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GandoTheBard wrote:Another thing that is annoying is that our data control is WAYYYY out of sync. I just copied over the original rarities files included with the 3-20 download to the 3-20 main directory because I wanted to see how the card pools varied with a change. Something in those files (created on the 18th btw) caused the deck editor to bug out. So we can just throw those files out since they are no good. :/

The original rarities files will work if you add the following to the cards.txt file:

Lava Axe
4 R
Sorcery
no text
spDamageP:5

And add the following line to your cards-pictures.txt file:

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lava_axe.jpg   http://www.wizards.com/global/images/magic/general/lava_axe.jpg

Or you can remove the line with "Lava Axe" in the common.txt file. Either way should get the original rarities files in sync with the cards.txt file.

GandoTheBard wrote:Not only that but the cards downloader DOES NOT download all the cards...not even half the cards. This is quite annoying to realize as I suddenly find images missing from cards I've never seen before and didn't know were added to the client.

I will try to see what is wrong with the card-pictures.txt file. Are you getting the message that you need an internet connection? Some of the cards jpgs are only available from the web site of a card store. There web site might not be up 24-7. Nonetheless, I will look at the card-pictures.txt file and see if I can find anything obvious.

EDIT:

I tried downloading all of the jpgs with the 03-20 version and all of the jpgs downloaded OK. No errors or missing jpgs.

Chris H. wrote:

GandoTheBard wrote:Another thing that is annoying is that our data control is WAYYYY out of sync. I just copied over the original rarities files included with the 3-20 download to the 3-20 main directory because I wanted to see how the card pools varied with a change. Something in those files (created on the 18th btw) caused the deck editor to bug out. So we can just throw those files out since they are no good. :/

The original rarities files will work if you add the following to the cards.txt file:

Lava Axe
4 R
Sorcery
no text
spDamageP:5

And add the following line to your cards-pictures.txt file:

Code: Select all

lava_axe.jpg   http://www.wizards.com/global/images/magic/general/lava_axe.jpg

Or you can remove the line with "Lava Axe" in the common.txt file. Either way should get the original rarities files in sync with the cards.txt file.

GandoTheBard wrote:Not only that but the cards downloader DOES NOT download all the cards...not even half the cards. This is quite annoying to realize as I suddenly find images missing from cards I've never seen before and didn't know were added to the client.

I will try to see what is wrong with the card-pictures.txt file. Are you getting the message that you need an internet connection? Some of the cards jpgs are only available from the web site of a card store. There web site might not be up 24-7. Nonetheless, I will look at the card-pictures.txt file and see if I can find anything obvious.

EDIT:

I tried downloading all of the jpgs with the 03-20 version and all of the jpgs downloaded OK. No errors or missing jpgs.

Nope. Not disconnected from the internet. Nope not getting such an error. It just runs and then doesn't complete the task. I end up having to grab the images myself off of Gatherer.

I just noticed this myself after running across the super elves again...Not cool Dennis. Very not cool. Im testing the decks you guys chose to include (some very lame ones imho btw so far) and Im also trying to test the changes you made to the client. I honestly thought that was a bug related to the changes you made. Pissed me off royally when I realized it was in cards.txt. Thankfully its not a hard fix but it means we cant just trust what is in the new updates.

Alright, no need to get all worked up about it. Shit happens, I'm sorry, it's not like I left it in there on purpose. This is why I slap the BETA tag on this thing, bugs are bound to happen, and it's the whole point of a BETA not to trust what's in the new updates.

As for Essence Warden and all the other state based effects, I think I might have fixed it. But that's just the thing, I'm not sure. I'll release something new in the next few days, and some more testing would hopefully either put it in the clear, or confirm it's still broken. In which case I'll try something else, or revert back to the way it was originally.
The only reason I've been messing with this is some of the slowdowns people like you have been experiencing, and I hoped I could fix those. I obviously didn't mean to introduce any new bugs.

I have no idea why the pic downloader does not download all the cards, for me it downloads every single one of them, no problems. Which cards are not showing up?

Not being able to "Morph up" in response to an opponents' ability is another easy fix.

I agree I should probably slow down with adding new stuff, but on the other hand, it prevents me from getting too bored. Adding the new shiny stuff is what I like the most
And for the record, I did not add in First Strike / Double Strike, jpb (where is he now?) did. But I gotta say, even though there were (still are) some bugs in there, I think it was a very good effort. You gotta start somewhere, with a tricky feature like that it's obviously not going to be perfect from the start.

GandoTheBard wrote:Nope. Not disconnected from the internet. Nope not getting such an error. It just runs and then doesn't complete the task. I end up having to grab the images myself off of Gatherer.

Many, but not all of the jpgs listed in the card-pictures.txt file can be found on WotC site using a variant of this address:

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http://www.wizards.com/global/images/magic/general/

For some of the cards we have to use a variant of the following address:

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http://www.magickartenmarkt.de/img/cards/

http://www.magickartenmarkt.de is a site which sells magic cards and they may be a small business. They are undoubtedly, substantially smaller than WotC. It may have been this site which caused you to not get all of the jpgs.

On one or two occassions in the past I have had to use the auto downloader more than once to get all of the cards. I keep re-using the Download Card Pictures command until I'm told All card pictures have been downloaded.

Rob has spent some time investigating the auto downloading situation. WotC does not have all of the Portal cards on it's own site. I trust Rob. If he can come up with a better system than what we have currently, then I'm all for it.

DennisBergkamp wrote:By the way, Mr. Chaos, did you have the problem with Night of Souls' Betrayal with the 03/20 version? Because I know it was broken for 03/13, but it should be fixed in 03/20.

Sorry for the late response. The problem occured in the 03/13 version.
I just encountered the card in the 03/20 version and it worked as it should. killed my Wellwisher and 2 Llanowar Elves, me NOT happy! (I have removed your "enhancements" from the Llanowar Elves, even if I felt sad to see them go)

One other thing, about the lands like Godless Shrine.
When the computer plays these lands, it often pays the 2 life to bring it into play untapped but then does not use it to pay for a card. (most often on the first turn)
It seems the decision to pay the 2 life is made at random.
I don't mind if the computer gets all masochistic and deals itself 2 damage that way, saves me the trouble of doing it.
But it feels wrong.

Rob has spent some time investigating the auto downloading situation. WotC does not have all of the Portal cards on it's own site. I trust Rob. If he can come up with a better system than what we have currently, then I'm all for it.

My better solution is to use some other source.... Thanks for the vote of confidence, though!

I've got a good friend at StarCity, and he told me a while ago, that their use of the card pictures, which are copied (once) from WOTC, isn't authorized. But being that they're one of the largest retailers, it doesn't make sense to pursue them.

So either we bite the bullet and find a place to store the real images in a known path, or keep gambling with the source for the images, and make sure they all work, and not assume that they're all available from one URL.

I've got free hosting at forgedb.net78.net and I'm not using it to its full capabilities.... Maybe Dennis could help me with some PHP script to return the image from a MySQL blob or something. But the server does go down here and there, and they do some administrative checks for content, during which time any given site might be out of service for a while.... Maybe if we all had accounts, then the file should be available from at least one of them... since they would all follow the same URL convention, it's easy to swap in the downloader code.

On the other hand, maybe the better solution is to fix the card downloader from having a heart attack in the middle, and allow it to recover and just move on to the next picture, then report the failed pictures. (save to file) This is how I wrote it in the MTGForge Manager, it uses a little-known object that's built-in to VB - the AsyncDownload control.

Rob Cashwalker wrote:On the other hand, maybe the better solution is to fix the card downloader from having a heart attack in the middle, and allow it to recover and just move on to the next picture, then report the failed pictures. (save to file) This is how I wrote it in the MTGForge Manager, it uses a little-known object that's built-in to VB - the AsyncDownload control.

Ah, that is interesting. If we could pull off something similar in java.

DennisBergkamp wrote:

I just noticed this myself after running across the super elves again...Not cool Dennis. Very not cool. Im testing the decks you guys chose to include (some very lame ones imho btw so far) and Im also trying to test the changes you made to the client. I honestly thought that was a bug related to the changes you made. Pissed me off royally when I realized it was in cards.txt. Thankfully its not a hard fix but it means we cant just trust what is in the new updates.

Alright, no need to get all worked up about it. Shit happens, I'm sorry, it's not like I left it in there on purpose. This is why I slap the BETA tag on this thing, bugs are bound to happen, and it's the whole point of a BETA not to trust what's in the new updates.

Yeah I was being dramatic but still it did upset me, which is probably more due to my volatile nature than anything else but even the most even tempered person would be annoyed by such tricks thinking it was done on purpose which I know now wasn't but seemed like it at the time. I guess it is incumbant on play testers to notice changes and I think we do...but it is also the purview of the maintainers to check things like that so that we testers dont jump off bridges in despair (or in Mr Chaos's case perhaps celebrate overenthusiastically.) Not saying it was your fault but it is something to think about for future changes/testing. I guess it proves that the doublestrike life gain fix does work though if that was still in question.

As for Essence Warden and all the other state based effects, I think I might have fixed it. But that's just the thing, I'm not sure. I'll release something new in the next few days, and some more testing would hopefully either put it in the clear, or confirm it's still broken. In which case I'll try something else, or revert back to the way it was originally.
The only reason I've been messing with this is some of the slowdowns people like you have been experiencing, and I hoped I could fix those. I obviously didn't mean to introduce any new bugs.

I have no idea why the pic downloader does not download all the cards, for me it downloads every single one of them, no problems. Which cards are not showing up?

Sorry don't have a list offhand but it was a number of them. I went to change the rarities in Rare's manager and saw missing files everytime I paged down. I actually still need to go through and make sure Ive got all of the pics this time. I got fed up when the Original Rarities data files ended up broken. (Thanks Chris for pointing me to Lava Axe...I would never have noticed it in the middle of the file otherwise.)

Not being able to "Morph up" in response to an opponents' ability is another easy fix.

I agree I should probably slow down with adding new stuff, but on the other hand, it prevents me from getting too bored. Adding the new shiny stuff is what I like the most

Understandable. But not all new stuff needs to be released to us testers right away. There are hundreds of cards Id love to see added (see prior posts for some of them) but I also want to have a stable client to work with so that when I do see a bug its not huge. lol. Well not that we find huge bugs normally. Im sorry I haven't maintained the bug list...I keep thinking about starting a new thread and just listing what is currently a bug but the task of going through the thread is a bit daunting.

And for the record, I did not add in First Strike / Double Strike, jpb (where is he now?) did. But I gotta say, even though there were (still are) some bugs in there, I think it was a very good effort. You gotta start somewhere, with a tricky feature like that it's obviously not going to be perfect from the start.

Yep he did a good job with jury rigging it. But you have spoiled us a little with your coding feats so I guess I for one expect more.

Gando,

Sorry I got a little jumpy myself. I definitely agree with you, it's time to get some more stability into MTGForge again. In addition to a lot of "weak AI" cards, I suppose currently the biggest bugs that need a-fixing are:

- First / Double Strike together with Planeswalkers (I think I fixed a bunch of things with First Strike already, I currently don't know of any other First Strike problems than the bugs associated with Planeswalker Combat, what else is going on with first strike? ).
- State based stuff....
- Creatures that have "search library" abilities grabbed with control magic will search the owner's library.
- Algorithm that balances creatures / spells ratio in quest mode...
- AI should take exalted into account when deciding what creatures to attack with.
- ... what else?

These are things I will try and focus on, even though on half of these bugs I have no idea where to even start fixing them....
In the meantime, I actually have made a bunch of new cards already, I don't think they will generate too many issues so I'll just release them with the next version

Rob Cashwalker wrote:My better solution is to use some other source...

Have you looked at
http://www.ccgtradepost.com/
http://magiccards.info/
http://www.magiclibrarities.net/
?

DennisBergkamp wrote:Gando,

Sorry I got a little jumpy myself. I definitely agree with you, it's time to get some more stability into MTGForge again. In addition to a lot of "weak AI" cards, I suppose currently the biggest bugs that need a-fixing are:

- First / Double Strike together with Planeswalkers (I think I fixed a bunch of things with First Strike already, I currently don't know of any other First Strike problems than the bugs associated with Planeswalker Combat, what else is going on with first strike? ).
- State based stuff....
- Creatures that have "search library" abilities grabbed with control magic will search the owner's library.
- Algorithm that balances creatures / spells ratio in quest mode...
- AI should take exalted into account when deciding what creatures to attack with.
- ... what else?

These are things I will try and focus on, even though on half of these bugs I have no idea where to even start fixing them....
In the meantime, I actually have made a bunch of new cards already, I don't think they will generate too many issues so I'll just release them with the next version

Also for some reason there is a really weird slowdown bug going on with the Quest mode. In normal mode if you play a number of games (unspecified but probably more than 2 usually) the game will slow to a crawl no matter whose turn it is. This is happening with the quest mode now on the very first game about 3-4 turns in. I think I reported this before but it seems like one of the more critical bugs if we can figure out what is causing it. I suspect it has to do with certain Quest decks and the way the AI is coded to deal with some cards but I cant put a closer finger on it than that.

RE the creatures searching their owners library. The fix here isn't simple in execution perhaps but in concept it should be as follows:

Each player is both a controller and an owner. Owners have graveyards, hands, decks, removed piles, and play areas. Controllers have permanents and spells. whenever a permanent controlled by a player has an ability that is triggered and or put on the stack that permanent needs to know its own controller and its own owner. If control of that permanent changes the permanent should know its new controller and its owner.

What this means is that permanents get their own object model separated from the card data.

When a card comes into play it becomes a permanent. This creates an instance of the permanent object with all pertainent data for that card stored in the new object. (Name, Types, subtypes, basepower, basetoughness, modifiedpower, modifiedtoughness, abilities.) When the card leaves play it removes the permanent object associated with it from play.

Each permanent gets its own unique id (much as cards now have ids of course). This id is removed when the object is. The card then goes onto whatever appropriate area of its owner its supposed to go to.

Im not sure if this is as clear as I thought it was to when I started typing this but it seems logical to me. In otherwords don't rely on the old model of the card is everything. Use inheritence and prototyping to make indirect copies of the cards being played. For non card permanents such as tokens things are even simpler as you dont need to deal with a card when it leaves play.

- Algorithm that balances creatures / spells ratio in quest mode...
Im working on rating the cards still. When thats done, the rest of you can review what ive done and if acceptable we can think about how to make them into set packs. Then we can determine ratios of creatures to noncreatures for balancing purposes. Btw I put the Rares ratings page up so that you guys could see what Im doing and comment on it if you think the ratings are off at all.

Mr.Chaos wrote:Dare I say it might be a good idea to not add new stuff to the game until most of the known bugs are fixed?
Because it seems like every time new elements/options/cards are added, old stuff that worked before suddenly is broken in one way or another.
[...]
Maybe we should all slow down a notch. Try to find/iron out the worst bugs before adding even more new stuff.

May I highly suggest something that I've already suggested, and that's been working great for me so far: regression tests.
You basically add a few hacks in the Game to be able to start at a given state, and a few hacks for the AI to accept commands from a text file. You also add a way of verifying the final state of the game, to compare what really happens to what you were expecting.
Then you can have a precalculated AI vs AI match run and see if it works or not.

Here is a real life example from Wagic: 129732 is the id for Shock, 129471 is the id for Snapping Drake .
[INIT] is the initial state: We ask the game to start at the first main phase. We want Player 1 to have a Shock in his hands, and in his manapool. Player2 has a Snapping Drake in play
[DO] is the actions we perform: we click on Shock, then click on the Snapping Drake. (no need to tap a land for mana since I put in the manapool in the init sequence)
[ASSERT] is the state of the game as I expect it to be: Player1 has no mana and Shock in his graveyard, Player 2's Snapping Drake ended in his graveyard.

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#Testing Does shock really do 2 damages (against a /2 creature) ?
[INIT]
FIRSTMAIN
[PLAYER1]
hand:129732
manapool:{R}
[PLAYER2]
inplay:129471
[DO]
129732
129471
[ASSERT]
FIRSTMAIN
[PLAYER1]
graveyard:129732
manapool:{0}
[PLAYER2]
graveyard:129471
[END]


This test is run in the game, and once the test is finished, the engine compares the state of the game with what I was expecting in [ASSERT]. If it's not identical, a bug has been introduced.

This is also great for writing bug reports. You write a simple test file, send it to the programmer, and they can confirm quickly that the bug exists without having to playtest a lot against the AI.

I have a list of tests like those, whenever I do a change and before committing, I run all the tests to make sure they all pass. It's not 100% sure there's no bug, of course, but at least I'm sure that all bugs that have been solved in the past (and for which I wrote a test) did not reappear again.

HUGE speed improvements in the coding once you have such a system in place, it's worth the 5 hours coding it requires, I SWEAR.
more info : http://wololo.net/wagic/the-testing-suite/

Combat damage is not removed from Cavern Harpy when you use its own ability to return to your hand. The damage is removed if you bounce Cavern Harpy (or any other creature) using any other method (Vedalken Mastermind, Boomerang, Evacuation, etc.).

Also, Cavern Harpy has an extraneous line of text ("Cavern Harpy - Creature 2 / 1") in the upper right card description area...

I fixed the damage part not being removed from Cavern Harpy, but I'm still not sure why it has the exta "Cavern Harpy - Creature 2 / 1"

frwololo wrote:HUGE speed improvements in the coding once you have such a system in place, it's worth the 5 hours coding it requires, I SWEAR.
more info : http://wololo.net/wagic/the-testing-suite/

Good stuff frwololo.