened, it was difficult to find time to put into Wagic. Thankfully, I’m not the only one working on Wagic anymore, and thanks to the incredible dev team, this update is impressive, as usual.

What is Wagic?

Damn, do I still need to introduce Wagic? Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven, entirely customizable (you can create themes, mods, even new rules), available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, and N900 (maemo). We are also working on ports for other devices such as the iPad, and we are still looking for devs to help on that ;)

Obligatory Screenshots

Changelog

What’s new in this release of Wagic? Well the major point is that more than 1000 unique cards were added. Wagic now supports more than 7700 unique cards (which, if you count the reprints, means more than 13700 cards), thanks to the incredible work of Zethfox, Dr.Solomat, and 840126. But that’s not the only new stuff in this release, check this out:

  • More than 1000 new cards. Wagic now supports more than 7700 unique cards, 13700 cards total, including the new set MBS (thanks go especially to Zethfox, Dr.Solomat, and 840126)
  • (Windows) Mouse version improved, some bugs fixed, overall controls have been improved (Xaw Otihs)
  • Threading support for image loading. Overall this should make image loading a bit smoother (Mootpoint)
  • Support for actual button icons instead of text (Mervin, Mootpoint)
  • New Wallpapers by Kaioshin
  • Translation updates (thanks to all translators!)
  • Added new keywords/abilities for card creators. Hopefully we will find the time to edit the wiki and add documentation for these new keywords, for now you’ll have to look into the new cards to see what’s new :)
  • Various performance improvements
  • Many, many, many bug fixes

More Info

Remember that in addition to the news in this blog, you can find more Wagic news on twitter and facebook thanks to Leungclj

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

download here

As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic!



Wagic 0.15 Beta ready for testing – Looking for translators  

April 6, 2011 in release, Wagic | 30 comments

Update: Many thanks to everyone offering their help for translation. Please see this post where I explain how to translate Wagic. I can’t contact every person by email, I’m too busy for that. If you can create/update the translation file for your language, please do so and submit your finished work on the forums, we will then add it to the SVN. Thanks for your understanding

I usually don’t announce Beta versions on the blog, but this time I’m changing our release flow a little bit, in order to gather some attention from translators. Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian), but our language files are usually not up to date compared to the latest code.

 

This time, in order to do the correct thing, I’m calling all translators who would like to help, to participate in the beta, update the language files, and send them back to us. This way, the official release will have the best possible translations.

We expect the beta to be extremely short. If you want to help find bugs, or if you want to help with the translation, please join us!

The Beta is open to anyone who is registered to the Wagic forums.

This new version of Wagic, among many other things, adds more than 1000 unique cards, bringing the total of unique supported card to 7675 (or more than 13600 if you include reprints)

Get the Beta here, thank in advance for your feedback and your help!

Wagic on the iPad and the iPhone  

April 2, 2011 in Wagic | 25 comments

This is a post I promised myself I would do, a long time ago. The main reason I haven’t posted about this yet is that I don’t myself own any Apple product, so I’m in an awkward position to talk about this…

If you’re a Wagic player, you’ve probably been wondering if there was any plan to release Wagic on platforms outside of the PSP. The answer is, of course, yes. Wagic already runs perfectly on several platforms (Maemo, PSP, Linux, Windows), and we are trying very hard to get it ported to as many platforms as possible. But the truth is, we’re lacking manpower to maintain all the ports.

A little while ago, Xaw Otihs, who already ported Wagic to the Maemo platform, shared a video showing extremely good progress on the iOS platform.

If you’re into card games, you probably already know about freeware games such as Forge, Incantus, MagMa… These games all have pros and cons (Forge recently reached a number of cards higher than Wagic… but wait for our next release guys, the competition is not over yet ;) ), but Wagic is the only one designed for portable devices. If you’ve been hoping for a Card Game on your iPhone, Wagic is likely to be the thing you’ve been looking for. The thing is: the port exists (and it’s been in our public svn for a little while now), but we now need devs to improve it so that it goes into a more acceptable state: easier to compile, easier to configure, easier to distribute, better interface for touch devices, etc…

If you’re an iOS dev and are interested in this project, we would love to hear about you. Don’t send me an email personally, as I’ve been really busy lately, but rather, please follow our “procedure” for joining the Team: provide a few patches for the game, on the forums, and we will review them. If they’re good enough, we’ll gladly give you submission rights in our SVN :) . More info here

(and to clarify one thing, we’re talking of the Cydia side of the force here…we don’t expect Wagic to be distributed on non-jailbroken devices anytime soon :) )

Wagic Theme: Purp Theme by ZiRRuSH  

April 2, 2011 in Wagic | 3 comments

If it’s the first time you’ve heard of it: Wagic is an Heroic-Fantasy card game. It is available in 8 languages, and runs on the PSP, Windows, Linux, and Maemo (and on iPad/iOS for those who are brave enough to compile it). More info on the Download Page

I haven’t talked about Wagic in a while. This week, as I browsed the Wagic forums, I saw this gorgeous theme made by ZirRuSH.

One of its particularities is that the Theme ships with a “Customize” folder, that allows you to change the backdrops, icons, fonts, card backs, etc… It’s a DYI Theme, in a way :) . But pictures are worth a thousand words, so enjoy these screenshots.

Screenshots

Download

You can download this theme, as well as many others, on the Wagic forums. Use the opportunity to give feedback to the author :)

There’s more

Solo campaigns, themes and hundreds of new cards are added regularly on the Wagic forums. Although we try to keep the “official” releases of Wagic in a “Vanilla” state, keep in mind that the community is hard at work to let you customize the game as much as you want. Meanwhile, we’re actively working on the next release (Wagic 0.15), and trust me, it will be good :)

Release: Wagic for OFW (yes, signed homebrews are a reality on the PSP)  

January 18, 2011 in PS3, psp dev, release, security, Wagic | 89 comments

Things are going very fast. For those who are just joining us: until now there were basically two solutions to run homebrews on a PSP. Either you had a hackable PSP on which you could install a “Custom firmware” (CFW), or you owned one of the new models (basically every PSP that was sold since summer 2008), and had to rely on some “exploits” such as the Patapon exploit, which was used to run HBL (a homebrew loader), and later on a HEN (Homebrew Enabler).

CFW or HEN, that was basically the choice we had so far to run homebrews.

Then came fail0verfl0w, and Mathieulh. A group of developers found a critical security issue in the PS3 system, which led to a full analysis of the PS3 firmware, in which some keys used for PSP Game encryption were found. After a few weeks of hard work involving many developers, tools started to emerge. I’ll spare the details for now, but it is basically possible to sign your own games (I’m talking here about games you created, not games you get on the PSN), and run them directly on a PSP without any “classic” hack, or without a Custom Firmware.

Yeah, we're superheroes, you love us

In the video below I’m showing Wagic running on a 6.35 PSP3000. Note that I cold reboot the console, to show that no exploit is running there.

The tools to sign your homebrews, although not entirely user friendly yet, can easily be found with our friend google (and if not now, tomorrow they will be). I used prxEncrypter by bbtgp and fix-relocations by JJS.

These signing techniques still rely on some external data, and Sony could probably fix this in further firmwares by creating a whitelist of allowed Eboots. Will they actually do it, or are they now focusing on the PSP2? For now, this is only user mode (yes, liquidzigong did sign his Hen, but this Hen still relies on a kernel exploit to work, and that’s easy to fix…), which should keep us away from any form of piracy, at least for now (and, alas, from plugin support or CFW as well)

Download and Install Wagic for OFW

  1. Download Wagic from the official Wagic download page
  2. Unzip the archive at the root of your PSP
  3. Replace PSP/GAME/WTH/EBOOT.PBP with the EBOOT.PBP in this file
  4. Run the game on an official firmware :)

Signing tools used

How to sign your homebrew

This assumes you have access to your homebrew’s prx. If you only have the EBOOT, you can extract the prx with pbp unpacker (data.psp == your prx)

  1. if your prx has relocations type 7, run fix-relocations on it (fix-relocations mygame.prx) (if you don’t know, run that anyways, it shouldn’t hurt)
  2. run PrxEncrypter on your prx (prxEncrypter mygame.prx)
  3. run pack-pbp the way you usually do it in a makefile (pack-pbp EBOOT.PBP PARAM.SFO icon.png NULL pic0.png pic1.png NULL  data.psp NULL )
  4. That’s it

There are still lots of limitations (no kernel mode, prx should be less than 5MB, no static elf support,…), but tools are being progressively built to make this easier, so I’m sure that as I type this, more convenient tools will already be available. I spotted some tools that allow to sign static elfs by embedding a loader inside of the eboot.

Enjoy :)

Regarding donations  

December 30, 2010 in HBL, TN Hen, Wagic | 20 comments

Total_Noob posted a warning a few days ago regarding donations for the TN Hen: it seems some people are impersonating him in order to get donations in exchange for vaporware…

Don’t get tricked! Devs always appreciate donations, but we (I speak for Total_Noob and the devs of HBL and Wagic) will never ask for donation in exchange of new features. TN Hen, Half-Byte Loader (and Wagic) are free. As  a matter of fact, HBL and Wagic are so free that they are open source.

Keep in mind that you donate to thank the devs for the work they’ve done so far, not for something you expect to happen.

TN Hen is the result of months of work by Total_Noob. You can find his donation link directly on his blog.

Half Byte Loader is the result of more than one year of work, from almost 10 developers. Wagic is the result of 3 years of work by more than 20 devs and designers. I shamelessly accept donations for my own involvement in these 2 projects. I try to use the donations money wisely. However if you don’t want to donate to me directly, but still want to thank us for these 2 projects, donate to the Red Cross and let me know by email!

Thanks to all people who donated and to those who will :)

Creating your first deck in Wagic  

December 30, 2010 in magic, Wagic | 11 comments

A few days ago we released a new version of Wagic. Wagic is a cool strategy card game set in a heroic-fantasy universe, in which you build your army of cards out of several thousands of units, an fight against the AI.

I know that many people like to build lots of different decks to experiment with. I prefer to start with one single deck, and make it evolve with time. It’s a matter of choice of course, but here’s how I create my first deck:

A rule of thumb is that a typical deck in Wagic should have 60 cards. There are 5 colors in the game, and it is usually recommended to start with a deck made of 2 colors, including 24 lands. When you run Wagic for the first time, the game gives you 140 cards randomly, as well as 3000 credits. What I do at that time is go straight in the deck editor, and look for the two colors for which I have the most cards, and simply put all these cards in my deck, as well as the associated lands.

Can you easily beat the game with your first deck?

Imagine the two colors for which I have the most cards are black and green. I’ll put all the green and black cards into my deck, as well as the 10 forests and the 10 swamps available from the “lands” section. Note that this does not make 24 lands, so on top of that I’ll usually add 4 random lands, let’s say 4 mountains. If I’m lucky, this will be enough to build a first (crappy) 60 cards deck. If that’s not enough, I can still add a few artifacts if necessary.

The game intentionally gives you “not enough” stuff at the beginning to virtually increase the difficulty, but remember that you have 3000 credits. I usually use these credits to buy the lands I’m missing (let’s replace those 4 mountains with 2 forests and 2 swamps!) and/or cards of the two colors I just chose. But it is also possible to buy boosters. How you use your first 3000 credits is a good part of the initial strategy, and buying cards of your 2 “main” colors is probably the best move, but I must admit I sometimes can’t resist the will to get surprised by boosters (and sometimes completely change my 2 initial colors). You can buy all these from the shop, that can be accessed directly from the main menu.

I know that some people want to build the deck of their dreams right away (there’s the cheat mode for that ;) ), but what I like about this strategy is that I get to discover cards I didn’t know, combos I didn’t imagine…and overall starting with a crappy deck and improving it as I play is how I enjoy Wagic, and I hope you will too. The AI in Wagic would probably be easy to beat for an experienced player with a well constructed deck, but by putting constraints on your initial decks, we try to make the game more challenging, and I believe we are really successful on that part (at least as far as I’m concerned, I’ve been playing Wagic every day since the first release!)

Release: Wagic 0.14.1  

December 25, 2010 in release, Wagic | 80 comments

I’m always excited to announce a new release of Wagic. This new release is packed with new features and I want to thank all the devs, designers, testers, who helped making this game so great.

What is Wagic?

Is it still necessary to introduce Wagic? Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven, entirely customizable (you can create themes, mods, even new rules), available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, and N900 (maemo). Developer Xawotihs also started working on an iOs port for iPhone and iPad, but I’ll talk about that later :)

Obligatory Screenshots

Changelog

So, what’s new in this version? Well, a pile of stuff, as every time we do a release :) The most visible change is probably the new menus for deck selection. They make the “tasks” accessible directly from the menu (no need to go to the shopkeeper anymore to see what tasks would give you more credits), and we implemented an “AI Deck unlock” mechanism to smoothe the difficulty curve of the game.

  • Hundreds of new cards (and new sets), mostly thanks to the work of Zethfox and Dr. Solomat. Wagic now allows you to play with more than 12’000 cards (more than 6700 unique cards)
  • (PSP) Improved performance with firmwares 5.5x and 6.xx. TN Hen users should see a major improvement when running the game from the XMB. In worst cases, Wagic 0.13 used to take 20 seconds to launch from the XMB, this should now be instant.
  • New deck selection menus in “classic” game mode, and in the deck editor (Mnguyen, abrasax)
  • Opponents decks now need to be unlocked. Just play normally, and they will be naturally and progressively unlocked :)
  • Mouse support in windows and Linux (We now have two windows versions, check the Download section for details) (Xawotihs)
  • Various AI improvements by Zethfox
  • Added Japanese font support (we need translators!) and improved Chinese font support (J, linshier)
  • 6 new AI opponents (Zethfox)
  • New wallpaper by Kaioshin
  • Possibility to save as “AI Deck” in the deck editor so that you can easily play against new opponents without having to create the decks on a PC (mnguyen)
  • Many, Many, many bug fixes, including some performance improvements (thanks to all devs but especially Mootpoint!)

More Info

Remember that in addition to the news in this blog, you can find more Wagic news on twitter and facebook thanks to Leungclj

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

download here

As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic! This release is (of course!) compatible with HBL and the TN Hen.

List of cards supported by Wagic 0.13.1  

October 10, 2010 in Wagic | 5 comments

I updated the Miki with the list of supported cards in Wagic, enjoy! I will also try to update the card coding documentation when I get more free time.

Release: Wagic 0.13.1  

October 4, 2010 in release, Wagic | 36 comments

After long months, I am extremely proud to announce a new release of Wagic, The Homebrew, almost in sync with the release of Scars of Mirrodin (The new expansion of MTG was released a week ago). Let me especially thank Zethfox and Dr.Solomat for this release, they are the ones who pushed the card engine beyond all expectations, and added around 800 new cards, raising the number to more than 11700 playable cards (6300 unique).

Let me also thank leungclj for his involvement on our Twitter and facebook pages!

What is Wagic?

Is it still necessary to introduce Wagic? Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven, entirely customizable (you can create themes, mods, even new rules), available in several languages (Chinese was added in this release by linshier), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, and Linux. An N900 version is in the works, and already available on the SVN, thanks to the work of developer DJardin.

Obligatory screenshots

Changelog

This release comes with so many new features that I’m sure I’ll forget some. There are so many new keywords in the card engine that a dedicated section (see below) is needed to describe them all.

  • More than 800 new unique cards, including cards from Magic 2011 and Scars of Mirrodin. Wagic now allows you to play with more than 11700 units (6300 unique)
  • New loading screens by Kaioshin
  • Card engine/parser updates, see list below
  • Story mode improved (new rewards)
  • Mulligan (thanks almosthumane)
  • Support of Chinese language by linshier
  • Advanced themes by Jeck. Give a try to the “gemstones” theme!
  • Additional option to pass phases automatically (almosthumane)
  • Improved deck selection menus (mnguyen)
  • Support for “tiny crops” images (from slightlymagic.net), recommended for PSP users (better performance)
  • Too many bug fixes to mention. Thanks to ALL devs!

New parser keywords

Thanks to Dr.Solomat for the list, and to Zethfox who coded most of these!

Fixed keywords:

CANTREGENERATE --> now CANTREGEN. The engine always handled it as "REGENERATE" and thus had to be renamed.

New abilities:

ABSORB
AFFINITYARTIFACTS
AFFINITYPLAINS
AFFINITYFOREST
AFFINITYISLAND
AFFINITYMOUNTAIN
AFFINITYSWAMP
AFFINITYGREENCREATURES
BOTHNOCREATURE ---------- both cant cast creatures.
BOTHCANTCAST ------------ both cant cast spells.
BOTHONECAST ----------- both limited to 1 spell.
CANTCREATURECAST --------- card controller cant cast creature.
CANTLIFELOSE -------- you cant lose for having no life left.
CANTLOSE -------- you cant lose the game/ opponent cant win.
 (Card example:Platinum Angel
CANTSPELLCAST ---------- card controller cant cast spells.
CANTMILLOSE --------- you cant lose from being milled.
CANTWIN ------------ you cant win the game / opponent cant lose.
CONTROLLERSHROUD ----- (Card example:True Believer)
FROZEN ------- card/target will not untap on its controllers next untap phase. (Card example:Tangle)
INFECT ------- New ability from Scars of Mirrodin.
LEYLINE ------- Enables the coding of the Leyline cycles.
NOMAXHAND --------- controller has no maximum had size.
PLAYERSHROUD
POISONTOXIC,POISONTWOTOXIC,POISONTHREETOXIC -- card adds 1,2 or 3 poison counters to the player it damaged. Poison counters will appear as green letters under or above the lifetotal.
PHANTOM ------- prevents damage and remove one +1/+1 counter (Card examples:Phantom Centaur,Phantom Nishoba)
RETRACE ------- Now without any workaround!
STORM --------  storm ability (Card example:Tendrils of Agony)
TREASON ------- card with abilities=treason will be sacrificed at the end of the turn (Card example:Sneak Attack)
UNEARTH ------- Now without any workaround!
WILTING ------- source takes damage in the form of -1/-1 counters
VIGOR ------- instead of taking damage the source gains +1/+1 counters (Card examples:Phytohydra)

New code line starters:

BUYBACK={...} ----------- Now without any workaround.
FLASHBACK={...} ----------- Now without any workaround.
OTHER={...} (+ AUTO=ALTERNATIVE effect) -- Enables alternative casting costs (Card example:Force of Will,all cards with EVOKE)

New cost symbols:

{D} ------- Discarding a random card as additional casting/activation cost.
{E}/{E(target|zone)} ----------- Exiles something as additional casting/activation cost.
{H}/{H(target|zone)} ----------- Returns something to your hand as additional casting/activation cost.
{L} ------- life loss as additional casting/activation cost.
{M} ------- Puts a card from the top of you library as additional casting/activation cost.
{s2l} --------- "put *target|whereever* on top of your library as additional casting/activation cost.
{X}{X} --------- now 2 {X} are possible! (Card example:Decree of Justice)
{l2e} ---------- Exiles the top card of you library as additional casting/activation cost. (Card example:Arc-Slogger)

New keywords:

ONLYONECAST   -------target player can only play 1 spell this turn.
NOCREATURES  -------- target player cant play creatures this turn.
NOSPELLS   --------- target player cant play spells this turn.
LAND:number  -------  target player can play number additional lands this turn.
BLOODTHIRST --------- (Card examples:Scab-Clan Mauler)
FOG --------- This is similar to "PREVENTALLCOMBATDAMAGE", which only worked for instants and sorceries. "Fog" works only for permanents and is used in combination with the newly introduced parameter "ONESHOT"!
NAME(...) && effect -------- When used in an autoline it replaces an autoline's "ability" text with a custom ability name.
COLOR:+X/-X -------- Manacost Alteration (Card examples:Goblin Warchief,Sphere of Resistance)
PREVENT:X ------- damage prevention to single creatures and players. (Card examples:Healing Salve,Battlefield Medic)
TRANSFORMS(types or subtypes,color,ability) ------- similar to BECOMES. The main difference is that you can change single parameters of a permanent like only color or type. -- (Card examples:Memnarch,Wild Mongrel)

New Sets:

Magic2011
Arcenemy
From the Vault: Relics
Scars of Mirrodin

New variables:

LIFETOTAL(static)
OPPONENTLIFETOTAL(static)
EQUIP ---- looks if a card is equipped ["this(equip !=0) effect"] or how many artifacts are on a card ["thisforeach(equip) effect"]

New Zones:

OPPONENTHAND (Card examples:Duress,Thoughtseize)

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

download here

As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic! This release is (of course!) compatible with HBL.

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