Gameplay animation (experimental)
Posted: 27 May 2014, 08:11
Just committed a new experimental feature that will play an animation when an AI draws a card from its library. The card zooms out from the hand icon to the center of the screen where it is displayed at its full size (if possible) for a short period of time before zooming back down to either the stack or battlefield area. You can cancel the preview by clicking on the screen or hitting spacebar or enter.
A new setting in the Gameplay section of the preferences dialog can be used to switch the animation on or off. It is off by default.
This introduces a new external libary - trident-1.3.jar - which I have added to build.xml so you will need to do a build to pull this file from Maven and then add a reference to it before running. It is about 105 KB.
There is still much that can be improved but even at this initial stage I think it adds a lot of value and is worth introducing to the main branch. It introduces a more natural transition between gameplay states and makes it much easier to follow what the AI is doing (especially in an AI v AI game). Ultimately with the appropriate animations I think you could add an option to hide/dock the left hand panel so that the battlefield takes up the whole screen which I think would be attractive to advanced MTG players.
A new setting in the Gameplay section of the preferences dialog can be used to switch the animation on or off. It is off by default.
This introduces a new external libary - trident-1.3.jar - which I have added to build.xml so you will need to do a build to pull this file from Maven and then add a reference to it before running. It is about 105 KB.
There is still much that can be improved but even at this initial stage I think it adds a lot of value and is worth introducing to the main branch. It introduces a more natural transition between gameplay states and makes it much easier to follow what the AI is doing (especially in an AI v AI game). Ultimately with the appropriate animations I think you could add an option to hide/dock the left hand panel so that the battlefield takes up the whole screen which I think would be attractive to advanced MTG players.