Updates on the way.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by gmzombie » 18 Apr 2015, 15:52
Ok just wanted to know if I could do anything to help and that is usually when I can help is getting things out of the vault and disassembling them..
can I maze of ith your snowstorm?
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Korath » 26 Apr 2015, 23:30
Abilities now supported: Can't-Block, Deathtouch, Double Strike, Fear, Horsemanship, Indestructible, Infect, Intimidate, Lifelink, Shadow, Wither, Unblockable.
(I had approximations for Lifelink and Deathtouch before, based on El-Hajjaj and Thicket Basilisk, and Unblockable was implemented via card function; they're correct now, and, like the rest of these, dependent only on the ability being present. The abilities are all assigned statically, like the original ones; in Manalink, only Double Strike and Infect are. So e.g. Heirs of Stromkirk, Erdwal Ripper, and Slith Predator all share the same function instead of everything being cut-and-pasted everywhere.)
As mentioned in the first post (item c1), Manalink's magic.exe was changed at some point to look for some graphics in *.bmp filenames instead of *.pic. Shandalar now mirrors that behavior, so graphics mods should mostly Just Work. However, in a couple of instances, the change wasn't done completely: generally images are loaded when a window class is registered and, if they aren't valid when they need to actually be drawn, they're loaded again then; and for some of these, only one of the load points had its name changed. That's clearly unintentional, I have no intention of being bug-for-bug compatible, and the mods I've looked at recently all use the bmp names in these cases; so Shandalar only looks for the .bmp names for these. On the other hand, magic.exe still always looks for WINBK_StartDuelButtonDisabled.pic, not WINBK_StartDuelButtonDisabled.bmp, and all of the mods I've looked at recently try to put it at the latter, so I read it from the .bmp name too.
Individual cards can be configured to be (almost) removed from the game; they won't be sold in towns, found randomly, appear in the player's initially-owned cards, etc., so if you don't like playing with Duh, or a card ends up being too buggy to deal with, you can just turn it off. (They'll still show up in enemy decks, as the restricted dungeon treasures, and as "free" cards in dungeons and duels.)
Merfolk Shaman's deck, at least in the Shandalar installation I'm working from, had two copies of Deep Water (which isn't even implemented in Manalink). I'm not sure how the original game behaved when it showed up, but it currently crashes hard; so I've replaced much of the deck, replacing Sandals of Abdallah and the non-merfolk creatures with Triton Shorestalker, Coral Merfolk, Sejiri Merfolk (supported by Tundra), Master of the Pearl Trident, and Merfolk Sovereign. No Merrow Reejerey, Silvergill Adept, or Wake Thrasher yet, but it's a lot more challenging than the other AI decks now.
Edit: removed rarity.dat download; use the one distributed with the current version.
(I had approximations for Lifelink and Deathtouch before, based on El-Hajjaj and Thicket Basilisk, and Unblockable was implemented via card function; they're correct now, and, like the rest of these, dependent only on the ability being present. The abilities are all assigned statically, like the original ones; in Manalink, only Double Strike and Infect are. So e.g. Heirs of Stromkirk, Erdwal Ripper, and Slith Predator all share the same function instead of everything being cut-and-pasted everywhere.)
As mentioned in the first post (item c1), Manalink's magic.exe was changed at some point to look for some graphics in *.bmp filenames instead of *.pic. Shandalar now mirrors that behavior, so graphics mods should mostly Just Work. However, in a couple of instances, the change wasn't done completely: generally images are loaded when a window class is registered and, if they aren't valid when they need to actually be drawn, they're loaded again then; and for some of these, only one of the load points had its name changed. That's clearly unintentional, I have no intention of being bug-for-bug compatible, and the mods I've looked at recently all use the bmp names in these cases; so Shandalar only looks for the .bmp names for these. On the other hand, magic.exe still always looks for WINBK_StartDuelButtonDisabled.pic, not WINBK_StartDuelButtonDisabled.bmp, and all of the mods I've looked at recently try to put it at the latter, so I read it from the .bmp name too.
Individual cards can be configured to be (almost) removed from the game; they won't be sold in towns, found randomly, appear in the player's initially-owned cards, etc., so if you don't like playing with Duh, or a card ends up being too buggy to deal with, you can just turn it off. (They'll still show up in enemy decks, as the restricted dungeon treasures, and as "free" cards in dungeons and duels.)
Merfolk Shaman's deck, at least in the Shandalar installation I'm working from, had two copies of Deep Water (which isn't even implemented in Manalink). I'm not sure how the original game behaved when it showed up, but it currently crashes hard; so I've replaced much of the deck, replacing Sandals of Abdallah and the non-merfolk creatures with Triton Shorestalker, Coral Merfolk, Sejiri Merfolk (supported by Tundra), Master of the Pearl Trident, and Merfolk Sovereign. No Merrow Reejerey, Silvergill Adept, or Wake Thrasher yet, but it's a lot more challenging than the other AI decks now.
- I haven't posted for a while, so there's rather a lot of new cards to list here | Open
- Alchor's Tomb, Purelace and its four friends, and Prismatic Dragon's change-color effect. Whimsy and Faerie Dragon will be, too, if they have change-color effects; I don't remember.
- Nafs Asp still deals 1 damage (per its 4th-edition wording) instead of causing a point of life loss, but now it randomly sometimes doesn't work.
- Sometimes a blocker who dies from first strike (or double strike) damage and regenerates still deals damage to the attacker. I don't know why; the regeneration backend looks the same as in Manalink, and removes the regenerator from combat, and combat damage assignment checks whether it's been removed from combat, and still checks whether the blocker's tapped besides. It's not consistent, either, and it's driving me nuts.
- When something like Two-Headed Giant of Foriys blocks, the AI sometimes gets fake effect cards added to its hand, which it "casts" for free as creatures which die at end-of-turn. I can't think of anything I've done so far that would cause it, and can't help wondering if it was broken even before I started tinkering.
- Loading a game saved during a duel is broken for the time being. (Not permanently; I've been documenting the breakage I've caused.)
Edit: removed rarity.dat download; use the one distributed with the current version.
Last edited by Korath on 21 May 2015, 16:48, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by gmzombie » 27 Apr 2015, 18:09
i could be wrong but a quick count of cards is showing about almost 2200 cards now..this is amazing
can I maze of ith your snowstorm?
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by ElvishSpirit » 27 Apr 2015, 20:58
okay so to clarify, is there going to be one deck for each enemy, a pool of decks for each color, or a pool of decks for each enemy?
If enemies are going to have multiple choices for decks then I should have alot of fun deckbuilding for this.
If enemies are going to have multiple choices for decks then I should have alot of fun deckbuilding for this.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Korath » 27 Apr 2015, 23:01
For now, one deck per enemy. Merfolk Shaman will always use decks/0150.dck, Sedge Beast will always use decks/0219.dck, and Prismat will always use decks/0992.dck.
Eventually, ideally, I'll want to make Sedge Beast pick a random deck out of decks/0219/*.dck or something like that each duel. But I'm still distracted by making cards.
Eventually, ideally, I'll want to make Sedge Beast pick a random deck out of decks/0219/*.dck or something like that each duel. But I'm still distracted by making cards.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Aswan jaguar » 28 Apr 2015, 06:28
Deep Water was meant to be in a future expansion by original developers just like other cards that were on csv but weren't coded at the time,someone later tried to see if they will work if added to decks.MTG iso 2010 and earlier versions didn't have it on the decklist of Merfolk Shaman's deck for reference MTG iso 2010:Korath wrote:Merfolk Shaman's deck, at least in the Shandalar installation I'm working from, had two copies of Deep Water (which isn't even implemented in Manalink). I'm not sure how the original game behaved when it showed up, but it currently crashes hard; so I've replaced much of the deck,
- Merfolk Shaman (U, 4th) | Open
I don't know if it is any different on shandalar and where it reads from if a card is coded or not but in magic exe an uncoded card even if you put a coded value 1 in Manalink.csv and the card appears in deck editor without an entry in Ct_all the card isn't loaded in duel and instead the game adds basic lands instead of the uncoded card so it doesn't crash.
---
Trying to squash some bugs and playtesting.
Trying to squash some bugs and playtesting.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by jiansonz » 28 Apr 2015, 09:10
Whatever comes of this, I'm excited just following this thread.
At least Faerie Dragon can change the color of a permanent - I don't remember about Whimsy.
@Korath: have you been looking at solving the bug in Shandalar with Spirit Link on a creature with Trample? (As it is now: during combat, you gain life equal to the power of the Spirit Linked creature, then you gain life AGAIN for the points that are dealt as Trample damage. This is not how it's supposed to work, right?)
At least Faerie Dragon can change the color of a permanent - I don't remember about Whimsy.
@Korath: have you been looking at solving the bug in Shandalar with Spirit Link on a creature with Trample? (As it is now: during combat, you gain life equal to the power of the Spirit Linked creature, then you gain life AGAIN for the points that are dealt as Trample damage. This is not how it's supposed to work, right?)
Re: Updates on the way.
by Korath » 28 Apr 2015, 11:21
Not specifically, though I was reminded of it - or, rather, the analagous situation with lifelink - while fixing a bad interaction with Archangel of Thune. (The straightforward implementation causes two lifegain events instead of one if a creature with lifelink splits its damage between two blockers, so the archangel gave two counters instead of one. Even further off topic, I wasn't able to find a ruling on whether a creature with lifelink and an ability like "T: This creature deals 1 damage to each creature" produces one lifegain event for each creature it's simultaneously dealing damage to, or just one total, so I picked one - I think the latter - and made it easy to switch if I happened to be wrong.)
I understand the combat damage function better now, and the problem's that it's (of course) using fourth edition-era trample rules, which, once you're past the veneer of common cases, work very differently from modern ones. The end result is usually the same except in corner cases like this one, and it'd be significant effort to rewrite it. The lifelink symptom might be treatable, but Spirit Link - which triggers separately and later - probably will need the complete rewrite. So I'm putting this off as not worth the effort.
I understand the combat damage function better now, and the problem's that it's (of course) using fourth edition-era trample rules, which, once you're past the veneer of common cases, work very differently from modern ones. The end result is usually the same except in corner cases like this one, and it'd be significant effort to rewrite it. The lifelink symptom might be treatable, but Spirit Link - which triggers separately and later - probably will need the complete rewrite. So I'm putting this off as not worth the effort.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by gmzombie » 28 Apr 2015, 13:06
so curious with what you know now about adding in keywords is it possible to do the same in manalink or is that to far gone to do the simple add ins to maybe make the game except those extra keywords you have added in already?
can I maze of ith your snowstorm?
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Korath » 28 Apr 2015, 14:33
It could be done. It could have always been done.
Adding abilities isn't especially complicated. There's basically three things that need to be done, and all of them have been well-understood for a long time:
The workable, long-term solution is to add the abilities to new columns in ct_all.csv; change ct2exe to output another .dat file containing the data in those columns, and read that in at boot-time.
...and then, waste three weeks going through all the now-redundant card functions and combining them. No thanks.
Adding abilities isn't especially complicated. There's basically three things that need to be done, and all of them have been well-understood for a long time:
- Get the data from somewhere, and put it in a new struct. More on that in a moment.
- At very start of the EVENT_ABILITIES section of get_abilities(), add the abilities to the card, at the same time as cards_data[].static_abilities are.
- Move create_a_card_type() at 0x4A6500 into C if it's not there already (it'll be about four lines; it just finds the first empty entry in the dynamic card types at the end of cards_data[], memcpy's the cards_data entry given to it as a parameter into that entry, and returns the new internal_card_id; or else pop up the "AddType error: No room in CT to add another type" message if all entries are full); and add another line to copy the extra data too.
- Those entries in the new abilities struct that are dynamically created via create_a_card_type() - the last 16 - need to be saved and loaded in both savegames and for AI speculation, too, but that's easy to do now; just add them to BACKUP_AND_SAVE_LIST in ai.c.
The workable, long-term solution is to add the abilities to new columns in ct_all.csv; change ct2exe to output another .dat file containing the data in those columns, and read that in at boot-time.
...and then, waste three weeks going through all the now-redundant card functions and combining them. No thanks.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by gmzombie » 28 Apr 2015, 16:45
well that is why i ask alot of questions. otherwise we dont know
can I maze of ith your snowstorm?
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
http://home.comcast.net/~gmzombie/index.html old stuff in here. don't use this stuff right now till I get time to get back into it and readjust.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Bog Wraith » 28 Apr 2015, 19:20
Is it possible that we could change some other aspects of the game such as writing new quiz questions for the Lairs, Dungeons & Castles that the player must answer correctly or face a random enemy if they get it wrong.
I would also like to add new types of quests that are offered in the villages, along with adding to the lore of Shandalar when a player goes to "Speak to Wise Man" in the villages.
There are other things like this I'd love to add new elements to.
Let me know if any of this is possible because I'd really like to work on these items to help modernize and expand on to this great realm!
I would also like to add new types of quests that are offered in the villages, along with adding to the lore of Shandalar when a player goes to "Speak to Wise Man" in the villages.
There are other things like this I'd love to add new elements to.
Let me know if any of this is possible because I'd really like to work on these items to help modernize and expand on to this great realm!
'Twas in the bogs of Cannelbrae
My mate did meet an early grave
'Twas nothing left for us to save
In the peat-filled bogs of Cannelbrae.
My mate did meet an early grave
'Twas nothing left for us to save
In the peat-filled bogs of Cannelbrae.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Korath » 28 Apr 2015, 20:37
I can't say for sure yes or no yet; I understand the Shandalar parts of Shandalar much less well than the duel parts. Fewer giants to stand on the shoulders of.
As an almost-completely baseless guess, I can't imagine that quizzes will be difficult. (I can't check at the moment.) The logic can't be complex, and they'll use text I can search for.
Quests probably will be; I tried briefly about a month ago to try to track down why you don't always get told whether and what kind of card you'll need for the get-a-mana-link-and-a-jewel quest, and promptly got lost.
I did have occasion to look into the lairs (the little cemeteries and sunken ships and so on that pop up on the map) the other day, since I was curious whether there was any disabled code for the nonexistent "Restless Graveyard", "Hallowed Ground", "Active Volcano", "Faerie Glade", and "Hidden Lagoon" types listed in @LAIR_NAMES in AdvStrings.txt. (There isn't.) Adding new types of these, or changing the existing ones, shouldn't be difficult at all.
In any case, start building a wishlist.
Here's a start:
As an almost-completely baseless guess, I can't imagine that quizzes will be difficult. (I can't check at the moment.) The logic can't be complex, and they'll use text I can search for.
Quests probably will be; I tried briefly about a month ago to try to track down why you don't always get told whether and what kind of card you'll need for the get-a-mana-link-and-a-jewel quest, and promptly got lost.
I did have occasion to look into the lairs (the little cemeteries and sunken ships and so on that pop up on the map) the other day, since I was curious whether there was any disabled code for the nonexistent "Restless Graveyard", "Hallowed Ground", "Active Volcano", "Faerie Glade", and "Hidden Lagoon" types listed in @LAIR_NAMES in AdvStrings.txt. (There isn't.) Adding new types of these, or changing the existing ones, shouldn't be difficult at all.
In any case, start building a wishlist.
Here's a start:
- More different things you can get from Dice in dungeons, and especially change the "you-get-a-random-creature-or-artifact-from-your-library" thing so you don't get guaranteed the one gigantic creature in your deck. Shivan Dragon was bad enough; now there's things like Blightsteel Colossus on the way. (I still have some original Microprose cards to reimplement before the graveyard trigger works properly.)
- More things you can get from Wise Men. Maybe "Hey, want to buy this card, one time offer!". Should be easier than quests, which have to stick around for a while, be displayed in the lower right, and get saved and loaded.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by Bog Wraith » 28 Apr 2015, 22:54
Ok, understood.
I agree that text element resources should be able to be expanded & updated. I'm not a programmer in any way, but I do know that text files can be altered and the program can be made to call for those files when they are triggered.
Yes the Lairs I mentioned are exactly what you touched on and that too seems that it can be expanded on.
As for a wish list, I & I'm sure others, will be thinking of these kinds of changes & additions that we'd like to see implemented, keeping in mind the limitations and workarounds that will be necessary in order for any of these ideas to function within Shandalar. All this plus the CCGHQ community building a new series of decks for the creatures who roam Arzakon's most wanted prize, will help to redefine and reenergize this plane we all love to travel to.
The good thing is that there is no time limit or rush to get all this done and that you'll have quite a few folks wanting to lend a hand in fleshing out what can be eventually customized for this new version of the campaign game.
I agree that text element resources should be able to be expanded & updated. I'm not a programmer in any way, but I do know that text files can be altered and the program can be made to call for those files when they are triggered.
Yes the Lairs I mentioned are exactly what you touched on and that too seems that it can be expanded on.
As for a wish list, I & I'm sure others, will be thinking of these kinds of changes & additions that we'd like to see implemented, keeping in mind the limitations and workarounds that will be necessary in order for any of these ideas to function within Shandalar. All this plus the CCGHQ community building a new series of decks for the creatures who roam Arzakon's most wanted prize, will help to redefine and reenergize this plane we all love to travel to.
The good thing is that there is no time limit or rush to get all this done and that you'll have quite a few folks wanting to lend a hand in fleshing out what can be eventually customized for this new version of the campaign game.
'Twas in the bogs of Cannelbrae
My mate did meet an early grave
'Twas nothing left for us to save
In the peat-filled bogs of Cannelbrae.
My mate did meet an early grave
'Twas nothing left for us to save
In the peat-filled bogs of Cannelbrae.
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Re: Updates on the way.
by ElvishSpirit » 30 Apr 2015, 02:21
okay so, before this release, is there any enemy (or enemies) you haven't made an updated deck for? Because I'd be happy to do them and I can start asap
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