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Blog post that thanks everyone

PostPosted: 20 Nov 2009, 18:44
by mtgrares
I'm going to post the article below on Monday thanking everybody for their effort.

MTG Forge Is Not a One Man Project

Sorry for the long title but I couldn't think of a shorter one. The title is trying to say that many people have contributed to MTG Forge. One person improved the card download and added a cool looking progress bar. Another person compiled a list of cards that could be added to "cards.txt". Someone else coded a few new cards.

This is article is also a big THANK YOU for everyone that has contributed to MTG Forge. MTG Forge really is a group project.

To view a complete list of people and their contributions, see the forum here. Below is a summary.

DennisBergkamp - is currently the lead developer and has the unpleasant job of making sure that everything doesn't fall apart. (Everything will fall apart, it is just a matter of when.) This is the guy that rewrote all of MTG Forge's targeting code in order to support protection.

Rob Cashwalker - has transformed cards.txt from a simple file into keyword madness. He spearheaded the movement to add more and more "keywords" like drawing card and dealing damage to cards.txt. One of his earliest contributions was landwalk.

Thanks to Slightlymagic.net and Huggybaby for providing MTG Forge with its very own forum.

Silly Freak created the "resizable game option" which allows MTG Forge to be resized. He also wrote the "central error code" that shows the nice reports as well as divided up MTG Forge's files into convenient directories.

Zerker has done a great job adding the mana pool and other cards.
Nantuko84 gave me the code that shows the card pictures in play as well as added several cards and added filters to the deck editor.

Mr. Chaos was one of my first, exuberant fans that sent me more than enough error reports.

Apthaven helped to spread the word of MTG Forge far and wide as well as posting bug reports.

Chris. H. has done a fantastic job of keeping up all of the rarities for all of the cards in MTG Forge. He is also responsible for playtesting the quest decks and determining the difficultly of a deck. Currently the decks are only divided up into three categories: easy, medium and hard, but three more "wizard" categories are going to be added soon which should make questing more difficult.

The hard thing is that once you start listing people you inevitably leave someone out, so let me say sorry in advance.

All of these people have helped make MTG Forge the superb program that it is today. (These people also deal with all of MTG Forge's inherent problems that I created. Reading someone else's code is like trying to follow a complicated math problem.)

Re: Blog post that thanks everyone

PostPosted: 21 Nov 2009, 08:48
by Huggybaby
Thanks rares, we all appreciate you too, that's for sure.

Re: Blog post that thanks everyone

PostPosted: 22 Nov 2009, 15:40
by Chris H.
mtgrares wrote:He is also responsible for playtesting the quest decks and determining the difficultly of a deck. Currently the decks are only divided up into three categories: easy, medium and hard, but three more "wizard" categories are going to be added soon which should make questing more difficult.
`
There seems to be a slight misunderstanding, sorry, nothing personal. :D

At one point in the past, I was considering creating some documentation with a background story. The background story was a non-technical way of explaining how our opponent decks would be divided into three different groups, easy, medium and hard.

Some people like a technical description of the quest mode difficulty settings, etc. and how this impacts the game. Some people just want a nice creative story line that they can read which would provide the same info, but in a non-technical fashion. Different strokes for different folks.

So my references to wizards referred to the story line rather that an attempt to add additional difficulty levels at this time. I have also seen the manalink messages and their new mode is awesome, but I am still learning Java and my coding skills have not yet risen to the level that would be necessary to add something similar to our project.

As far as improving the difficulty of the existing quest decks, it can be done without too much work. Additional decks with new themes and mechanics could also be added. There is always room for improvement. 8)

Unfortunately, in my real life, I now find myself to be pre-occupied with a major family crisis. I'm not sure how much of my free time will be consumed with this important situation. :(