Warning: Community Wad basic lands that crash the game
Posted: 23 Jul 2022, 17:03
I played with Community Wad for quite a few years, and after updating recently found out that some of my decks which worked fine before now crashed the game completely. Deck Manager didn't show any errors, so I had to dig in and do a little investigation.
Long story short: there are lands - basic lands, no less - in a current (1204) version of Community Wad (available in Google Drive folder) for Magic 2014 which crash the game if they are present in deck of any player playing the match. If you remove them from the deck and replace with non-broken lands, everything works just fine. There are two things about it that are especially bad, from my opinion:
1) At least some of those broken lands worked just fine on 2017 version of Community Wad (this was my version before updating). Someone broke code for perfectly working cards.
2) The problem is quite subtle, both Riiak's Deck Manager and in-game Deck browser do not display any error messages or indicate that anything is amiss. You can recognize the problem only when the game crashes once you start the match.
There are five lands I've definitely tested that cause this problem, there probably are many others. Here are the codes for lands I've tested:
Plains = Plains_CW_NEG_23, Plains_CW_NEG_39, Plains_CW_NEG_84
Forest = Forest_CW_NEG_43
Island = Island_CW_NEG_40
What could cause such a problem? I'm not a programmer and never coded any cards, so I can't say for certain, but all of the broken cards have something weird written in XML code in localizations for some languages, especially for what I assume is Portuguese (I highlighted it in an attached screenshot). Question marks for a lot of other languages also don't look too good to me. Now, I don't know if this is what causes crashes, but something definitely is broken here. I also play with English language myself, so my guess is this problem should materialize on any language version of the game.
Considering the state of the forum (dead) I don't hope too much for someone to come and actually fix these lands and make a fixed version of Community Wad, but I can at least warn others who may have problems with unexplained crashes of one possible reason for them (and warn the others to look the code for basic lands before adding them manually).
Below you can see screenshots with XML for two cards to this message, Plains_357489 is working as it should, while Plains_CW_NEG_84 crashes the game if added to player deck.
Long story short: there are lands - basic lands, no less - in a current (1204) version of Community Wad (available in Google Drive folder) for Magic 2014 which crash the game if they are present in deck of any player playing the match. If you remove them from the deck and replace with non-broken lands, everything works just fine. There are two things about it that are especially bad, from my opinion:
1) At least some of those broken lands worked just fine on 2017 version of Community Wad (this was my version before updating). Someone broke code for perfectly working cards.
2) The problem is quite subtle, both Riiak's Deck Manager and in-game Deck browser do not display any error messages or indicate that anything is amiss. You can recognize the problem only when the game crashes once you start the match.
There are five lands I've definitely tested that cause this problem, there probably are many others. Here are the codes for lands I've tested:
Plains = Plains_CW_NEG_23, Plains_CW_NEG_39, Plains_CW_NEG_84
Forest = Forest_CW_NEG_43
Island = Island_CW_NEG_40
What could cause such a problem? I'm not a programmer and never coded any cards, so I can't say for certain, but all of the broken cards have something weird written in XML code in localizations for some languages, especially for what I assume is Portuguese (I highlighted it in an attached screenshot). Question marks for a lot of other languages also don't look too good to me. Now, I don't know if this is what causes crashes, but something definitely is broken here. I also play with English language myself, so my guess is this problem should materialize on any language version of the game.
Considering the state of the forum (dead) I don't hope too much for someone to come and actually fix these lands and make a fixed version of Community Wad, but I can at least warn others who may have problems with unexplained crashes of one possible reason for them (and warn the others to look the code for basic lands before adding them manually).
Below you can see screenshots with XML for two cards to this message, Plains_357489 is working as it should, while Plains_CW_NEG_84 crashes the game if added to player deck.