Manalink 3.0 Installation

[CirothUngol]

Oops, I think I see the problem. I've deleted my old Google Drive content for Manalink, but my link wasn't updated and was still pointing to the old files. The new file is named 'Manalink3_20150325.7z' (152,179,958 bytes). I've checked the new install and it contains all the required files from the 'Fate Reforged 2015-03-25' patch.

I've changed my DropBox, GoogleDrive, and OneDrive links below, the others are currently defunct until I get a chance to re-activate them. I've reactivated them and am uploading content now. I haven't updated the ReadMe yet, but the new Mod structure is open and easy. It allows using folders or archives (ZIP or 7Z) and you can add descriptive texts and custom batch files for more complex Mods. Art and Playdeck Mods even create back-ups of all replaced files to allow you to Undo any changes the Mods make. You may extract all Mod archives in place and remove them for quicker access, if you like.

Sorry for the inconvenience to anyone who download the old Manalink install. Please snag the new file (Manalink3_20150325.7z in the 'Manalink 3.x' folder) and let me know if the Install, Mods, and Game all work correctly.

[Monicle of Urza]

Firstly, thanks to all who have been working on this for the countless hours it took. It's fantastic. I kept a copy of the original Microprose game on an old laptop and played it there for years but just found this.

Please excuse the noob-ness, I have looked through other posts but just can't find an answer. I am fairly confident I installed Manalink 3.0 properly in it's most up to date (032515) version and it is working but card images (main artwork not card background) are missing. I have the 2012-March 2015 updates. How do I get manalink 3.0 to show the artwork from these updates?

I tried looking at past posts including one suggesting to rename card with card id number from deckbuilder and insert into cardart folder but nothing has worked yet (or maybe I didn't do it properly). Please help.

[CirothUngol]

Easy enough. I've placed a simple how-to on the 8th post of this thread. Step 3 is for installing Korath's new Shandalar mod, but instructions for the CardArt images are at the bottom of the post.

[Monicle of Urza]

Thanks for the rapid response Ciroth!

I originally found that set of directions and followed it 3 times very very carefully creating and shipping all images into a newly created CardArtManalink folder in Program. Still no art inserted. Unsure if it has anything to do with it but I also keep getting a drawcardlib.dll error for an "unknown watermark "green"" in a line in watermarks.csv.

Also, Shandalar.exe never started after this and only resulted in a lengthy system busy blue circle mouse icon.

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

[IoriYagami]

I still don't understand much of the state of the project. Very confusing, riddled with obsolete and outdated info. I read 2 places about how to launch connection, and both were wrong and incompatible.
So where can I find correct instructions on how to launch the gem? How to connect?
In your distribution there manalink.ini has no strings like server port, etc. Why? Another incompatible version? Outdated guide on wiki? WHat is going on???
HELP!
Also, the gem I launch doesn't have any text - only shows one cyrillic letter Д everywhere - in menus, on the connection window. What the hell?

How do I play on the network? Local, internet?
Also, during duel, sometimes the card changes its art to alternate after going to graveyard from battlefield. Very odd.
Deck opening is slow and cumbersome and inconvenient to use - should be a standart openfiledialog instead of loading a combolist with 1000s of items.
Also, sometimes the launch crashes (50% of the time). Maybe it's my Vista, who knows.
Why did you remove different colored patterned battlefield backgrounds? Copyrights? All I see now is boring green background.

[gmzombie]

you cant play online with this right now. simple as that. use the single duel against the ai

[Korath]

And by "right now", gmzombie means "for the forseeable future". The overwhelming majority of the added cards were programmed before we knew which sorts of techniques did or did not break the multiplayer version. It's impractical to fix them without beginning again from the very start and essentially throwing away the last ten or twelve years' worth of development.

The whole point of playing with this engine is A) to play against the AI, B) specifically in this engine. Even from a programming standpoint, it always would have been way easier to start from scratch than to coerce this game into becoming reasonably complete and modern. (This isn't idle exaggeration. I wrote a MODO clone for a different CCG seven years ago; total development time was about as long as it took me to understand Shandalar well enough even to begin adding cards to it.) If you're not driven by nostalgia like the rest of us here, you're better off with one of the other MTG game engines.

[Aswan jaguar]

Also, during duel, sometimes the card changes its art to alternate after going to graveyard from battlefield. Very odd.
Deck opening is slow and cumbersome and inconvenient to use - should be a standart openfiledialog instead of loading a combolist with 1000s of items.
Also, sometimes the launch crashes (50% of the time). Maybe it's my Vista, who knows.
Why did you remove different colored patterned battlefield backgrounds? Copyrights? All I see now is boring green background.

The card image alternation happens in order to use a larger variety of different card images.
The launch doesn't crash on my Windows Xp pro at all and doesn't crash on windows 8.1 in my tablet also.
About the different colored patterned battlefield backgrounds the problem is that your origin download uses a mod with that background artwork.You can choose another or make your own.
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7203
About deck builder like with the program itself the more cards that get added and artwork the more time it will make to open especially with older and not so fast machines.

[stassy]

Deck opening is slow and cumbersome and inconvenient to use - should be a standart openfiledialog instead of loading a combolist with 1000s of items.

Juste backup/remove the files in the Playdeck folder and it will load faster, the game start to have hard time past 255 stored decks for slow/old computers

[IoriYagami]

Oh well, just what I feared. The project went on to trying to stuff as much newer cards as possible and ignored the core hard features. I guess you still can't change much in executable, if you can't even stuff a call to OpenFileDialog somewhere. I am a developer myself so I understand your sense of attachment to code you already done and not willing to scrap at start over.

Now I wonder about that Hamachi multiplayer thing? Is it outdated? Used with a wrong version? The wiki is pretty clear on this. What about Magic.reg? Manalink.ini? Was all it scrapped?

I'd rather play with a SMALLER OLDER CARD POOL (maybe without newer special cards, like colorless Eldrazi, planeswalkers, hybrid, double faced, levelers, flippers, morph), but with networking capabilites and with convenient UI. Now that's would be something worth donating to.
I like how small and barebones this version is. So far, neither MTGO nor Duels are as clean as that. At the same time, this game is presentable enough to be far ahead of homebrew MtG apps, not mentioning unique AI capability.

Oh well, great work all in all.

[stassy]

The Hamachi tests where done for the ML3 10.4 V2 as stated in my posts in 2012, but I am sure it would work for latest version of ML3 with no RuleEngine and vanilla cards only (unfortunately, a lot of old cards were recoded so they might no longer work, reducing the pool of cards available for network play).

Ciroth has a storage which hold old ML versions (check his sig), so maybe you can have a shoot at the 2012 version.

For the ML3 recoding, it's not that the devs wanted to keep their code working (for example, Korath is willing to start from scratch by delving into Shandalar which was untouched while still working on ML3), the true reason is they don't have the source code and all they can do is work in the dark with a few mined and reverse engeneered data.

[IoriYagami]

Yeah, I know that's only executable you are working with, since it's abandonware. Very cool. I myself sometimes can't make head or tail out of other people source code.
So, what is the last (and where) version which has net functionality?
I tried that manalink 1.3.2_20010711.7z from Cyroth's archive, and it has quite a lot of cards,which is fine. I managed to make it work on local network in 1-on-1 duel, but it turned out to be buggy as hell. I took 2 standard decks used in shaldalar (witch and seer), so it should've worked fine. Alas, no such luck: after a couple of turns, both players got DIFFERENT game state, and were essentially playing different games. I guess it is due to Microprose poorly implemented priority system? I mean players 1 has a creature, and player 2 doesn't see it, intead, he sees that player 1 gets mana burn for those mana spent on the creature. Especially funny when you get attacked by non-existent creature (it flashed 'illegal target type' at me at the player prompt. And finally when 1 player already won, the other, with completely different life totals kept playing. When I moved to next round, a WINDOWS messagebox fell through with something about expecting SHOWRESULTS packet and getting PICKACARD packet instead, and crashing after that. Oh my!

[stassy]

You got it to start at least, that's a good thing
All version should have net functionality, it's just that the devs didn't work at all on multiplayer code (if they found any), so any modification on card or card pointers might cause a desync. Did you try to disable RuleEngine in the config.txt and try to play with vanilla creatures/cards?

[gmzombie]

To be honest I don't remember how well the game played when it was done by microprose as they didn't have tcpip at all. I may be wrong by I'm not even sure mok had tcpip setup. I believe it was coded by someone else. And then sometime before the 2k fix was when the network code got written over. The problem is I'm not sure when it was done..I have a few ideas as I think it was either right before or when the rules engine card was implemented. Now with that said I have almost every update ever made for this game and if someone wants to try and figure it out and get partial networking back maybe it would be enticing enough to fix then? I'm just guessing though. There is so much to do for manalink that I believe would make the game better than any other one out there but we really need a team of programmers to help as Korath is busy with shandalar right now and Gargaroz is busy with real life things st the moment. Do you have any programming experience loriyagami? if so what?

[IoriYagami]

I'm afraid I'd be of not much help, I mostly do typical client-server applications (I do both server-side and client side, as well as analysis and testing) which work with financial data stored in centralized database. Nothing as fancy as AI, game engines, or system-related. The most of that kind I did is some equipment data communication.
Still amazed at both you guys and those original Microprose people. That was really ambitious. I wonder whether DotP 2012 etc do any better than that - after all, their card set is limited.