Shandalar Deck Injector

[RyanfaeScotland]

Anyone else have this problem?

[demonseed1981]

AWESOME!

Gonna play Shandalar again .....

[RyanfaeScotland]

Hey guys I've added the source code to the zip as I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like to work on this and it's taking me way too long to release updates.

Hope it is of use to someone. You can get it from the same place as before.

[RyanfaeScotland]

Well I've finished my degree (not got my marks yet) so I've now got a lot more free time so I'm picking this up again for a while. So far I've only added in better error handling and reporting which will hopefully allow people to give better descriptions when things go wrong cause to be brutally honest some of you's have been poor so far

I plan on adding in the health editing, backup prompting and an options pane before releasing the revised version but it should be out within the next week or so.

I've also now got a Windows 7 machine and have had no problems running it so if you are running Windows 7 and having problems I'm afraid it looks like it is the setup on your system and not the program itself but let me know what is going wrong and I'll continue looking into it.

Keep checking out this topic and I'll keep you posted on the updates.

[Marleyman]

Brilliant, just found this Deck Injector. Got it running and working on my Windows 7 x64 PC in no time. Great tool. I just wanted the 'cash' in game but I did 'inject' a deck just to test it.

Thanks, Great tool.

[RyanfaeScotland]

Good to hear Marleyman and thanks for going to the extra effort of signing up to tell me.

I'm managing to work on this for about 15min each day on the bus going to work so although it has all been cosmetic changes so far (other than the additional error handling) I am managing to progress at a steady pace.

Here is another 'sneak peek' at the current state of things: So the seperate sections have been split better, now getting their own section in the form of a tab. We also have the ability to insert into Deck 1 2 3 or just the players hand. There is also a warning window at the bottom that will give warnings about the deck being injected such as if it is legal, if there are too many cards in it and things like that.

I'm also going to add some features 'behind the scenes' such as auto-backups of games saves, warning messages about overwrites, the ability to turn all this off and probably deck extraction so you can grab your deck out of the game and use it in Duel.

[Huggybaby]

Beautiful progress, thanks Ryan!

[RyanfaeScotland]

Well I'm afraid because of the way my earlier code formatted the card data once it had been extracted from the game it isn't going to be as easy as I thought to re-insert it again into certain decks. You guys don't need to worry about that though it just means I need to re-code the format I'm using which will cause a bit of a delay but nothing huge.

What I do need to know however is how you would expect the injector to work in the end. Currently it replaces all the cards held with the ones in the Duel deck so any cards from the game are lost but this doesn't make much sense when injecting into certain deck slots as it means the only cards would be the ones in the deck anyway!

So my thought would be to check all the cards that are already held and the decks they are a part of then inject the new deck into the right slot keeping the cards in the other decks as well where appropriate and not adding any extra cards to the hand other than those needed and not removing any either.

So you hit 'Open Shandalar' and it shows you all the cards the player is currently holding. You can then check Deck 1, Deck 2 or Deck 3 and it'll show you the cards in those decks. You open a Duel save and press inject and it'll inject it into the selected deck slot using the cards already held, adding any that are needed, without deleting any cards unless 'All cards' is selected in which case it'll just add them in without adding them to a deck. You can use the clear deck button if you want to empty your hand of cards.

This make sense?

[Huggybaby]

Yes, that makes perfect sense and sounds like a great solution to me.

[RyanfaeScotland]

Right, that's just about in. I think there are still a few unusual cases I have to deal with where it is spitting out decks wrong but I'll get to them on the next stint I do at it. Something I should have thought of tho is that if you make illegal decks you can't change to them in game because it tells you to remove the extra cards. Not a huge problem, just means I'll need to add a way to select the active deck from the injector. God I hope it is just a flag that needs set for the deck and not one for each card.

[Aurasan]

OK so.. downloaded this from your brill site, total cluster for me.
I'm running Vista (I know I know), 32 bit on a Compaq Presario CQ-60.. and I get nothing but errors everywhere when I try to use this.
For one the only decks I seem to be able to find to open are the ones already made (no making my own decks apparently).. editing a pre-made deck doesn't work as I can't open them anyway, only have one save file MAGIC3.SVE and when I open that it doesn't correspond to any of the decks I have in any of my 3 save files.
Specifics:
When I try to open a pre-made deck (as I mentioned ones I make dont seem to even show up, and I sure cant search for 'em with windows as I cant even search for the ones that do show up) I get the following error:
Array out of bounds error.
This is most likely caused by comments in the deck file, remove them and it should work.
I hit "ok"
a box pops up that says error in the title bar but has no message for me, just a stopsign with an X in it.
I hit OK.
Up top where it says Duel Deck I can see the name of the deck I've tried to open but the card list is missing.
OK so I went to go and edit the deck to remove all comments and whatnot.. niet, no luck. Still gives me the same error.
So I figure I'll try opening one from the "decks" folder.. which I get it, I'm not supposed to do, but what the heck.. maybe my custom decks are getting saved here? Nope. I get the error:
java.io.EOFException
"ok"
the blank-erroe-message-red-stopsign-X box makes another appearance.
"ok"
same thing as before.. "Duel Deck: 0141.dck"
Should I have a duel decks folder?

Gah sorry for the essay here.

[RyanfaeScotland]

Hey Aurasan,

Sorry for all the bother you are having but thanks for the wealth of information on the errors you're getting.

The blank error messages are caused by me not adding any details to the exception catching and insteading just printing out whatever is held by the exception object which I have sadly found out is quite often nothing! I've remedied this by adding in my own messages which say which method the program was executing when it broke which, although not really helping you guys, will help me in finding problems faster.

As for the actual problems you are having I found a bug in the program that meant if a Shandalar save contained cards that weren't in any deck then they would have a different ID number which would cause my program to crash so this might be what is happening to you.

You say you only have MAGIC3.SVE? Trying saving in game to one of the slots and see if another one appears.

Your decks built with the Deck program go into the 'playdeck' folder (I think, will double check tomorrow) so that is where you need to navigate to to open them.

The newest version which I'm still working on has lots of changes and fixes so will hopefully sort these problems anyway. If you don't mind sending me the files you are trying to open that would be great cause then I can check for sure what is going wrong. My email is Null_n_V01d@hotmail.com

[Aurasan]

Howdy.. attached are said files I attempted to open. (not gonna bother attaching the 1410.dck ones as they arent even mentioned in your instructional walkthrough of running the program and I probably shouldnt have tried them anyway, if you still want 'em let me know.)
OK so I DO have the "playdeck" folder, however (strangely) when I navigate there via explorer or via SDI, my saved decks dont show up.. (but when I open deck editor they do)
Tried saving to another save slot (1 2 and 3 had already been there) so I added 4, but still the only one showing up is MAGIC3.SVE.. also MAGIC3.fce and MAGIC3.map.
I'm posting this in the email and in the forum so anyone with a similar issue will be able to follow this thread.

[RyanfaeScotland]

Howdy.. attached are said files I attempted to open....

Cheers for filling me in on the problems your having.

I tried out the first 2 of the files you sent me and the first one worked fine but the second one didn't. I opened the second one in a text editor and removed the comment, leaving in the semi-colon at the start of the line. After saving it I was able to open it like the other deck and both loaded into the game fine. Of course I am using my newest version, perhaps you are experiencing an error that has been sorted now.

It's really strange that the files aren't showing in Explorer or SDI yet they must have displayed for you to attach them to the email. Try checking your extenstion settings in windows incase something is associated with the .dck extenstion and it is marked as hidden.

Regardless of what I name my saves they are always saved in the Magic folder under the MAGICx.SVE .fce .map extensions so I'm not sure what's up there. Try using the search facility in your computer to find them.

Got a little error happening with the deck injector just now where it is adding in extra cards when it they aren't needed as they are already held, once that is sorted I'll probably release it so it shouldn't be long till the new version is out and with any luck it'll sort your problems.

[Osquou]

Any luck on adding health? Did you ever figure out what the offset is for it? I was working on learning hex before I found your program and figured out money and food on my own. BTW though you can type in FF FF FF FF on money and food, neither are acceptable values. I've managed to get FF FF FF FD on money, haven't played around enough on food but it's MUCH lower. Anyways, health and gems would be nice if you've got the offsets I can edit them on my own. Thanks for the great program and all your hard work!