The Art of Things to Come

[Aswan jaguar]

I reported this also in the bug tracker but it is a mistake in naming sequence in CardArtManalink folder.
tracker.php?p=4&t=1306
The problem is that Zombie(14) is skipped so when it is selected to be shown it has blank artwork.

[drool66]

Thanks again for reporting these. Zombie (14) is included in the August Manalink patch and cumulative cardart folder.

I just finished going through token art in MTGO and I've added or updated about 100 images, this one included - at this point there is only one token I know of that's not included in Manalink! You can find them in the "New for next update" folder in my sig.

[drool66]

The Magic 2015 frames are finally finished, and they're posted here for anyone who wants to take them for a spin. For anyone who does, I appreciate any reports of issues or inconsistencies you find with them - thank you!

Link
(Includes an updated Duel.dat)

[Aswan jaguar]

I enabled Spurnmage Advocate which was already coded now needs card artwork.

[drool66]

Thanks! Cards that are coded but not in sets published since the most recent Manalink public release are in MEGA>Dev Images>Added in Dev
Conversely, the new sets are in MEGA>Dev Images>New Sets>SETNAME

(This is the reason I follow the git server, btw )

[drool66]

I finally managed to do something I've wanted to do for what seems like forever!
Check this out (thanks again for your help, FastEddie!)

[Aswan jaguar]

Is this a WOTC art as I don't see it in any set on gatherer?
If you don't know Korath had made something similar but still different here:
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=13238#p142015

[drool66]

Yes
https://scryfall.com/card/p09/1/cryptic-command

Thank you for reminding me of these. What's new here is we can now drop portrait-oriented art into CardArtManalink, and if it's not a card type that already uses portrait art (just Planes & Schemes I think), it will use the full art frames. We can now have different instances of the same card use different frames, which wasn't implemented before. I think I'm going to try to find a way to use both theses full art frames and Korath's "full art with bar."

[drool66]

So here's what the "Full Art with Bar" frames look like. I was able to create a system whereby we can use both these and the full art frames. Anyone have an opinion on them one way or another? Should they make main release?

[EDIT] Also looking for input as to whether I should use these for any and all full art/full frame/extended art/whatever promos

[FastEddie]

The background art looks extremly cool. Cards are nice but Emrakul's text is a bit hard to read for old guys like me.

[FastEddie]

Kudos to you for the nice work. There is just one little fly in the ointment, namely that white text is somewhat hard to read against a bright (worst-case white) background like here:

Is there any way to switch the colour to black for some cards?

[drool66]

We could, it would just have to be an entirely separate frame sorted by ID. I think that would be wasteful - most of these are textless anyway, meaning they're simple enough that Wizards thought we don't really need the rules text (the whole textless Cryptic Command debacle notwithstanding). Want to try to find a color that works more generally across all the images?
There's also the smallcard text glitch that I can't pinpoint, where the white text will be too far offset from its black shadow. My guess is that it's done in exe, but it could be something I missed, probably in windows.c.

[FastEddie]

This calls for testing . I tried various shades of grey for the text (but way less than 50). These were the most convincing results.

RGB 200/200/200

RGB 205/205/205

RGB 210/210/210

This one is already hard to read against an almost white background (220/220/220):

What do you think?

[drool66]

One of the problems with full art cards is finding an image size that works for both big & small cards. For big cards, it's stretched and on small cards it's compressed, so you have to find something in the middle, which isn't really good for either size. This is what I've done so far. Here's the result:

BeforeSmall.jpg (15.63 KiB) Viewed 6516 times

I just figured out a simple solution - crop the small card art for full art cards to normal proportions before drawing. Here's what you get:

AfterSmall.jpg (17.74 KiB) Viewed 6516 times

I'm very happy with the results; what do you think?
Of course this means I need to redo 500+ pieces of art I've cropped & processed over that last 2 months, but I think the results are worth it!

Here's the code, btw:

Code: Select all

int DrawSmallArt(HDC hdc, const RECT* rect, int id, int version) {
   if( !ArtIsPortrait(id, version) ){
      return DrawBigArt(hdc, rect, id, version);
   }
   else{//crop inline for small art
      if (!LoadBigArt(id, version, 0, 0)) {
         EnterCriticalSection(&crit);
         gdi::Graphics graphics(hdc);
         gdi::SolidBrush brush(gdi::Color(211,211,211));
         gdi::Rect tmpRect(rect->left, rect->top, rect->right - rect->left, rect->bottom - rect->top);
         graphics.FillRectangle(&brush, tmpRect);
         LeaveCriticalSection(&crit);
         return 0;
      }
      EnterCriticalSection(&crit);
      gdi::Graphics graphics(hdc);

      std::string path = idToNameFun(id, version);
      gdi::Rect tmpRect(rect->left, rect->top, rect->right - rect->left, rect->bottom - rect->top);
      UINT wid = (*cache)[path].get()->GetWidth();
      graphics.DrawImage((*cache)[path].get(), tmpRect, 0, 0, wid, (29*wid)/36, gdi::UnitPixel);

      LeaveCriticalSection(&crit);
      return 1;
   }
}

[FastEddie]

Looks good to me!

Of course this means I need to redo 500+ pieces of art I've cropped & processed over that last 2 months, but I think the results are worth it!

Depending on what you need to do, there are probably ways to make your life easier. If you need to crop, resize, convert one standard format into another, etc. a bunch of pictures you might want to have a look at IrfanView: https://www.irfanview.com/. It has a batch conversion feature that takes care of pretty much everything you can imagine (under File->Batch Conversion).

If you must convert from, say, JPEG or PNG to the proprietary PIC format I understand there are tools to do so. Wrapping a little shell script around it should be no issue so that you can convert a whole folder at once. Let me know if I can be of any assistance.