Collectible Card Game Headquarters

I've thought of making a global announcement, and I would use it as a blog type thing, like rares had. The purpose of my blog type thing would be to make all the users of this forum aware of all the other cool things in this forum. IOW, it appears to me that a lot of folks are active in one forum, and never seem to browse around to any of the others.

It frustrates me to see someone building ANOTHER deckbuilder, ANOTHER web crawler, etc., when these already exist in polished and reusable form.

I agree with Arch. A general resource forum for data, pictures, utilities of any kind, magic related, would be useful to lots of people. It's something that would fit outside the scope of Programmers' Roundtable or HQ Card Pics really, as different utilities would have different goals and scopes. Generally all these kind of utilities and data collections are things that aren't really just for programmers or just for picture collectors and scanners, so it really is a separate kind of forum area.

In this new forum, would each utility have a subforum, or is a sticky OK?

Subforums are ignored by lots, because they're hard to notice, in my opinion. A single sticky with a summary of each utility would be great, along with the official thread for each utility afterward. Probably best to limit new thread creation to new utilities only, so there doesn't end up with a pile of threads that are basically off-topic.
Not sure if the sticky should organize a list of programs and data/information collections alphabetically and have a summary of what each does, or if the sticky should have general categories of utility or data/information types and list the various programs and differences under that.

Arch wrote:Updated first post.

Any chance of getting just the delta when an update happens?

we have a wiki here too - how about an announcement thread that is updated when a new tool is added to the wiki (i.e. only deltas), but the actual info goes into the wiki (alphabetically sorted)?

I know that the wiki is hardly noticed, so the sticky is important, but if there is some sort of update notification, I think the wiki is the better form.

Here is the crawler we are using for MAGE. Running it will output the data in a txt format, with the values separated by "|".
https://github.com/magefree/GathererCrawler

Huggybaby wrote:In this new forum, would each utility have a subforum, or is a sticky OK?

Actually what I was thinking about was something akin to viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1840 but for raw data. I'm guessing there's also other resources such as card-rendering, domain models (that might not be completely tied into the logic) and so on.

This could easily be extended to other parts of the site. There are 10-20 AI/enforcement forums/programs; where should I go? Which ones work on my os? Where can I chip in with some work and so on.

If I were to start this off I'd just go with a thread. Throw up a table or list and start adding stuff. Right now I don't have a clear view of what I'd like to achive with something like this. What I think something like this needs though is someone with a vision.

At the same time I'd support any effort in this general direction.

randian wrote:Any chance of getting just the delta when an update happens?

What kind of delta are you looking for? I put a small list on the first page but I guess that's not what you're looking for. If you want a diff of the actual data you could just get the current and previous versions and diff them yourself.

I have had some ideas about altering the way I distribute the data which could possibly include diffs as well. But I don't have any concrete plans at this time.

North wrote:Here is the crawler we are using for MAGE. Running it will output the data in a txt format, with the values separated by "|".
https://github.com/magefree/GathererCrawler

I downloaded it to check it out. There's html in the output, don't know if that's intentional or not.

Do you have any idea of where you want it to go? Is it going to be library that others can integrate into their products or some standalone downloader?

Arch wrote:This could easily be extended to other parts of the site. There are 10-20 AI/enforcement forums/programs; where should I go? Which ones work on my os? Where can I chip in with some work and so on.

If I were to start this off I'd just go with a thread. Throw up a table or list and start adding stuff. Right now I don't have a clear view of what I'd like to achive with something like this. What I think something like this needs though is someone with a vision.

This sounds like the way to go to me.

For the different Engines:
Wiki table. Most recent release. General release schedule (how many weeks?). OS Compatibility. Programming Language.

And then like 5-15 different features, preferably Yes/No. But sometimes a bit more open-ended (like AI could be "Min-Max", "Simple", "None"). I'm willing to help out fill out the table for Forge.

Edit: Something like this http://www.slightlymagic.net/wiki/List_of_MTG_Engines

Arch wrote:

North wrote:Here is the crawler we are using for MAGE. Running it will output the data in a txt format, with the values separated by "|".
https://github.com/magefree/GathererCrawler

I downloaded it to check it out. There's html in the output, don't know if that's intentional or not.

Do you have any idea of where you want it to go? Is it going to be library that others can integrate into their products or some standalone downloader?

Regarding the HTML in the output files, it can be easily replaced to suit your needs.

From an architectural point of view this could be greatly improved. It wasn't written to be used as a library. Anyone interested in using the code is free to do so. Also, there are behaviors that should be extracted in separate classes, namely outputting the data. We only use it when a new set comes out.

I wouldn't recommend dynamically getting the needed information from Gatherer. This is slow because of the html overhead. I am sure there are some better solutions out there, especially if you are interested in different languages. You can use this one because you can easily write your output method and save the file however you want (or save directly to the DB).

I think that cards from Fallen Empires and such should show how many different versions there is, like basic lands do (I think they did at one point, but not anymore).

friarsol wrote:And then like 5-15 different features, preferably Yes/No. But sometimes a bit more open-ended (like AI could be "Min-Max", "Simple", "None"). I'm willing to help out fill out the table for Forge.

Yeah, something like this.

North wrote:You can use this one because you can easily write your output method and save the file however you want (or save directly to the DB).

That's a big plus in my eyes. Language specific access to the data is one step better than raw data, as long as it's available for "my" language.

Marek14 wrote:I think that cards from Fallen Empires and such should show how many different versions there is, like basic lands do (I think they did at one point, but not anymore).

Possible that I broke it with the fix for viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1347&start=225#p81157

Will have a look at it.

It seems there are no flavor texts for the second side of a transform card in the meta.xml?!??!

I've made my own page for the data at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2771470/index.html so will just link to that instead of maintaining the first post here. Note that this thread is still the official place for announcement of new releases though, you just need one more click to get it.

This setup allows for some more freedom. Specifically it allows me to autogenerate the information on that page.

Marek14 wrote:I think that cards from Fallen Empires and such should show how many different versions there is, like basic lands do (I think they did at one point, but not anymore).

I reverted the old fix since it seems like that is the behavior wanted. Night // Day for instance actually has two version so should be (x2). The meaning of the number would not be the number of different cards in a set that still have the same name.

PilotPirx wrote:It seems there are no flavor texts for the second side of a transform card in the meta.xml?!??!

Fixed.