Arrival Of The Planeswalkers

[Tejahn]

I tried to post this in thefiremind's thread Modding tests (what changed from 2014, what didn't) but it kept telling me that the board attachment quota has been reached when I tried to post screenshots. Anyway, I contributed a few Planeswalkers to DOTP 2014 some time ago and I decided to see if we could create a few of them for 2015 as well. I was working on a tutorial to explain how I manually add cards and their respective images to DOTP 2015 (including the card pool) and decided to take a break and conduct some test. To my surprise the game crashes if the word 'Planeswalker' is used as a type.

But after successfully getting Ajani, Mentor of Heroes 'Planeswalker' Supertype to show in game I created a Dromoka's Command deck to test him and Managorger Hydra from Magic Orgins. Well, something unexpected happened. The screenshot above shows that the manager tokens are visible on the board and remain so during the entire battle after selecting to keep my hand. The same is true when Frontier Siege produce it's two green mana. The mana tokens appear and disappear for Frontier Siege. I'll probably post a video to make it clear. Either way, does anyone know a way to 'hide' (make these token managers invisible)?

I also made all the cards Common so I can add up to four in my deck. I remember seeing a post where someone found a way to permit almost any number of cards in a deck regardless of rarity but I couldn't follow it well enough to understand how to achieve the same result.

Another strange thing is that when I made the land Savanna and tried to add it to my deck the number became infinite and stuck at 30. Yet, Kiora's deck has Tropical Island. The Planeswalkers work flawlesslessly but the art becomes distorted when their placed on the battlefield. I remember Xander9009 and fallenangel updated the Planeswalkers and Neo experimented with the art.

A Question: Will TFM's transformation functions allow us to create the Magic origins Planeswalkers?

I'll post the deck if anyone wants it. Managorger is awesome in this deck.

EDIT: Well, it's the entire board. I suppose I created this thread for nothing. I thought it was TFM's thread. I used photobucket to show images instead.

[Tejahn]

Here is a screenshot of my Planeswalker being attacked. I wonder where it is reading the information in the box from...?

[thefiremind]

it kept telling me that the board attachment quota has been reached when I tried to post screenshots

The board is big and there are lots of people posting attachments. The quota had been already reached before, and I guess now the board administrators will have to tweak it again. That's why I always suggest to use file hosting sites when the attachment is greater than a couple of MegaBytes: if everyone did, we wouldn't reach the quota so frequently. Of course screenshots don't weigh much, my "critique" is aimed at those who attach big files.

The screenshot above shows that the manager tokens are visible on the board and remain so during the entire battle after selecting to keep my hand. The same is true when Frontier Siege produce it's two green mana. The mana tokens appear and disappear for Frontier Siege. I'll probably post a video to make it clear. Either way, does anyone know a way to 'hide' (make these token managers invisible)?

The trick we have always used in order to make invisible tokens was to give them no types. It seems you just discovered that this isn't true anymore in DotP2015... that's interesting, but quite disappointing if we can't find another trick. Maybe you could try to give the tokens a Scheme, Plane or Phenomenon type and see what happens (most likely it will freeze or crash the game, but it's worth trying).

Another strange thing is that when I made the land Savanna and tried to add it to my deck the number became infinite and stuck at 30. Yet, Kiora's deck has Tropical Island.

Kiora's deck is "preconstructed", while the deck builder probably has some problems with lands with more than one basic type. There have been reports of the deck builder adding an arbitrary number of such lands, just by adding them to the card pool.

A Question: Will TFM's transformation functions allow us to create the Magic origins Planeswalkers?

I guess they should be something between Loyal Cathar and Garruk, the Veil-Cursed, both of which were working as much as possible in DotP2014.

Here is a screenshot of my Planeswalker being attacked. I wonder where it is reading the information in the box from...?

Do you mean the message box? The sentence should be in a TEXT_PERMANENT file. "%d" should have been substituted with the name of the Planeswalker, I'm not sure why it doesn't work.

[Tejahn]

Nyx Card Frame

Land Full Art Card Frame

Thanks for that information. I'll try what you suggested and report back. Also, after looking through the card frame folder I noticed that we got a few new frames that are functional. Remember the Lamia screenshot I post a while back? It used the new NYX card frame. There is also BASIC LAND FULL ART, MIRACLE, PLANECHASE, and WATERMARK. I wonder if using one of these frames for our token managers would be a solution after making it completely transparent?

Will it be possible to add Planechase? All the images and functions seem to still be part of the engine.

[Xander9009]

Even if they're made completely transparent, the game would still put them on the battlefield. They'd still take up space and other cards would be moved around them. Still, it might be better than how they are now if no workaround can be found to remove them from the board altogether.

[Tejahn]

Indeed. Is there a known way to stack them atop one another if they just have to be on the battlefield?

And concerning my questions earlier about allowing more cards to be added to a deck without changing the Rarity, does someone know the way it was done? I couldn't understand the method as it was explained.

@Xander9009: Were the upgrades you and fallenagel produced incorporated into NeoAnderson's image mod for Planeswalkers? I think it's the Functions I copied from his file causing the Planeswalkers to be distorted when they enter the battlefield. Well, I suppose the image is just being stretched.

[Xander9009]

Indeed. Is there a known way to stack them atop one another if they just have to be on the battlefield?

And concerning my questions earlier about allowing more cards to be added to a deck without changing the Rarity, does someone know the way it was done? I couldn't understand the method as it was explained.

@Xander9009: Were the upgrades you and fallenagel produced incorporated into NeoAnderson's image mod for Planeswalkers? I think it's the Functions I copied from his file causing the Planeswalkers to be distorted when they enter the battlefield. Well, I suppose the image is just being stretched.

Not sure. The best method I can think of wouldn't help with the mana at all, but it would help with the managers: combine all of the manager tokens. Instead of having a bunch, have a single manager that manages everything. It should be at least relatively simple to combine them all. You'd just have to make sure all of the various abilities don't have overlapping registers for any LinkedDC, RSN_ObjectDC, and resource_id numbers used.

For RSN_ObjectDC, that would obviously only be used for things that need to be accessed by other cards, so those should be constants, anyway, and thus shouldn't be a problem.

For the LinkedDC numbers, just go through each manager in turn and see if it has any linked_ability_group attributes, and if so, make it one more than whatever the last manager that had one used, and make sure you correct all instances on the manager.

resource_id attributes would be the toughest, because there can easily be multiple different ones on any given manager.

Either way, if done, at least the managers would only take up a single space.

Frankly, I'm okay with the managers showing up. It would be worth testing to see if the manager can be given an activated/granted ability. If so, that means we could do things like grant it abilities that are otherwise difficult to do. Channel, for instance. Other instances could be emblems and utility abilities like possibly switching between manual and auto-tap mana, a way to spawn a token version of my debugging card, and various other things I'm sure it could help with.

I'm currently working on an ability to make Blinkmoth Urn a bit more cooperative. It gives you a bunch of colorless mana, but that doesn't play very nicely with vanilla lands and Etched Oracle. Even with manual lands, the best you could do is hope you get the colored mana rather than the colorless mana. I've made an activated ability (I'm in the process of refining it) which lets you make certain mana unusable until you're ready for it. (Currently works 99%. Just need to make it properly get rid of the mana at the end of the phase, because that's handled by an ability, and I'm calling LoseAllAbilities.) That could be MUCH better handled on a manager token that is always available, rather than trying to add the ability to every relevant card.

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to reply to the bit directed at me: no. I made the CW with all of the planeswalkers available at the time. Then, Neo made his graphics update. Then, fallenangel took over the PLW mod. Throughout him making changes there, I've incorporated all of the changes I could into the CW. But Neo hasn't been around to incorporate any of those updates. I'm not 100% certain about the planeswalkers' images and stuff. I know the basics of how they work, but when I tried incorporating them into the CW, they didn't work and I never had the motivation to go fix them, so I've never really looked into them.

[Tejahn]

Those are some interesting points. Perhaps a way to make them appear only when needed is more appropiate. As it stands, to me at least, it's just clutter. Lol! But at least they do work. I'm interested in knowing the results of what you stated their possible uses can be. Please post your results when you test it all.

And I easily fixed the problem with the image. Just had to narrow it down.

[Xander9009]

Those are some interesting points. Perhaps a way to make them appear only when needed is more appropiate. As it stands, to me at least, it's just clutter. Lol! But at least they do work. I'm interested in knowing the results of what you stated their possible uses can be. Please post your results when you test it all.

And I easily fixed the problem with the image. Just had to narrow it down.

I'm not actually modding 2015 yet. A) I don't have a copy. B) I'm still pretty focused on 2014 since we don't have a card limit. I consider the card limit in 2015 a bigger limitation than the limitations of 2014.

Making it appear only when needed would be very difficult unless someone can find a workaround to make it actually invisible.

One thing you might be able to do is to rework the manager so it only uses delayed triggered abilities. Get them set up, and then exile the manager so it's not on the battlefield. If you're lucky, the triggered abilities will continue to fire properly and it'll work without the manager itself being present anymore. You would have to move anything using RSN_ObjectDC on the manager to use the PlayerDataChest or something similar. For the PLW manager, I don't think that would be an issue. For that one, there's already only one ability that's not a triggered ability. So, just give each one a resource_id, create a delayed trigger for those ids (notice that resource_ids 1 and 2 are already used), and then exile the token and see what happens.

[thefiremind]

I'm not actually modding 2015 yet. A) I don't have a copy. B) I'm still pretty focused on 2014 since we don't have a card limit. I consider the card limit in 2015 a bigger limitation than the limitations of 2014.

I'm not modding it either, but it's just because I'm not satisfied with the tools I have. I'm making a tool right now which should edit the CardPools file automatically according to the cards we add to our own package (be it WAD or ZED, I want the tool to be able to manage both a WAD and a ZED easily, since that's the way I intend to work). For now, I just made a part of the tool that is a universal converter (you drag & drop files or folders onto it, and it automatically converts them, for example a PNG will become TDX and viceversa, a folder will become a WAD if its header is found otherwise it will become a ZED, etc.), I still have to code the interesting part.

Will it be possible to add Planechase? All the images and functions seem to still be part of the engine.

They also were in DotP2014, even though Planechase was in DotP2013 (same is true for Archenemy which was in DotP2012). That's not enough to remake the whole format.