Wagic, the Homebrew ?!, MTG for PSP/Android/iOS/Win/Linux/N9

[frwololo]

Hey MageKing, late reply from me, but thanks a lot.
Yes, screen resolution *is* a problem on the PSP, although we support any resolution for cards now, which is good for windows and android. we still have low res graphics for pretty much everything else, sadly, and the people who created the themes are long gone...

[MageKing17]

Hey MageKing, late reply from me, but thanks a lot.
Yes, screen resolution *is* a problem on the PSP, although we support any resolution for cards now, which is good for windows and android. we still have low res graphics for pretty much everything else, sadly, and the people who created the themes are long gone...

Um. I forgot what I'd written, so I had to reread it, but I wasn't talking about the PSP's resolution, I was talking about the processor. The graphics looked fine to me, but given how with Incantus we struggled to our utmost to make every card obey every rule we could think of (and reasonably implement), the Wagic card definition file is highly reminiscent of the design philosophy I've tried to discourage in our card makers. Of course, I immediately realized the only reason we can get away with our ridiculously dynamic approach because we're flaunting all the hardware of modern desktop computers piled onto a language made for dynamic code modification (which turns out to be really helpful for making a Magic implementation, although terrible for speed). With Wagic, you have to make sure it runs on a PSP, which runs at, what, 333 MHz tops? As I discovered with other PSP homebrew, that is not a lot of processing power, so you have to take what you can get, and the approach to card definitions you take is nothing short of genius for the system you have to optimize for.

I recently got a Pandora, and while it has a much more powerful processor than the PSP (SNES games run much faster at an overclocked 800 MHz than any speed you can get on a PSP ;P), it uses an ARM processor, so everything has to be specially compiled for it... or written in Python. The problem with Python is that very few libraries have been ported to the Pandora, and it runs very slowly. I tried a simple game I wrote in PyGame meant to run at 60 FPS and it ran at more like 12. I had to go with an even simpler program before I got intended speeds... a Snake clone. So while I'm sure, if Pyglet and twisted and cocos and whatever other libraries Incantus requires even had Pandora versions, the program would be so slow you'd have difficulty just using the 3D interface, let alone playing a game with someone, and the delay between turns (while the massively complicated rules engine did its stuff) would be atrocious, and that's on hardware that natively runs about twice as fast as a PSP (the CPU is rated at 600 MHz)... so the fact that Wagic not only runs fast but supports such a wide variety of cards and has AI support? Brilliant work.

Only one question: any chance of a Pandora port? There's even already a port request.