Realistic Appearance Card Rendering

[stravant]

I'm interested in picking up implementing full realistic card rendering in XMage. I've already done some work on it, progress sample:

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Progress Sample

And it doesn't seem too hard, but there's a lot of issues to address:

* Legality concerns: Are we allowed to render cards very similar magic cards at all in the program in the first place? (as long as we use no exact copies of parts of the cards, such as background textures / frame pieces etc)

* Should it be toggleable: Should it be possible to toggle between using card rendering and using the existing card images solution? And if so, how should that be implemented. (Extract out a base class from CardPanel and have two implementations with some sort of global factory that reads the setting and creates the appropriate one at the usage sites?)

* Card Art - To get card images right now, I'm just using the existing card images and slicing a region out of the middle to use for the card art. This isn't ideal, since I still have to load all of the full images, and for things like Devoid cards, I can't get the full art that way (for rendering the transparent card frame), same thing for future sight cards (no nice square art region to cut out).

* Card Face - Should we just render all of the cards in the same card face (The M15 frame), or do correct rendering of old border cards / future sight frames etc too?

* "Changed" characteristics on cards. On MTGO, characteristics of a card that don't match the "base" characteristics of the card (for example, added abilities, or pumped power) are shown in a different color. This seems to be pretty tricky to implement at present, because it doesn't seem like the CardView has any access to the true underlying card. Is there some easy way to access that info that I'm missing?

* Currently I'm just using getRules() to get the rules for the card. But this requires some hacks like checking if the rule contains any spaces to tell if it's a Keyword ability or not. There's also other cools things I could do with a reference to the actual ability itself. How feasible would it be to give the card rendering actual references to the ability objects (not just textual through the view)?

* Caching strategy: The current ImageCache + "Key" struct approach gets a more tricky if extended to the full card rendering strategy. Basically the entire info about the card needs to be included as a Key, at which point hashing it isn't exactly trivial. It's still probably faster than re-rendering, but it's a bit awkward. Begs the question of if there's some way for the engine to tell the client when it thinks the card has changed rather than the renderer trying to figure it out.

* How to abbreviate things. Can the card's name be abbreviated to "~" when short on space? Not many people would know what it means, but they're probably reading the full card text in the popup anyways in that case and realizing shortly, so maybe it's fine?

* Rendering performance: Full card rendering will be a bit more expensive than the current approach. Is there any performance level that's mandated right now? Like, a number X of cards that should be able to render comfortably at once on the screen? Any suggestions on how I should be keeping track of performance to make sure it's fast enough?

* Fonts: What font to use? Are we allowed to package the Beleren font with the program to use for M15 card frames?

[escplan9]

The Developer Talk subforum is a better place for most of these questions: www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=116

I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer most of these. With regards to toggleable, yes it should be a toggleable feature for sure. As to how to accomplish that, I'm not sure, I haven't worked with that area of the code before. There is no performance thresholds that I'm aware of, it's just something that can be improved upon. And as long as this feature is toggleable and not default, it will not be a concern at all no matter how bad the performance gets.