Moving away from cards.txt

[lord of 13]

Images are the vast majority of it. 80/20 rule - 20% of the card class [images & associated data] takes 80% of the time to load. And vice versa. Eh... gotta live with it.

[Chris H.]

I made an effort last night to update the rarities for the recent card additions. I noticed that Elspeth Tirel has an K:SVar:Rarity:Mythic and has no rarity displayed in the deck editor.

We have 65 cards using K:SVar:Rarity:Mythic and they appear as a Rare in forge, yet Elspeth Tirel does not show it's rarity.

[Rob Cashwalker]

make sure it's copying the svar during the card re-assignment

[Rob Cashwalker]

Speaking of SVars...

One of the next steps I will take is to remove the SVar as a keyword (handled in CardFactory). With the way cards are parsed now, it's easy enough to just handle SVar's at a lower level.

[friarsol]

I was just thinking that before. "We can just have Pic as it's own label instead of having it as an SVar, now that the cards data files have more structure."

[Rob Cashwalker]

At the moment, I want to keep the URL and rarity as SVars, just we won't need the "K:" prefix.

Why? I don't want the Card object to have a single string for URL and rarity, as both pieces of information will be better represented in a different sort of "tag" - "Set:{ExpCode}:{Rarity}:{optional URL}". "Set Membership" will be an ArrayList of some basic class to store the 3 values in one element.

At some point, I'm looking at replacing the "K:" with something like "Ability:", "Effect:", or "Spell:". Leaving "K:" for normal Keywords, like Flying. (definitely not until we get an AbilityFactory...)

[Chris H.]

make sure it's copying the svar during the card re-assignment

`
Thank you, adding this to the end of the card object for Elspeth Tirel did the trick:

Code: Select all

card2.setSVars(card.getSVars());

[DennisBergkamp]

Implementation of sets would be an awesome thing... this wouldn't just be a major boon to drafting, but I could add different types of boosters to the (Shandalar clone) quest mode.

[silly freak]

Is it possible to keep some sort of Dictionary<string, Card> in the class, then load from a file if the card is needed & its name [the key] isn't in the dictionary? While loading, you can use FileInfo to query the time last modified and compare it to the FileInfo of the application itself.

Not without some significant change... I wasn't aware that it would keep hitting the disk other than first-load.

I have some code for card caching in my own project, maybe you can copy/paste something together to make it work. I don't know how applicable it really is - Laterna Magica has no such thing as CardFactory - but it could give you some directions:

AllCards - This is the real cards cache. it is filled at startup and then serves as the one point for getting cards. LM reads the cards from a zip archive, so there are some specific parts in it.
CompileAll - This class has a method compileAll which recursively iterates through a directory's files. you can use this to bring some structure in all the card files, and it will automatically fix the "big folder" performance hit.

[Rob Cashwalker]

Today I submitted two changes in CardFactory and ReadCard to directly handle the SVars. I did not remove the keyword handler from CardFactory yet, to maintain some backwards compatibility for now.

I used a VB program to automatically remove the "K:" from "K:SVar:..."
I have begun committing cards, I'm hoping to have fewer errors because I'm using my office PC which is a dual core, with a direct LAN connection. (as opposed to my centrino laptop on WiFi.g)

[mtgrares]

To improve performance, you could zip all of the card files. Of course you could zip all of the card files during development but it would have the drawbacks of a single, big file.

You guys are doing great work.

[Rob Cashwalker]

I don't think performance would be better when zipped. It would have to be unzipped to be read, even if it's only unzipped in memory.... I definitely feel like the load time is a bit shorter in the card-per-file version.

Distribution is another story. cards.txt zipped up smaller than the cardsfolder does currently.

[silly freak]

Laterna Magica uses zipping, but with the difference that the zip is not a simple copy but a "compiled" version of the cards (represented as java objects instead of text)

it could boost the performance because it only requires you to open one file and not one per card, but I think that the improvement is marginal

[slapshot5]

Today I submitted two changes in CardFactory and ReadCard to directly handle the SVars. I did not remove the keyword handler from CardFactory yet, to maintain some backwards compatibility for now.

I used a VB program to automatically remove the "K:" from "K:SVar:..."

SVars aren't being set correctly for download URLs.

ReadCard.java

Code: Select all

else if (s.startsWith("SVar:"))
                {
                    String t[] = s.split(":");
                    System.out.println(t[1]+"-"+t[2]);
                    c.setSVar(t[1], t[2]);
                }

sets "Picture"="http". The rest of the URL would get set in t[3]. Not sure what kind of flexibility you're looking for here, so I didn't just go ahead and fix "s.split(":",3)"

-slapshot5

[Rob Cashwalker]

That is the correct fix.