Updates on the way.

[dingbat1]

Just because you think the design decisions are stupid, doesn't make them automatically so, and much less "obviously stupid". I, and I'm sure many others, like some of those decisions. I'm also not a noob, and was playing Shandalar when it first came out.
While I agree that there are some things I prefer weren't there, for the most part I think the designers did an excellent job of translating a card game into a computer game. The operative term being "computer game", not "computer simulation of a game". If you're not sure what that means, compare Railroad Tycoon to 1830 or Civilization to its board game (or Risk to Shogun Total War).

The other thing to keep in mind is that the unmodded game was actually very balanced. For creatures, deck strength and life totals sort of match up, and creates a more believable world of weaker and stronger creatures, as well as allowing the player to take on progressively harder challenges. Likewise, the starting deck is pretty crappy, and would be horrible for playing a full game of 20 life each.
Sure, some of the world magics are worthless, and yes, the AI does make some stupid decisions from time to time, but altogether it was a great game at the time, and still holds up well today. Kind of like Magic itself (Despite not having the same polish as newer sets, Unlimited and Arabian Nights are still great to play, even if there are some weird design decisions; let's not talk about the quality of the other early expansions)

It would be nice if certain features could be turned on or off, but on a whole, those features are what make Shandalar special.

[Korath]

Is the Arcane "proper" or hacked? I think I remember you saying changing card subtypes was being a pain so big congrats if you managed to get it in. Lot's of spirits in the pool already, the more soulshift and arcane to play with them the better

Adding a new subtype printed on a card is easy. The problem is adding or removing one to a specific card on the battlefield. (Maybe in this coming version; I have space to store the data now.)

I've mostly avoided Arcane cards, since I don't plan on getting around to splice anytime soon, each of the arcane cards will have to be rewritten when I do get around to splice, and the majority of arcane cards are not-terribly-interesting copies of other cards with Arcane and a minor drawback (sorcery speed, extra casting cost, etc.) tacked on. Cleanfall was an oversight, but Peer Through Depths is interesting in its own right.

Irritatingly, all the soulshift cards in Manalink are now in the game. Kamigawa block was well before the 2000-iid limit was broken, and I don't think Manalink's revisited it since it came out.

[lujo]

The other thing to keep in mind is that the unmodded game was actually very balanced.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

| Open

But I'm done debating this. Bottom line is very simple - I just wait until Korath is done doing what he's doing, and in a few years just apply sensible fixes to Shandalar and make it available. I've actually enabled all spirits to be played in pre-combat on my end and this made spirit decks actually work. Most people here wouldn't be able to tell many things don't work, why, or how things are supposed to work. That wouldn't be a problem, but it means that the end product is going to be incredibly easy to improve upon.

I've seen it before, I worked on a beta for a rather good game, but as things happen developers were spending more time coding and giving interviews than playing the game, so a bunch of us testers got a lot better at understanding it than them. We tried to argue to them to make a very sensible change to it, they wouldn't because "it interfered with their vision and it would be terrible and ruin it". We told them that it's so sensible that it's the first thing that will get modded when the game is out, by anyone with half a brain and more coding skills than us. The got mad and temporarily banned us from the forums, because they really didn't understand. They claimed it would be a ton of work to implement it, they got really irrational about stuff. It became a sore point in the community and onone was to speak about it because it showed just how incompetent these people were at things other than telling a machine how to do maths. But they thought they "won", and still do.

What happened? As soon as the game went live, a guy who had some coding skills showed up on the forums. I sent him a PM, and asked him if he could tweak that one thing. He did it in an afternoon. I distributed the mod to everybody via PM's. And from that point on everbody who was anybody in the community was playing that, and we just never told the idiots. It didn't ruin anything, and it brought a ton of people who had given up on the game back. *And all the time people would show up and ask for this feature, be told by the devs about how that would ruin the game and how it was considered and how the "explained" to beta testers that it was bad and all that, and then the newbie would just get a PM, thank us, and the fools would remain fools. I stopped distributing it, though, because I wan't interested in helping fools keep their customers.

This is basically the same situation, except I've been here before and am older enough to know whats going to happen. I'm not saying any of these things for my sake. I'll just keep reporting bugs for a while, hopefully in a more helpful way, and things are going to go the way things go.

Take the spirit example below - if I posted an updated exe and a few other files with my tweaks to the csv for spirits, the game would have functional spirit decks. But if I tried to convince folks here that this solves actual problems, people would be cautious and hesitant to download it, and I would have to manually update it every time Korath made an update unless I could convince him to do it. Why bother right now? I know I'm right, I just have to wait until other people are done with what they'd do anyway and then do my thing. I just hoped that things could actually be done sooner rather than later and in a way where noone ends up looking like an idiot afterwards, but since they can't - oh, well, few more years isn't that much.

---

@Korath: Spirits have triggers when you play Spirit or Arcane spells. There's currently no way to trigger those but with creatures, which means that by default they can only be triggered by the AI at sorcery speed in the post-combat main phase. Since most of those are meant to be triggered before combat to make any sense I'll assume you can draw conclusions from that yourself and that it just hasn't occured to you because you're unfamiliar with those particular cards and are porting them in bulk.

Having 3-4 arcane cards per color would make a lot of things possible as opposed to impossible, even without splice. And the quality of cards in a vacuum is irrelevant - you can't possibly tell from the player perspective what's actually better for the AI and what's worse. For the AI, say, a 5cc Threaten is actually more usable than a while a 3cc one isn't, as stupid as that sounds. There's also a severe lack of "bad" cards for early decks anyway, which is part of why noone's really able to make non-overwhelming ones.

If the idea of having to rewrite them again for splice is the main reason for them not being in yet, no probs, that makes actual sense. But otherwise, having a bunch of of them in every color would do spirits already in more good than soulshift, honestly. Not intuitive, I suppose, but there you have it. Also probably why there might be fewer soulshift cards than arcane ones in manalink.

---

Say, there's one thing I could do to help in a way which doesn't involve challenging anyone's perceptions, dogmas and intellect. How does one add cards to manalink? Really, I'd be happy to just sit there and add them all day long, simple ones that take a lot of insight to know what they're for and have motivation to do any amount of work to get them in.

If someone could spare the time to clue me in on how that works (I've heard a lot of info is outdated), I could quietly and non-intrusively help that way. EDIT: NVM, I found what Korath said on the subject, lemme just see if I understand it well enough. I suck at computers, that's what I'm terrible at.

[dingbat1]

Say, there's one thing I could do to help in a way which doesn't involve challenging anyone's perceptions, dogmas and intellect. How does one add cards to manalink? Really, I'd be happy to just sit there and add them all day long, simple ones that take a lot of insight to know what they're for and have motivation to do any amount of work to get them in.

If someone could spare the time to clue me in on how that works (I've heard a lot of info is outdated), I could quietly and non-intrusively help that way. EDIT: NVM, I found what Korath said on the subject, lemme just see if I understand it well enough. I suck at computers, that's what I'm terrible at.

If it's relatively easy, I'd be happy to help put in cards that are easy but other people can't be bothered with, such as Homelands.
(can you point me it?)

[lujo]

From what I've seen so far, if the card is simple enough or similar enough, it's pretty much mostly about translating a row of relatively obscure flags in one file into a row of different, relatively obscure cards in another file. And locating the art. If I manage to get even one in properly I'll tell you (but if you're less of a complete failure at code than I am, just look at the thread I made in the manalink forum today, you'll figure it out faster than I could, Korath posted some links to where he explained it before).

On the other hand there's the fact that if a card would need specific code, even simple code, it would need more than that, which is why, I suppose, most of these aren't in. Still, that's not hard to do for a lot of them, if you just know how (I don't). "Rebuild ManalinkEh.asm" for example doesn't mean anything to me - rebuild with what? after doing what to it? It's probably very simple if you know anything at all about programming.

Edit: Or ever screwier. The only thing that seems to be preventing me from porting Feast of the Unicorn into Manalink, from my clueless perspective, is that I have no clue what to change the code address into or how to assign one (or what it is or where it is or anything about it except what it's function is - something about containing code for particular cards). Actually coding it I can do (or at least tweaking existing code into it until I get it right), probably even figure out which of the two things to write in the manalinkeh.asm along with the address (if it's not one it's the other), maybe even figure out what you need to click to build it (without understanding what "build" means, or what to do then)... But how the hell do I determine the adress, lol? If I knew that, I think I could even EXPLAIN how to port cards into manalink to someone else See, the will is there, if that's really all there is to it I could've ported a dozen cards by now. If assigning an address took a hour, I could've assigned a bunch of them. If it takes a minute once you know how... why not explain it? I don't even know what to look for on the forums, and if I knew it everyone benefits, what gives? I mean, give the info and a week, you got a manalink update and no such thing as not-in-manalink, as long as it's not de-facto impossible to code (and no perl scripts either). Would've done it weeks ago. And then after that no such thing as "I didn't think this card would be useful even though I could've ported it" for shandalar, either, because all it would take is me realizing the card isn't in yet while a mechanicaly identical card is. But as is - can anyone explain how to assign a code address?

I mean, do the math, if I can do this, all Korath has to do is port one card of a type and give me the list of stuff he thinks uses that code for cards already in manalink. Why hasn't anyone suggested this already, actually ?

[Thesaguy]

Man, thanks for your in-depth feedback!

Really like some of your proposals to improve the Worldmagics.
Like the idea of Worldmagics unlocking card sets. Adding that to any useless Worldmagics would make it a must have 

Would you like to discuss possible features here or just open a ticket?

Is the map sized fixed or can you make it larger?

If the map was larger, the worldmagics would be more useful. Let’s say you could make the world four times as big, with the same amount of towns. Then you’d have to walk a lot further to each city.
The different terrain segments would be much larger, so it would be harder to just sidestep enemies by going on a different terrain.

The Swamp/Mountain walk (Dwarven Pick, Amulet of Swampwalk) would be a lot handier, since currently the terrain segments would be larger.
Leap of Fate much better.
Fruit of Sustenance would be a little better 



The below is probably not possible, but thought I’d throw it out there.
Possibility of buying buildings in towns.

You mentioned slowing down sieges. It would be nice if one could buy walls for towns. A wood wall would slow it down by 1 day a stone wall by 3 days.
Gem mine. Would give you 1 gem every 10 days or something like that. Depending on what terrain the city is, will affect the color of the gem.
Market Upgrades. (or maybe a Worldmagics feature). Increase the money you get for selling cards. (10%, 20%...)
Farm – Generates 1 Food every 5 days.



Anyways, can’t wait for future updates!

[dingbat1]

Lujo, i'm going to wait until you figure it out completely, so that you can teach me and we can leave Korath to the more important work.

[lujo]

It seems like the only thing that's keeping me from doing it is not knowing how to assign the address or what to do with that. Feast of the Unicorn - it looks like it doesn't take all that much fiddling with either .csv row (existing one or the new one). If the cards folder contains code for individual cards like it seems it does, then all the code it needs is there, too (I've compared it with similar cards). The file with a big list of ";adress" comments next to all the cards in manalink.csv has it on the list, and has a comment noting a hex value next to it. I tried putting that down as the address in the ct_all.csv and compiling it, but no dice. Shows up in deckbuilder, doesn't show up in duels. I must be doing something wrong somewhere.

That card's 99% in manalink, except...

I'm able to follow every step I've seen mentioned whenever Korath was explaining, except all I know about assigning the address is that doing that "and applying it in all the places is always a hassle". How do you even DO it? I think that's all the info that's needed, and I can't seem to figure that out on my own. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be a hassle to me if I just knew what was where and what I was supposed to do. Or even how to find that out.

Every other card that takes this little effort besides that step can pretty much be in manalink tomorrow, from what I can see. You just open up a new tab in the "other view" in notepad++, take the first row from both .csv's into separate tabs, put everything separated by ; into it's own row and then editing .csv's becomes quick and easy without any scripts, art's pretty straightforward and everything simple enough seems to be sort of coded for manalink allready. But you can't do anything if the whole address thing doesn't get explained.

So, how do you assign addresses? What to do with them?

[lujo]

Nope, I really was a moron and it really was simpler than I thought it was. I was somehow editing the wrong Ct_all.csv, which is odd because I thought I only had 1 Ct_all.csv to begin with I've no idea where the other one came from. Terminal inexperience with the process and the files involved on my part.

Anyway, I'll check to see if I messed anything up and see if I can update manalink to the latest release just in case and get, idk, Penumbra Kavu in as well, to see if I really got it. It seems quite difficult to really mess up because it looks like stuff is mostly coded, and the code adresess are pre-assigned and it doesn't take much effort at all, for simpler cards (unless I'm not doing something important but am unaware of it). Then I'll make a thread.

---

Ok, Penumbra Kavu doesn't have an address assigned to it in manalinkeh.asm, so with that one I am stuck at "where and how do I assign an address to it". Everything else I know how to do (I've done it, too, I even made the proper code and everything, it just doesn't have an address so it's not using it). Feast of the Unicorn is in, arts, everything, tested, works, no hassle if you know what what is, but it had the address pre-assigned (or at least it had it somewhere where I could see what it is).

So, er, how to assign the adress? "Edit ___________ in the src using __________, then click on ____________ in there / type ____________ in the cmd to do _____________ which apply changes to ____________, and then possibly copy ____________ the the main folder. You need to have __________ installed to do this." It's not even a sentence, just filling in blanks, from what it looks like. If it was 10 times more complex / work intensive it'd still be easy as pie with all the info, and if really this easy it's still impossible without the info.

[Misaka Mikoto]

I just started playing Shandalar tonight—the first time I’ve ever played Magic.

I’m playing Nomads’ Bazaar, release 1.

I started at the easiest level, with a green deck.

In my second duel, I drew Deathreap Ritual as part of my opening hand. I wanted to see what DR did, so I floated over it to get a preview of the card (this during my opponent’s turn).

When I did, I didn’t get a preview of DR. Instead, the game drew me an additional card—without my clicking or anything.

Every time I tried to float over DR to get a preview of it, the game drew me another card. This happened during my opponent’s turn, during my turn at all the wrong times, and apparently without limit.

The end result, of course, was that I had to discard all my cards and lost the match.

Thank you for making this, though. What a great game! I am a longtime board and card gamer, but I’ve avoided CCGs like the plague except for proxying the hell out of original Netrunner.

Now I can finally play Magic. Thank you!

[Misaka Mikoto]

I crashed the game to escape that match before losing my ante, and on getting back in, I resumed back to my encounter with the Green Wizard. In my retry of the match, I happened to draw Deathreap Ritual again, and I can confirm: The same thing is happening. Every time I float my mouse cursor over DR to preview it, I have another card drawn into my hand.

[Aswan jaguar]

Misaka Mikoto welcome to forums and shandalar/Manalink project.Thanks for the bug report however please report it to the bug tracker so it doesn't get lost:
tracker.php?p=4
and if you are able to provide a screenshot before and after this or any bug happens it would be very helpful.

[Misaka Mikoto]

Ah, whoops; sorry. Will do.

[Korath]

No need, I've fixed it already. Thanks for the report.

[Misaka Mikoto]

Ah, shit, sorry, I added before coming back to this page. You can mark as closed.

Thank you! And shame on me for having just sold DR. Even after having read this thread, I didn’t expect the dev to be so incredibly responsive.