New to Xmage, have questions and possible bugs to report.

[Ratha]

Im new to using Xmage and while its a little rough around the edges in places, it seems to be pretty usable. Its allowed me to play my first game of magic with a friend from childhood after about 15 years, thanks! Got a few questions and would love if anyone could give a little help here:

1: I am an owner of the MTG 2012 and 2013 Duels games and was curious if anyone had built these decks for use with Xmage. I have resorted to grabbing the deck list of these cards and trying to build the decks myself, putting the 20/30 of the unlockable cards into the sideboards.. its quite the task. Especially in the case when some cards do not yet exist in Xmage apparently. (Celestial Force, Hostility, Flame Wave, Fangren Firstborn just to name a few from the first couple of M13 Duels of the Planeswalker decks.) My question: What is a good resource for downloading 'official' decks and does anyone know if these decks specifically have already been created/exported by someone else?

2: I cannot seem to get tokens to display card art. Ive downloaded the entire set of cards as far as i can tell, and have even found a zip file called TOK.zip which appears to have assorted tokens in it. But multiple creature tokens (all of them that ive seen so far) seem to not display. M10's "Howl of the Night Pack" creates artless wolves for example. This also applied to EVG's goblin tokens created by playing "Mogg War Marshal" and M15 soldier tokens. Theres no folder for M15 inside the TOK.zip though.

Interface questions/quirks:

3: Is there any way to move the zoomed in card art and/or the turn phase indicator from the right-hand side of the screen to the left hand side where the rest of the card/health/status information is? On a wide screen monitor its a little disorienting to constantly look back and forth all the time when all of your cards are on the extreme left, and the big image/turn indicator is on the far right.

4: Is there any way to make the card art in the player's hand and or on the field larger by default? Everything is so small that i constantly feel like im squinting into the screen. Am running 1920x1080 resolution and there appears to be a fair bit of wasted screen space within the UI.

Possible bugs w/ 1.3.0.dev2014-08-30:

5: In multiple games against the AI i have noticed that it simply stops playing cards after a certain point. In one game the other night it had about 10 land, and 8 cards in its hand, no creatures on the field, and simply stopped playing things and discarded a spell it could have cast. The AI may have been glitchy on its main phases as it was taking about 30-45 seconds to do nothing, doing nothing, then passing This was on difficulty 10. On another occasion the AI stopped attacking and blocking even though it had valid attacks, it would still occasionally play cards though. Is the AI known to break like this? Couldnt find posts with people talking about such issues. All testing was done on a local server.

6: "Ib halfheart, Goblin Tactician" causes you to sac blocked creatures, but those creatures do not do 4 damage to each creature blocking them.

7: Was unable to setup a server behind a NAT router that someone other than myself could connect to even after forwarding the proper TCP+UDP port. A few posts on this forum have said that a server cannot be run behind NAT. When i attempted to connect to my friend's server it said 'cannot connect to [friend's computer name]' Its strange that it was able to return the name of his computer, but wasn't able to connect? I also tried setting up a server, and even tried replacing the 0.0.0.0 IP address in the server config.xml file with my external IP. Couldnt get it working. Is this a hard limitation of the server software, that it simply -cant- be run behind NAT, or did we just do something wrong?

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Thanks for any help you guys can give.

[LevelX]

1: I am an owner of the MTG 2012 and 2013 Duels games and was curious if anyone had built these decks for use with Xmage. I have resorted to grabbing the deck list of these cards and trying to build the decks myself, putting the 20/30 of the unlockable cards into the sideboards.. its quite the task. Especially in the case when some cards do not yet exist in Xmage apparently. (Celestial Force, Hostility, Flame Wave, Fangren Firstborn just to name a few from the first couple of M13 Duels of the Planeswalker decks.) My question: What is a good resource for downloading 'official' decks and does anyone know if these decks specifically have already been created/exported by someone else?

You can import .dec files and decks in txt format. E.g. the download from the Daily MTG of Wizards can be easily imported. Existing sample decks are in the ../mage-client/release/sample-decks/ folder. I add there from time to time decks from the wizards site od the preconstructed decks.
If you import a text file, the import shows you which cards does not exist in XMage.

2: I cannot seem to get tokens to display card art. Ive downloaded the entire set of cards as far as i can tell, and have even found a zip file called TOK.zip which appears to have assorted tokens in it. But multiple creature tokens (all of them that ive seen so far) seem to not display. M10's "Howl of the Night Pack" creates artless wolves for example. This also applied to EVG's goblin tokens created by playing "Mogg War Marshal" and M15 soldier tokens. Theres no folder for M15 inside the TOK.zip though.

M15 tokens are not added to download yet because they are missing here: http://magiccards.info/extras.html. If they exist there, we add it to the download logic. You can add them manually (as you already find out) by adding the images to the TOK.zip file in a folder M15.
The token images you mentioned e.g. the wolves from Innistrad are shown on my system (I tested it now). So check if the wolve image 1 to 3 are in your TOK.zip/ISD/ directory. If not it's a problem of the images download. If yes, I don't know (restart of client you did test I guess).

Interface questions/quirks:

3: Is there any way to move the zoomed in card art and/or the turn phase indicator from the right-hand side of the screen to the left hand side where the rest of the card/health/status information is? On a wide screen monitor its a little disorienting to constantly look back and forth all the time when all of your cards are on the extreme left, and the big image/turn indicator is on the far right.

You can zoom the card with the wheel of the mouse. It's more convinient in my opionion. I don't even show the right panel normally.

4: Is there any way to make the card art in the player's hand and or on the field larger by default? Everything is so small that i constantly feel like im squinting into the screen. Am running 1920x1080 resolution and there appears to be a fair bit of wasted screen space within the UI.

No there is no way to make it larger. But maybe to show the enlarged view with mouse wheel helps to get used to.


Possible bugs w/ 1.3.0.dev2014-08-30:

5: In multiple games against the AI i have noticed that it simply stops playing cards after a certain point. In one game the other night it had about 10 land, and 8 cards in its hand, no creatures on the field, and simply stopped playing things and discarded a spell it could have cast. The AI may have been glitchy on its main phases as it was taking about 30-45 seconds to do nothing, doing nothing, then passing This was on difficulty 10. On another occasion the AI stopped attacking and blocking even though it had valid attacks, it would still occasionally play cards though. Is the AI known to break like this? Couldnt find posts with people talking about such issues. All testing was done on a local server.

Yes I know that bug. AI is not in development focus. Maybe if Human vs. Human development needs less work I will look into it. But probably not in the near future. Maybe another talented developer takes the AI as his priority. But I doubt it.

6: "Ib halfheart, Goblin Tactician" causes you to sac blocked creatures, but those creatures do not do 4 damage to each creature blocking them.

Yes a bug. It's fixed in the next update.

7: Was unable to setup a server behind a NAT router that someone other than myself could connect to even after forwarding the proper TCP+UDP port. A few posts on this forum have said that a server cannot be run behind NAT. When i attempted to connect to my friend's server it said 'cannot connect to [friend's computer name]' Its strange that it was able to return the name of his computer, but wasn't able to connect? I also tried setting up a server, and even tried replacing the 0.0.0.0 IP address in the server config.xml file with my external IP. Couldnt get it working. Is this a hard limitation of the server software, that it simply -cant- be run behind NAT, or did we just do something wrong?

I guess it's not that JBoss Remoting (what XMage uses for the client server communiaction)is not able to work behind a NAT. But I guess some parameters are not set the way they have to be to work in this scenario. Invested already a lot of time to this problem with no success. So I'm not very optimistic it's easy to solve.
If you like look into the manual, maybe you find some hint/idea what to change/set.
http://docs.jboss.org/jbossremoting/2.5 ... userguide/
Edit: The connection to the server creates always 6 TCP connections on different ports. On server side 4 (or 5)are set to the port given at server start (e.g. 17171 for the public server). But there are always two additional connections made with each client on a random port on the server (e.g. currently 57858 on public server). But this second port is randomly choosen each time the server is started. So if you don't free this second port it can't work. That can be the reason the name of the server is shown, but the communication at all does not work. But that's probaly not the only problem.

Here an example of connections of one client connected to the server

Code: Select all

java    343 root   54u  IPv6          170061720      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:17171->94.239.158.166:50856 (ESTABLISHED)
java    343 root   86u  IPv6          170183376      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:57858->94.239.158.166:51390 (ESTABLISHED)
java    343 root  178u  IPv6          170061908      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:17171->94.239.158.166:50857 (ESTABLISHED)
java    343 root  427u  IPv6          170060459      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:17171->94.239.158.166:50852 (ESTABLISHED)
java    343 root  428u  IPv6          170060488      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:57858->94.239.158.166:50853 (ESTABLISHED)
java    343 root  431u  IPv6          170061342      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:17171->94.239.158.166:50854 (ESTABLISHED)
java    343 root  435u  IPv6          170061721      0t0       TCP 176.31.186.181:17171->94.239.158.166:50855 (ESTABLISHED)


[Ratha]

Thanks a ton for answering all my questions, didnt expect to get anywhere near as detailed of a response. :)

Didnt realize you could import decks in .txt format. I edited one of the .dck files and thought to myself 'if i have to figure out what expansion the card came from as well as know the exact name, i might as well just add the cards manually anyway' Being able to copy/paste to a text file and import it will save -tons- of time. Thanks!

Regarding the tokens. Will have to play around with token generation a bit more. I have wolf tokens in my M10 folder as well as ISD, so I am not sure why that card didnt show token art when played. Definitely didnt have wolf image #3 in the ISD folder though. Will construct a deck and test it specifically a little later.

About zooming, i dont have a mouse wheel on my mouse for somewhat complicated reasons. While it would be nice to have a wheel, i need a more reliable middle button than i do a wheel so i stick with my old mouse instead. Is there any way to use Mouse #3 (middle button/mouse wheel click) to zoom a card? (Similar to how ALT+E works currently: hold down middle mouse to zoom cards instead?) I suppose this function could possibly be mapped with a macro program, but if there was a way to do it in the XMage config files, that would be optimal since middle click is used for a ton of things. Would have to disable the macro every time i swapped out of the client while waiting on a friend to make their move.

Aside from the ability to rebind the zoom/F-key functions to easier to reach/easier to press keys, i sure wish that i could move the display card or the turn/phase indicator over to the left side of the screen, but maybe it will just take some getting used to. Anyway, thanks again for answering all my questions, im sure there will be more once i have proper examples to give. For example, there seems to be instances where i cant untap my mana after paying too much for an ability (due to lag?) but i dont know under which specific circumstances it occurs at the moment. Once i figure that out ill ask about whether thats a bug or intended or what. Appreciate the help.

[LevelX]

7: Was unable to setup a server behind a NAT router that someone other than myself could connect to even after forwarding the proper TCP+UDP port. A few posts on this forum have said that a server cannot be run behind NAT. When i attempted to connect to my friend's server it said 'cannot connect to [friend's computer name]' Its strange that it was able to return the name of his computer, but wasn't able to connect? I also tried setting up a server, and even tried replacing the 0.0.0.0 IP address in the server config.xml file with my external IP. Couldnt get it working. Is this a hard limitation of the server software, that it simply -cant- be run behind NAT, or did we just do something wrong?

Added today an option to config.xml of the server to set the secondaryBindPort to a explicit value (e.g. port 17179). So maybe give it a new try to run the server behind a NAT with that option set to a port you forward.