Re: Updates on the way.
Posted: 18 Apr 2015, 15:52Ok just wanted to know if I could do anything to help and that is usually when I can help is getting things out of the vault and disassembling them..
(I had approximations for Lifelink and Deathtouch before, based on El-Hajjaj and Thicket Basilisk, and Unblockable was implemented via card function; they're correct now, and, like the rest of these, dependent only on the ability being present. The abilities are all assigned statically, like the original ones; in Manalink, only Double Strike and Infect are. So e.g. Heirs of Stromkirk, Erdwal Ripper, and Slith Predator all share the same function instead of everything being cut-and-pasted everywhere.)
As mentioned in the first post (item c1), Manalink's magic.exe was changed at some point to look for some graphics in *.bmp filenames instead of *.pic. Shandalar now mirrors that behavior, so graphics mods should mostly Just Work. However, in a couple of instances, the change wasn't done completely: generally images are loaded when a window class is registered and, if they aren't valid when they need to actually be drawn, they're loaded again then; and for some of these, only one of the load points had its name changed. That's clearly unintentional, I have no intention of being bug-for-bug compatible, and the mods I've looked at recently all use the bmp names in these cases; so Shandalar only looks for the .bmp names for these. On the other hand, magic.exe still always looks for WINBK_StartDuelButtonDisabled.pic, not WINBK_StartDuelButtonDisabled.bmp, and all of the mods I've looked at recently try to put it at the latter, so I read it from the .bmp name too.
Individual cards can be configured to be (almost) removed from the game; they won't be sold in towns, found randomly, appear in the player's initially-owned cards, etc., so if you don't like playing with Duh, or a card ends up being too buggy to deal with, you can just turn it off. (They'll still show up in enemy decks, as the restricted dungeon treasures, and as "free" cards in dungeons and duels.)
Merfolk Shaman's deck, at least in the Shandalar installation I'm working from, had two copies of Deep Water (which isn't even implemented in Manalink). I'm not sure how the original game behaved when it showed up, but it currently crashes hard; so I've replaced much of the deck, replacing Sandals of Abdallah and the non-merfolk creatures with Triton Shorestalker, Coral Merfolk, Sejiri Merfolk (supported by Tundra), Master of the Pearl Trident, and Merfolk Sovereign. No Merrow Reejerey, Silvergill Adept, or Wake Thrasher yet, but it's a lot more challenging than the other AI decks now.
- I haven't posted for a while, so there's rather a lot of new cards to list here | Open
- Alchor's Tomb, Purelace and its four friends, and Prismatic Dragon's change-color effect. Whimsy and Faerie Dragon will be, too, if they have change-color effects; I don't remember.
- Nafs Asp still deals 1 damage (per its 4th-edition wording) instead of causing a point of life loss, but now it randomly sometimes doesn't work.
- Sometimes a blocker who dies from first strike (or double strike) damage and regenerates still deals damage to the attacker. I don't know why; the regeneration backend looks the same as in Manalink, and removes the regenerator from combat, and combat damage assignment checks whether it's been removed from combat, and still checks whether the blocker's tapped besides. It's not consistent, either, and it's driving me nuts.
- When something like Two-Headed Giant of Foriys blocks, the AI sometimes gets fake effect cards added to its hand, which it "casts" for free as creatures which die at end-of-turn. I can't think of anything I've done so far that would cause it, and can't help wondering if it was broken even before I started tinkering.
- Loading a game saved during a duel is broken for the time being. (Not permanently; I've been documenting the breakage I've caused.)
Edit: removed rarity.dat download; use the one distributed with the current version.