The near future of Manalink 2.0 (or 3.0)

[Stroggoii]

There are some cards that aren't really good, like Crypt Champion, who doesn't work without Saffi Eriksdotter, and even with Phantasmal Image doesn't work for the Caller of the Claw combo (Wich makes caller a sucky card as well).

I wouldn't mind Rakish Heir and Balefire Dragon in their stead.

[Gargaroz]

The Champion is a nice creaure for itself, IMHO, it reanimates and has Double Strike. I could code Saffi too, but I fear the combo is impossible to do correctly in Manalink.
The Caller is not a sucky card at all : if you got wiped by a Wrath of God or similar, try casting it on EOT
But it's perfectly fine if you don't like them : anyone has is own preferred cards.

[aww1979]

I'd love to see the 2000 card barrier broken; it would remove a lot of these issues. However, as far as I know, nobody is willing or able to work on that yet, which as I understand it will take a lot of boring grunt work. (my brother, a professional programmer, described what needed to be done to me, and said he knew how to do it, but that it would be so ridiculously long and boring that he didn't want to :p)

In absence of that, the idea of making one uber vintage set for challenge mode and vintage games, along with the different block editions that have already been done (tempest, urza's, etc) seems like a good idea to me. It would allow for new content to be added, and if the 2000 barrier is ever broken, porting in all those already coded cards will just be a matter of data entry.

Another option for future projects would be more challenge modes. I'm not good enough at coding (especially when it involves other people's projects!) to do any of this, but I'd be happy to provide ideas for difficult challenges.

The fourth option I've been thinking of is that possibly somebody could figure out how to add the new cards to Shandalar. I don't know if this is even possible, or if anybody has spent much time working on this, but it would be another potential project.

I'm just happy to take whatever the community will produce, but that's my two cents.

[Mangara]

What you guys did with the old game is just brilliant, really appreciated.

My 2cents: I think the my2000 solution sounds best to me.

The thing I regret most about Manalink 2.0 is that there are really important cards missing from preceding editions and that the golden years mods lack many cards from Constructed. Could cards from the golden years mods be added to the my2000 library when it works reliably?

[gmzombie]

aww1979 you said your brother described how it could be done? do tell please. im curious. my attempts to push the original cards coded in the magic exe and just move them failed..as im not a programmer but i have been "trying" to read and understand the assembly language. Wether or not i get it is another story but im trying at least. would like to hear what he has come up with.

[aww1979]

Well, what he said was that somewhere there would have to be some arrays that were hardcoded to hold 2000 entries and no more. You'd have to go through in assembler and find every single reference to the 2000 card limit and change it. Apparently finding them all would not be easy, and if you missed any, it would be very bad :p That was at least the gist of what I can remember.

[0rion79]

More informations would be needed about that. Also, as long as we can experiment with a backup copy, I see nothing bad about that! The only true "risk" is the loss of time.

[Gargaroz]

I agree with Orion : aww1979, just ask your brother to write down what we need to do and post it in the development forum.

[aww1979]

I'll try and remember to talk to him about this. There's no way he'd be willing to do it himself; he told me this when he was describing how it would be done, but hopefully with my beginner's programming skills I'll be able to grasp it and convey it here.

[0rion79]

We have very skilled persons here and I trust our coders: there is no need for him to do that, I'm sure that a detailed explanation about what must be done would be enough.

[gmzombie]

agreed with orion we do have some great coders here and this info could help with the final fix.

[Stroggoii]

Innistrad is incredibly fun, can't wait to have some of it's cards on manalink.

Keep up with the awesome work

[0rion79]

I'm more excited waiting news from aww1979's brothers At last, goodbye Custom version and welcome to major changes...

[foolosopher]

Wow! I just read this thread and what aww1979 said and I'm really curious. I did put quite some effort for about 9 months but my skills in assembly are quite limited so I was trying to circumvent going deep into assembly but that's not possible to overcome the 2k limit I realized. Anyway if it's something that can be procedurised I 'm willing to give a shot at it again, but with proper insrtuctions.
Another way I tried was after disassembling magic.exe into c using IDA and PE, I tried to debug it, but left it at about 1000-1100 errors, before trying out something different with gmzombie.
Nevertheless, it seems that I may have some time to put in this for a few months from now, so unless aww1979 tells us his solution I might go back to debuging the magic.exe, after finishing with drawcardlib, but for this I 'll move the discussion to the Manalink C/ASM Dll topic.
Sorry to say this but (as most have already realized) don't hold your breath for a sollution shortly (coming from me at least) as long as major assembly is required.
My vote for the time being is go for the my2000 debug/development solution.

[foolosopher]

Well, what he said was that somewhere there would have to be some arrays that were hardcoded to hold 2000 entries and no more. You'd have to go through in assembler and find every single reference to the 2000 card limit and change it. Apparently finding them all would not be easy, and if you missed any, it would be very bad :p That was at least the gist of what I can remember.

This was the original idea when we started searching with gmzombie. Lonefox had located a couple of these arrays back then, but they were at specific addresses which were modified after some tinkering with the magic.exe during time and it's partly true I think. We had disassembled the magic.exe and a couple more files into assembly but there were very few references to 2000 or 7D0 its hex equivalent.
From a discussion I had with snacko some other time, I think that maybe some of these arrays might be in another file deck.dll I think), which we hadn't looked into.
However, the disassembled code was again with IDA and PE, but I think tracking 2000 down with ollydb would have more accurate results, I just didn't have time (and all the skill needed) to look into it when we came to that.
Anyway I sincerely hope that aww1979's brother's solution is more specific than that, or at least he gives us quite specific instructions on how to locate them using certain tools to do it.