Collectible Card Game Headquarters

OK. After a minor panic attack earlier, when the new csv2dat.exe refused to produce a Cards.dat file when run - which I finally traced back to a single ‘-1’ value in the ‘Power’ entry of ‘Char-Rumbler’ in one of my files. Here’s some candidate beta Manalink files. There will be some errors, of that I have no doubt, but for the coders I’m hoping these files will work straight out of the box for testing purposes.

Whilst the current, and many of the removed, coded card parameters have been restored – the new cards entries only contain their Full Name, Name, Color, Rarity, Casting Cost, Power, Toughness, Rule Text and Flavor Text entries – none of the Manalink specific parameters have been entered so far.

I’d request any found errors are submitted back to me for the moment, so I can correct the errors in the current base files for general release at later date.
Please don’t send the entire csv back – just the corrected entries.
If you’re using Excel, for example, just cut and paste the ‘row’ of the corrected entry into a separate sheet and send the single sheet with the corrected entries in a file. I’m not particularly fussed about the format it arrives in – csv, xls, ods – all fine.
Wading though a posted 12000+ row spreadsheet to find a single ‘0’ changed to ‘1’ is a complete nonstarter, though.

As all the cards entries ‘rules text’ are updated to the latest Oracle wording – the original |H1, H2, |S codes in the rules text required for the ‘Sleight’ and ‘Hack’ abilities on the original cards are not restored. It would be possible to rectify this on the original cards, but as the two abilities only ever really worked on these– I chose not to do it at this stage.
Although, Mok’s earlier post has wetted my appetite to spend some time applying the codes to all the cards.

To simplify converting the oracle format to the manalink.csv - Hybrid Mana symbols in the ‘Rules Text’ are currently represented in the form '( / )'. Whether people like the look of this format is open to debate – I’ll bow to the forum if people want it changed.

Anyway, I humbly submit the files to the scrutiny of the forum…

http://www.mediafire.com/?6tv2q5240wn7olw

Sorry Orion79 – my bad. ‘Agro’ is a British colloquialism for something, or someone, causing ‘a lot of trouble’.

This :
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=agro

In dev term, when 2 dev are arguing because they are working on the same project and their dev idea differ

Well done Sonic! And thanks for the info about "Agro": it is always nie to learn something new

Ah, the file is working but the game is overall very slow to start, not to run. It is a shame that we are totally without arts now and that it is still showing the old, bad GIF arts.

The art is the next big thing - I'll start compiling that soon. I've got all the HQ artwork pre-sized to 288x232 - just needs minor tweaks to the contrast and color balance in some cases. I'll have to make custom artwork for some of the tokens though.

You could try using the current coded artwork Aswan Jaguar adapted from my 'SCV Card Art Updates' for Snacko's CardLib mod.

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5897

Personally, I think this is the way to go. As Snacko's mod accesses the artwork by name rather than ID number. So regardless of whether the card slot ID numbers are changed in the csv, the artwork won't ever require renumbering.

It was working fine but had a conflict: if I could use the arts, I couldn't have the latest Mok's changes that allowed a CSV with more than 2000 cards to run. Maybe things have been merged in the meantime. Please, also take a look to the artwork that I've included in this thread some days ago. Maybe you already like them and may save some job.

I'd already adapted those pieces of artwork in the SCV updates. They're in the Snacko CardArt folder as well, if you want to see what I used for the other non-WotC artwork.

The 2 'Vampire' token images come from Zendikar and Innistrad, and there are currently 6 WotC 'Wolf' tokens in the folder from various sets.

I like your 'Deadbox' Reaper - mines a bit... Er, 'conventional'.

Yep, but I couldn't find anything better It was in the days when patches not always had appropriated arts together. So I filled them as I could.

Regarding the arts, just a small info that the files don't have to be resized to the specified dimensions. The game will resize them after loading anyway. I believe I chose the resolution to be the same as original files when switching to jpg, but that's all (the original arts used 2 versions of the files, big and small and were compressed by a very unusual at the time wavelet based codec). As long as files aren't too long (and 12k+ cards is a lot) it doesn't really matter if the resolution is off and each recompression adds more artifacts.

In the csv, please ignore the |H and |S, I'll do it automatically as it will have an extra bonus of filling the required color fields (the hack mode will still require manual changes, but that can be done later). For the card costs, I'll see about upgrading it for some modern rules, but first I need to modify csv2dat and csv a bit, so let me know when your csv is ready for further updates and I'll play with it for a couple of days.

Mok wrote:Regarding the arts, just a small info that the files don't have to be resized to the specified dimensions. The game will resize them after loading anyway. I believe I chose the resolution to be the same as original files when switching to jpg, but that's all (the original arts used 2 versions of the files, big and small and were compressed by a very unusual at the time wavelet based codec). As long as files aren't too long (and 12k+ cards is a lot) it doesn't really matter if the resolution is off and each recompression adds more artifacts.

In the csv, please ignore the |H and |S, I'll do it automatically as it will have an extra bonus of filling the required color fields (the hack mode will still require manual changes, but that can be done later). For the card costs, I'll see about upgrading it for some modern rules, but first I need to modify csv2dat and csv a bit, so let me know when your csv is ready for further updates and I'll play with it for a couple of days.

The problem was, we ended up with images a lot smaller than 288x232 - when they were automatically re-sized they'd look awful. And images as large as 800x600 - and all with various qualities of jpg encoding.
We had CardArt folders with 400+ redundant images, all sizes, and encoding quality, and nobody knew which folder went with which update.
I recompiled and standardized all the artwork with HQ scans, from the guys over in the 'Pics Forum', in Jun/Aug 2010 - and have been releasing alternative card art updates with the redundant artwork removed ever since.

If you're talking about the 'Req xxx' color fields in the csv - I managed to extract the data from casting costs in the Oracle. Off the top of my head - 2GG = '2,0,0,2,0,0' in manalink.
If you're not talking about the 'Req xxx' color fields in the csv - please ignore the above.

Sonic wrote:The problem was, we ended up with images a lot smaller than 288x232 - when they were automatically re-sized they'd look awful. And images as large as 800x600 - and all with various qualities of jpg encoding.

Sure, if you use random stuff then you will end up with images that are too small to look good (or big enough to slow down the game). I'm just saying that if you have for example a set of images for a specific expansion and these are 348x256 or something, there's really no good reason to resize them to 288x232 unless you want to cut down on the file sizes.

We had CardArt folders with 400+ redundant images, all sizes, and encoding quality, and nobody knew which folder went with which update.

That's a good reason to leave "standard" art preparation to 1 person assuming we'll have 1 set of pics from now on, with maybe extra tokens added at one time or another. With others contributing extra art, but final set made by 1 person.

If you're talking about the 'Req xxx' color fields in the csv - I managed to extract the data from casting costs in the Oracle. Off the top of my head - 2GG = '2,0,0,2,0,0' in manalink.
If you're not talking about the 'Req xxx' color fields in the csv - please ignore the above.

I'm talking about "Sleighted Color", "Hack Color" and "Hack Mode" columns, that tell the AI which things are hackable and give hints how to choose the new basic land type/color.

Is there a way, in order to be easy customizable and understandable the csv to look always at the top to the values because you can't see what is BP,BQ for example when editing the cards.
And another question are only cards that are coded in magic.exe that are playable for testing right now?

Mok, now we have the "almost final CSV", so I need the tool to move the cards_ptr so I could enter in the final stage of testing (I could not debug anything now).

Aswan jaguar wrote:Is there a way, in order to be easy customizable and understandable the csv to look always at the top to the values because you can't see what is BP,BQ for example when editing the cards.

Do you mean having the Field Names - Like Full Name, CODED CARD, Name, Color, - in view all the time?

In Excel: Select the first entry in the CODED CARD field - should be '1' (for Air Elemental).

Go into the 'Window' Menu and select 'Freeze Panes' - this freezes all the cells to the left and above the selected cell.

You should now be able to scroll about the sheet with the Field and Card Names visible at all times.

Works in Open Office Calc in much the same way.

There is freeze top row thanks Sonic.

Nevermind my previous post, it seems I could still use the old editor, so I could do some testing.
The results are pretty good, I'm TRULY happy !