Korath's Drawcardlib - Nail in the coffin of naff cardart

In case you've missed all that has been going down recently since the arrival of our latest contributor. Korath has worked his magic again and we're looking to be on our way to finally end the Microprose legacy of cruddy looking cardart.
See viewtopic.php?f=56&t=11099 for current developments.
Just to be first out of the gate to take advantage of this new advancement to our beloved 16-bit obsession. I’ve produced some card templates for people to try out with Korath’s current development version of the Drawcardlib.dll.
And straight out of the box it's looking extremely good – and a major update to the constraints of the 228x325 files we’ve been lumbered with working with for so long... as can be seen below.


Being lazy, and to simplify the process of experimenting with the dll, I took the decision to resize the image files to 308x472 as this meant the card templates could be produced WYSIWYG when viewed in the deck builder working in a window with a screen size of 1280x1024. I believe many of the regulars use this screen resolution anyway, so it seemed a good place to start. Effectively this means the data in the Dual.dat file and the card templates themselves are optimized for this screen size - although, they have been tested at various other CRT monitor resolutions with varying degrees of success.
Give them a try – comments and criticisms are welcomed.
Updated 21st July - now available with added expansion symbols and dll included: http://www.mediafire.com/download/xcxoa ... atesV4.zip
Be aware, this is not a simple file replacement mod – it requires the system installation of a couple of fonts. Instructions for XP are provided if needed.
And please note - These templates will only work properly with duel.dat file provided in the above archive. Be careful not to overwrite the file when installing a new patch release.
For those of you using widescreens, I would appreciate some full size screen shots of the deck builder running on a popularly used widescreen resolution if possible.
I’d like to produce some separate templates for widescreen, but without a widescreen monitor it’s somewhat hard to work out exactly what any new templates will look like once they’ve been stretched and rescaled.
Have fun... Sonic
See viewtopic.php?f=56&t=11099 for current developments.
Just to be first out of the gate to take advantage of this new advancement to our beloved 16-bit obsession. I’ve produced some card templates for people to try out with Korath’s current development version of the Drawcardlib.dll.
And straight out of the box it's looking extremely good – and a major update to the constraints of the 228x325 files we’ve been lumbered with working with for so long... as can be seen below.


Being lazy, and to simplify the process of experimenting with the dll, I took the decision to resize the image files to 308x472 as this meant the card templates could be produced WYSIWYG when viewed in the deck builder working in a window with a screen size of 1280x1024. I believe many of the regulars use this screen resolution anyway, so it seemed a good place to start. Effectively this means the data in the Dual.dat file and the card templates themselves are optimized for this screen size - although, they have been tested at various other CRT monitor resolutions with varying degrees of success.
Give them a try – comments and criticisms are welcomed.
Updated 21st July - now available with added expansion symbols and dll included: http://www.mediafire.com/download/xcxoa ... atesV4.zip
Be aware, this is not a simple file replacement mod – it requires the system installation of a couple of fonts. Instructions for XP are provided if needed.
And please note - These templates will only work properly with duel.dat file provided in the above archive. Be careful not to overwrite the file when installing a new patch release.
For those of you using widescreens, I would appreciate some full size screen shots of the deck builder running on a popularly used widescreen resolution if possible.
I’d like to produce some separate templates for widescreen, but without a widescreen monitor it’s somewhat hard to work out exactly what any new templates will look like once they’ve been stretched and rescaled.
Have fun... Sonic