Magic Online Redesign

by **Arch** » 06 Nov 2009, 19:31

I don't know if this is news or not but I found it interesting.

The Magic Show #164 - A New Magic Online

To me it seems like the new UI will pretty much blow the old one out of the water. (Never played more than a couple of trial-games with the old one though.)

Even disregarding the visual update you can see that they've had professionals working on it. No useless clutter on the screen, just cards representing themselves. All very simple (though maybe not from an implementation perspective) but efficient. There's going to be a ton of great ideas to steal from this one.

I wonder if they made any changes to the yield/stop system. When going to the attack phase it seemed like they just clicked the red-zone. Is going to be interesting to see how it all turns out - if they can make all the step/phase shifting as smooth.

And of course, just to spell it out loud; this is obviously a challenge from wizards to everyone on this board...

by **BlackMamba** » 07 Nov 2009, 00:57

That looks very nice! It gives me a lot of great ideas for Mox! (Mox is currently based on WPF, the 'desktop' big brother to silverlight, so all this candy is possible).

by **Incantus** » 07 Nov 2009, 03:05

Wow, that's really nice! They finally use modern ideas like we have in Incantus (the way the redzones work seem awfully similar - see this video from a Feb 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAVnQKu2_E, particularly at time 8:14 and 10:20

, but then again i copied the idea from this game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r7xu3cYcas). Anyway, it's cool that they are moving to a browser based system, but since they are using Silverlight it will still be microsoft only (unless moonlightcan ever fully duplicate it).

by **Arch** » 07 Nov 2009, 09:33

It's true what you say, Incantus; wizards isn't leading the charge on this one. They do seem to have some chance to catch up with this though.

I think they pointed out in the video that Silverlight was just used for this demo, meaning the final product could actually be anything. I don't know how much magic is actually possible with browsers these days. Take Quake Live for instance, as far as I know it's just using the browser as a front-end and you still have to download the "actual" game to be able to play it. While a lot is possible maybe not everything is viable.

It would be nice if they provided an API. I want a command line interface so I can play it at work! Though I doubt that will ever happen. Maybe I'll let this thought resurface when Incantus goes open-source...

by **frwololo** » 09 Nov 2009, 02:02

Incantus wrote:the way the redzones work seem awfully similar

Yay, we have a redzone in Wagic too :mrgreen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LCdxkoZMnI#t=00m35s

by **Goblin Hero** » 09 Nov 2009, 06:37

Looks awesome, but... They can't return leagues for ages in the current client. It will takes years to see 1st version of this new interface and it'll be buggy as hell for at least a year.