Cardset Editor v1.1

[Rob Cashwalker]

Second beta release of my much anticipated MTGForge Cardset Editor.

Download installer here:
http://minstrelplayers.org/ForgeCSE/Set ... Editor.zip
Download updated executable file here:
http://minstrelplayers.org/ForgeCSE/CardsetEditor.exe

Features include:
- Primary function is to modify card rarity and frequency for sealed and draft mode.
- Attempts to display the card picture, if already downloaded by MTGForge.
- Allows user to modify the card-pictures.txt URL for any card.
- A search button will launch a search in the default browser, based on a configured search URL (gatherer is default)
- The card text can be modified.. just in case you notice a typo... it was a "why-not?" feature....
- All cardset data can be saved as individual profiles - for example: want to play Time Spiral limited? No problem, just load up a profile with Time Spiral cards being the only ones with rarities defined.... This will become more useful when we can actually add the majority of cards in a given block... without having to exclude many of them because the AI can't deal with them... but whatever.
- Keyboard Navigation in grid - up/down selects rows, keys 'C', 'U', 'R' modify rarity and '1' - '0' modify the count.
- Generic text card picture generator
- Card downloading applet - currently only handles URLs already defined, either already in card-pictures.txt or modified in the main screen since loading

Bugs:
None yet

Planned features:
- Track cards from previous session, to detect card additions between versions.
- Add and Delete cards entirely.
- Add oracle rules text to generic card pictures
- Formatted URL card picture downloading
- Mass-updating all card picture URLs to match formatted URL
+ Resizable window.
+ Additional card property columns / filtering
+ card list filtering

How to use:
- Browse to your MTG Folder (Location will be remembered between sessions)
- Change some data
- - Double-click the Card-Picture URL label to pop up an input box for the search URL (URL will be remembered between sessions)
- - Double-click the Card text textbox to edit it
- Type a profile name
- Save the profile
- Save the data
- Double-click the Card picture to download the image from the defined URL
- Generate generic text pictures using "Generate Card Pics"
- Download card pictures using "Download Card Pics" - either download all pictures (forced overwrite) or just missing pictures. Currently supports only defined URL

All prior files are renamed, so all changes can be reverted easily.

Visual Basic 6.0 source code here:
http://minstrelplayers.org/ForgeCSE/Sou ... Editor.zip

[mtgrares]

This is great, thanks.

[DennisBergkamp]

Awesome Rob, this is great!

One little nit-picky thing, not a big deal at all, but I notice I can't scroll through the list using my middle mouse button-wheel. Would this be easy to add in ?

[Rob Cashwalker]

One little nit-picky thing, not a big deal at all, but I notice I can't scroll through the list using my middle mouse button-wheel. Would this be easy to add in ?

I hadn't noticed that - it works fine with my laptop touchpad.... I connected a mouse, and sure enough,it doesn't respond. Not sure why. I'll test a basic project with JUST the grid, and no code to muck it up, and see if it's by design of the grid.

Edit- Turns out it's a driver thing. The suggestions I've read say to use the Intellipoint driver. There are subclassing hacks available, but I'm not sure I want to use them - if you trigger a breakpoint during debugging, while a control is subclassed, it crashes VB. Runs fine out of VB... though.

@mtgrares -
This editor you're working on... is it integrated into MTGForge, or a separate app? How much of my functionality have you maintained?

[mtgrares]

I just posted by set editor, it is totally separate from MTG Forge. I made it separate because a smaller project is easier to debug, program, and keep up.

[Rob Cashwalker]

I just wanted to update the thread with some news...

I haven't had as much development time as I'd like, so I've been making slow progress on what I'll start calling MTGForge Manager....

Right on the heels of releasing v1.1, I had started off with making the window resizable... that was easy.

I finished the formatted URL download feature, and in general any failed picture downloads are logged, so they can be fixed. If all pictures downloaded, the option to mass-update the URLs to match was also finished.

I then started thinking of how to get the oracle text onto generated pictures.... I tried scraping the rules text from individual gatherer queries for each card... but that resulted in nearly just as much web traffic as getting the pictures themselves. So I gave it some thought, and talked to Goblin Hero about how this forum software fills in the oracle text. He custom-wrote some PHP code and an oracle db hosted here. So I scrambled some knowledge of PHP and MySQL and worked out my own PHP script and a custom oracle database hosted on a free service 000webhost.com. This is an example:
http://forgedb.net78.net/forgedb.php?CardName=shock
So instead of gatherer, I was querying the db for each card, but that caused the server to choke on each batch of 1200 cards. So I figured out that if I queried the db for all cards that start with the first two letters, like this:
http://forgedb.net78.net/forgedb.php?CardName=sh% (copy and paste the URL, the auto-highlight doesn't like the "%")
Then I cached those results. If the next card in sequence was found in those results, then that was one less query to make. For 1200+ cards, I only made 190 queries, with 1.5MB of data transfer.

Supporting the pics folder change was finished just after that feature was added to MTGForge.

Then the great token project caused me to redesign the picture generator and the code which reads all the cards. Which was good, because it forced me to re-write the code to make it more uniform and break it out into a bunch of subroutines and functions. But drawing tokens lets me play with some wild color stuff... like the Red, Green and White Beast from Shards:

[DennisBergkamp]

Awesome stuff, it looks like quite the project. It's funny, PHP/MySQL is what I do for a living.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this

[Rob Cashwalker]

I dabbled in Perl a long time ago. I attempted to understand PHP when my company was trying to customize SugarCRM Support Portal....

I like the way PHP works- it is code that generates content dynamically, yet is still a part of the HTML. It's easy to figure out what the code does, by knowing what content is on the page. As opposed to Perl and ASP, which are completely separate from the generated HTML documents and are too abstract from the generated content.

I just googled for a free service, signed up with 4 of them before finding one that really worked. Setting up the MySQL DB was easy enough, I've built a number of Access DB's and MSSQL DB's. I copied the query code from PHP.net examples.... Then tweaked it for the format I wanted.

The only problem, is that it's a free service, and was down for a day while I was in the middle of testing. Now it's down for "malicious content review".