Collectible Card Game Headquarters

All sound very interesting - how would you actually implement it though? Magarena does not use a database (yet!) so this info would most likely need to be stored in each deck file or maybe as separate text files where each file represents a tag containing lists of matching decks. Potentially could be a right pain (or slow) if relying solely on the filesystem (through directory organization or lists of files etc)!

This is what I was getting at with the API.

Adding a local database to magarena seems very clunky and error-prone to me. Just think about ensuring compatibility after upgrades etc. There is also the downside that you can't (easily) move the data to a second device.

So why not create a powerful API that could provide all the functionality of a deck database without adding too much overhead on the client side?

To not overwhelm users with all the decks that are on firemind I could also imagine a curator system where the magarena devs could mark decks as something like "core deck" which would be the equivalent of shipping them with magarena as text files.

Obviously I'm arguing to use firemind because I already built a pretty powerful deck database and have the hosting taken care of. But if you dislike the idea of using some else's servers you could build your own independent API. I'd still argue for that solution over a local database because having the ability to store game data for users remotely feels so important to me. Of course I'm biased here because that's the type of app I work on all the time

mike wrote:
This is what I was getting at with the API.

Adding a local database to magarena seems very clunky and error-prone to me. Just think about ensuring compatibility after upgrades etc. There is also the downside that you can't (easily) move the data to a second device.

I don't think a database is the answer either, I have my fill of Oracle and SQL in my day job as it is! Magarena is all about doing stuff that I don't get to do normally.

mike wrote:So why not create a powerful API that could provide all the functionality of a deck database without adding too much overhead on the client side?

To not overwhelm users with all the decks that are on firemind I could also imagine a curator system where the magarena devs could mark decks as something like "core deck" which would be the equivalent of shipping them with magarena as text files.

I think using Firemind as a source of decks is a great idea and if we can add a powerful search/query UI to Magarena that will be a major distinctive feature. I still think there will be a demand for locally stored decks as well though which brings us back to how to store and query these decks.

Sounds like a lot of work... I don't know anything about databases though. Can't you just write a few words in the deck file like the descriptions now?