drleg3nd wrote:hey riiak i was thinking and i dont know if anyone brought this up, but can you builder be integrated with firemind web generator so that if you searching for a card triggered abilites/active abilites and such can be incorporated within xml if said abilites are available within any of the cards that are in the magic directory ?
I'm not exactly sure which way you are headed here, I see two possibilities as to your train of thought:
- Integrating such that the web generator talks to the Deck Builder to try and find missing abilities.
- With the web generator being running on a web server and having no access to the users computer it makes it pretty much impossible to talk to the Deck Builder (unless it is installed on the server, but that adds a lot of restrictions on its own).
- Integrating such that the Deck Builder talks with the web generator to build cards.
- This would basically mean putting a card creator into the builder. In that case it might even be better to simply build a new creator into the builder rather than accessing the web generator and then trying to analyze the card's abilities to try and see what is missing.
- Another big problem is trying to figure out which ability maps to which other ability. Mapping by text is spotty because most cards have text that is slightly different from the text you would be looking for.
- Also what would you do if you happened to find multiple abilities for the same text that are all coded differently?
Basically, it is extremely difficult to come up with any working logic for this idea. The best possibility at the moment would be to have a template directory that can be updated with ability code templates and using fuzzy logic text pattern matching to try and match the text rules to a high percentage match and let the user then select which would be the closest ability from any multiple matches above the fuzzy logic match threshold.
Though I doubt any of us are going to be coding anything anywhere near that kind of difficulty level in the near future.
If we had a great card database that had all the abilities properly separated out and had some kind of attribute system to describe each ability in a simple to check way then we could build a card generator that could auto-generate more abilities. There would still be a lot of abilities that would have to be manually coded even with a great system like that.
A completely different possibility would be creating a Card Builder with an ability template library with a list of common ability templates (that could be updated) and ability search tool that could search through all current cards for the desired ability and the user could then select and modify it in the builder, though that is more of a manual build tool rather than an automatic tool like the web generator.