Original Artwork

[Huggybaby]

I just installed the game from the 2010 iso and everything is working great!
Now I just wondered if it is possible to get the original card art (in Shandalar). I haven't played magic since revised and I prefer the original artwork (nostalgia). I saw that the original artwork was still there in the CardArtNew folder, but i have no idea how to change it so the game uses the original artwork.

I hope someone can help me with this.

Thanks in advance,

Maxer

[braingeyser]

Maxer, me too, I just want to play Shandalar using the old card arts. I don't really like the new Shivan Dragon and others, hehe.

I hope someone can help us in fixing this.

[braingeyser]

Maxer, I think I've found a way to fix it!

Look what I did and try, if you want, to do the same:

1) Close the game and go to Magic\Program.

2) Make a copy of the entire folder "CardArtNew", so if you mess with something during the process, you can recover the original files
3) Inside the "CardArtNew" folder you'll see that many have similar names. They're the different options of card art to the same card. The "Air Elemental" card art is the file "0000.jpg" AND "0000A.jpg", "0000B.jpg" and so on.

4) Delete all the multiples, keeping only the older/original card art for each card. In the example of "Air Elemental", delete all but the "0000C.jpg" file.

5) After you delete all the multiples, rename all the files that remained to "????.jpg" so they won't have letters in their file names, like "????A.jpg". If you don't take the letters, the game won't read the files correctly and the card arts won't appear.

If you did all the steps correctly, now when you open the game all the card arts that appear will be the ones you left. The ones you deleted won't appear anymore, and the game will look 100% the old fashioned way we like.

I did this here and it worked. I couldn't check all the cards yet because I don't have them all in my saved games, but I checked all the cards you can get through "Trade amulets for cards" and they all have the card arts I choose.

Anyway, sorry for my bad english, I'm brazilian. I hope I helped.

[CirothUngol]

Wait, the original art is the first , not the last.
Open DeckBuilder and the art displayed is the image without the *A.jpg, *B.jpg, etc.
Incidently, I believe that the number of images displayed is located in the Manalink.csv file, Colum #16 "Num Pics". Change all these to "1" and it might fix your problem(?).

[braingeyser]

You know, I though I had successfully fixed the problem, but I didn't fixed it.

What happened was that during gameplay all cards had the arts I've choose (by leaving the files in that folder). But during duels, even inside Shandalar, many cards appeared without art - I think because the game system implies that the arts got to vary, and I deleted all the multiples.

So I had to undo everythind - and yeah, don't do that, Maxer, it won't work and it will be a lot of useless work. Sorry.

Now what you said, CirothUngol, how can I do that? I mean, there is not a "Manalink.csv" file and I couldn't even find a "Num Pics" column in any of the .csv files I have in the game folder. Can you explain it better to me, please?

Thank you for the attention!

[braingeyser]

I had another idea and I think this one might work just fine, but it's a lot of work to do and I still didn't had time to do it.

Anyway, the idea is make copies of the original art file and rename those copies as the files which were the original multiples. In the Air Elemental example, I would delete all but one of the .jpg files, and them make a copy of the one file I've left, then I would just rename those copies as the files I've deleted. The game would read them all as usual because they're files that exist in the correct folder and have the proper names, and the arts would be the one I choose - even with the game reading multiple files (all with the same art).

It would work, wouldn't it?

[Sonic]

Read the wiki on 'Card Art File Naming / Personalising the CardArt Folders', about half way down the page.

http://www.slightlymagic.net/wiki/How_t ... ard_Images

Or read the instructions provided in the ISO update. There are instructions how to re-order the artwork in the pdf file.

The artwork as supplied is ordered from the earliest WotC MTG published artwork to the latest – this means the earliest released artwork has been set as the default image displayed in the Deck Editor.

I wouldn't recommend removing any of the alternative artwork - as you'll find the cards will occasionally display no artwork if you do. The number of images available to a card is set in the manalink.cvs file and if the program fails to find an image in the alphabetic sequence it just displays a blank.

braingeyser - yes, that would work

Or if there is enough demand - I could just create a separate manalink.cvs which is preset to display a single image for each card.

Voting starts now!

[CirothUngol]

...what tool do you use for manipulating the .csv files? I'm writing a .cmd script to scan the PlayDecks and .csv files, but I need a Command-Line Utility to convert the .csv to a Vertically Oriented text file. The only one I found was incapable of handling the extra-long Manalink entries (FROMCSV.EXE from Kilowatt Software's Poof! collection), and doing it directly in Batch has proven difficult/impossible (thanx to Windoze Command-Line restrictions and double-quoted entries). Any help?

[Sonic]

...what tool do you use for manipulating the .csv files? I'm writing a .cmd script to scan the PlayDecks and .csv files, but I need a Command-Line Utility to convert the .csv to a Vertically Oriented text file. The only one I found was incapable of handling the extra-long Manalink entries (FROMCSV.EXE from Kilowatt Software's Poof! collection), and doing it directly in Batch has proven difficult/impossible (thanx to Windoze Command-Line restrictions and double-quoted entries). Any help?

I can't really help with command line or batch tools for use with the manalink file.

I used a combination of Excel, Word, and Wordpad, to do the bulk of the text and formatting correction work in the file.

Any remaining individual errors were simply corrected using the Skymagic editor.
I just tend to use this to add any new alternative artwork to the file now.

[braingeyser]

"braingeyser - yes, that would work"

Yes, it worked!

I lost some time renaming all the multiples but at least it worked just fine. Now the game looks just like I wanted it to.

Thank you all for the attention!