Packaging DOTP 2012 Decks as DLC Wads

[MisterBenn]

Has anyone succeeded in doing this yet? I've worked from the "Casper's Deck" example file that was posted, and I can add a deck with cards and illustrations, and using the java Wad packer I can update the Wad file and have it recognised successfully ingame. I have however an issue:

I create the card skeletons from the XML card generator. This is a fantastic util and the cards look to be OK, but once I produce all the cards and the deck file, when I get to the Deck Manager ingame, only a subset of my created cards appear (like 25% of them at most). This is having deleted the profile after making changes, and I have an entry for my deck in the APPID_LINKING.TXT and _PREPPED_APPID_LINKING.TXT files which matches the decks UID. Those cards that do appear have the correct illustrations. If I create a new deck containing all cards from the existing game, they all appear in game correctly so it makes me think that the data in some tags makes the game exclude them in some way. Has anyone got past this when putting cards into a DLC wad file?

I hope there is a solution to this, I am itching to make some decks for this game! I'd really appreciate any help.

[SimUser]

Yeah I've had some cards not appear at all, even with really basic abilities, it's frustrating. That's not even with it being in custom DLC wads, I just put them in the DATA_CORE wad.

[MisterBenn]

So I was doing some detective work to try and work out why some cards are accepted and some aren't. I tested a few things, here's what I found:

* If you create your own deck made of cards from the vanilla game, there is no problem.
* If you create copies of vanilla cards and (under new filenames) pack the copies into a new Wad file, they can also be used successfully.

My next test was to take a card that is supplied with vanilla - but if you make the same card yourself (using the XML generator in this case) it does not work. One such card was Snapsail Glider. I made a copy of the vanilla card and I generated a fresh matching card from scratch, referenced them both in a deck and packed it all in a wad file. As expected only the vanilla copy appears in game. I then used Compare Files in Notepad++ to progressively copy entries from the working card across to see what prevents the new card working. I have got to this point:



Currently the entire cards are the same, with the exception of filename, multiverse id and the localised text entries. I have also tried other filenames and multiverse IDs and I'm satisfied they don't affect the issue. Even at the point in the image, only the file on the right works ingame, the one with the foreign text entries. Could it be a character set or encoding issue? It's mystifying that the foreign text works ingame and that replacing them with english entries does not work. I'd push the tests further but I can't get some text (particularly the japanese) to pass through the clipboard, I copy good text but it immidiately pastes down as question marks!

I'm quite baffled, I will keep expermenting...

[MisterBenn]

No idea if anyone is interested in my progress - I was experiencing two problems above. One is that either the game or the Wad packer utility expects your card files to be in UTF-8 format. It's not specifically because of the localised text, all english entries work too as long as the encoding is correct.

The second issue I encountered is that should you have cards with problems (maybe this encoding issue, or a bad syntax error or a missing tag) it can easily lead to a set of cards not appearing in game. Due to the lack of feedback ingame I've had a lot more success by adding just a single card at a time to the deck and getting it working completely before moving on. Common sense I know but really worthwhile here with the time to relaunch the game to retest each time...

[Huggybaby]

Thanks MisterBenn for the detective work. Maybe you haven't received any feedback on this topic but I'm sure others are reading.

[MisterBenn]

I've been developing quite happily since those posts, I just about have the workflow cracked now and I made 3 decks so far, only one of which is fully complete though. The last big issue I have is the best distribution method. So far I'm building into a DLC file and I have not been successful in packing in any localisation text. Card abilities are fine as they are inline but deck names and new query text need localisation and don't seem to work unless you edit the DATA_CORE contents and repack. This makes distribution tricky (although Casper cracked it with a self-extracting diff of some kind) and individual deck releases will need some kind of merging before being compaitible with each other...

So anyhow it's quirky but it's great when things come together in the end. Also I realise that the AI is a bit of an illusion since it's more heuristics and brute force than anything else, but the way in which it adopts new cards and puts them to use in creative ways is fantiastic sometimes!

[Huggybaby]

Thanks man. Please document what you can in a post here.

The wiki is at http://www.slightlymagic.net/wiki/Duels ... neswalkers. You can add whatever you find there if you want. You can login there with the same username and password you use for this forum.