Early Incantus Screenshot

[mtgrares]

Just for fun I thought I would post this picture of Incantus back when it was only called Mtg. Hey I thought your "old" user interface was still very good. (If your old gui was good, your new one is out of the world, ha.) I'm hoping that MTG Forge can look as good as this screenshot. (My graphics skills are not up to par or maybe you set the bar too high. ) Incantus is just a great program. (My goal in life is to have HALF of the number of cards that Incantus supports. I figure that is a relatively safe goal, although I may have to reduce my goal to 1/3.)

This version of Incantus impressed me so much with its user interface and short card code that I tried my best to learn Python. I got some basic things working but it is really hard to learn a new language and to become very familiar with it until the language "feels" easy. Honestly Python felt "slippery" to me and I missed the compiler errors. (My brain likes static type checking.) I like the idea of duck typing but it feels unusual.

At the very least, Incantus has pushed me to develop ever better Magic software. Without Incantus I might have stopped when MTG Forge had 1,000 cards and say, "That is as good as it gets" and quit. Now that Incantus has 7,000 or so cards, I don't feel like I can ever quit and I like being challenged. You're a great programmer Incantus and I do remember you saying that my program inspired you. Hopefully we inspire each other.

May your bugs be small,
Forge (or mtgrares)

[Incantus]

Hey Forge,
Thanks for the kudos. I still have the code for that interface laying around - I was thinking of updating it for the current rules engine. I stopped developing that version of the UI almost 2 years ago, right around the beginning of 2008, and was inspired to do a 3D interface from a Youtube video I saw of a dreamcast version of MtG that was only released in Japan. But you're right, my initial inspiration for Incantus came from reading your early blog posts on developing MtGForge. In fact, I remember sending you an email in December 2007 about my program - you're the first person who saw Incantus (I think at that point I was figuring out networking on the PC). A lot of people have helped with Incantus, both with early testing of the networking (Nico who I met on the magic-league forums) and some UI feedback I got from another member (who gave me a lot of good UI criticism), as well as rules and card creation help from (TheScient and Marek) and card creation/new coding from MageKing17 (who were permanent fixtures on #incantus on EFNET), and more recently Dorkmaster Flek and juzamjedi. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do any work on Incantus in the past few months, plus the new M10 changes, have caused this little community to fall apart.
Hopefully in the near future I can clean up the code (we have too many confusing branches) and then release it as open source so anyone can implement a UI on top of the rules engine, or just work on the rules engine (which I find more interesting). I would particularly like to do a UI based on the sneak preview showed of the new MTGO UI.
Incantus

[nantuko84]

it's really fun to look at this screenshot don't know what was code for that, but looking at current version, pretty sure it was a lot of work done

incantus is really great;)

[dberkholz]

Hopefully in the near future I can clean up the code (we have too many confusing branches) and then release it as open source so anyone can implement a UI on top of the rules engine, or just work on the rules engine (which I find more interesting). I would particularly like to do a UI based on the sneak preview showed of the new MTGO UI.
Incantus

I'd like to play w/ MTG in Python. Could you please send a current repo over, or just post it on google code now? In my experience, finding time for this kind of thing never seems to happen... My address is my nick at gentoo.org. Thanks!