Magarena sprints

[ubeefx]

From now on I will use the agile concept of one or two week sprints instead of working with fixed release dates.
Each sprint is started with a small list of committed tasks. Idea is to do as much as possible of this list.
The tasks can be feature requests, bug fixes and adding new cards.
At the end of each sprint, a new release is made.
This will keep the project alive and fresh while not being too time consuming.

For the first sprint, release 1.3, I selected the following tasks :
- on Google project issues page : number 21, 23, 24, 28, 31, 34, 35
- first attempt at High Quality card popup images
- replace Elite Vanguard with Steppe Lynx
- replace Curse of Chains with Narcolepsy
- add 5 cards : Pongify, Pulse of the Tangle, Vampire Hexmage, Grave Titan, Lord of Shatterskull Pass
- add 5 cards : Nirkana Cutthroat, Kitchen Finks, Lord of Extinction, Awakening Zone, Force Spike
- add 5 cards : Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, Twincast, Echo Mage, Ghostway, Brittle Effigy

[Huggybaby]

Awesome, I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks ubeefx!

[nantuko84]

Agile is very flexible and productive concept (we use Scrum at work that is also Agile).
But not sure it can be used for open source projects where members do theirs work in freetime and mostly for fun. So most of the time you can plan your own work, but not others.

[ubeefx]

We also use Scrum at work. I just want to try this out on the project.
Mainly to have multiple small incremental releases instead of a few big releases.
I will see how it works out.

[ubeefx]

Release 1.3 is available for download.
There are several UI improvements and 15 interesting new cards.

One cool new feature is the HQ card image popups. The images are downloaded from magiccards.
I also tried a set prepared by Sonic, and these look amazing but you need to run full screen.
Maybe this set can be updated for the new release and slightly downscaled to better fit UI of Magarena.
It could then be made available as a separate download to replace the current images.

Magarena now contains 490 cards that nicely show the capabilities of the engine.
I am convinced that there is no real need to have many more cards to make this game fun.
Usually when the engine is extended, like exile or level up, I like to add a couple of cards for that.
Cards from new sets also keep the game fresh.

I now want to start working on a new open source project to have a rules compliant Magic AI engine.
So not a game, although later on it might be plugged into a Magic game or a deck tester.
It would like to try out some other AI techniques like Monte Carlo.
I will also use cards of a higher complexity than what Magarena supports to try out the engine.

On his blog mtgrares mentioned the idea of adding a quest mode to Magarena.
I think this could fit nicely into the game next to the random deck duels.
But I will not add this myself. So if developers are interested to work on this please let me know.

ubeefx

[Huggybaby]

Thanks ubeefx, I'll try this ASAP!

[Aswan jaguar]

This new release with the extended difficulty level it seems to me that only makes the game slower and not any smarter the AI at least with my machine (2.8 double core).Sometimes it took more than 2 minutes to decide what to play.I played your other versions about 20-30 games each and never saw AI to attack me with a 2-2 simple creature for example into my 4-4 creature without having an istant or smt to back it up was that by chance?it happened 3-4 times playing with the new version.Could that be, that AI was trying to play a bluff on me?

Thanks for the excellent work with pop up high quality images they look great!! and all other desktop changes you have made they make the game better.

[ubeefx]

Glad you like the UI improvements. Huggybaby gave me some excellent suggestions.
I was also not expecting a lot of difficulty level 8, except the mentioned slowdown.
Going to far in the future (long term) will not always give better results on short term.
But please experiment with level 7 and 8 and give me your opinions.

There is now also a link in my signature to my new Google project, Mad Wizard.
This however does not mean that this project is not supported anymore.
As long as I keep playing the game, I will probably keep improving it.

But it would be cool to have other developers on board on the Magarena project, as long as you can accept the following :
* Only player versus AI games
* Magarena is not meant to be fully rules compliant but meant to be a fun experience
* The Cube concept to have a small pool of very playable and varied cards
The quest mode could be a nice starting point...

I way playing a game with 1.3 and used my Omnibian to make a leveled Lord of Shatterskull Pass a 3/3.
But it did not work, turns out there was still an issue with how the level up creates were implemented.
I fixed this. I also did another nice UI improvement (valid choices display) and added a new skin.
There are 5 new cards : Spitemare, Sunblast Angel, Wrecking Ball, Sylvok Lifestaff and Snake Umbra.
Also some target pickers for the AI were improved because they did not always work well.
Release 1.4 is available on project page.

ubeefx

[jeffwadsworth]

Love the UI improvements. I assume the AI level is set via the deck tester. Your new project sounds exciting...about time we had a computer opponent worthy of a challenge in the full game. I am currently looking through your code and would love to be a contributer once I have it figured out.

[telengard]

Is there a .jar available for these latest releases? I downloaded the 1.4.zip and it had an exe in it. I'm on a Mac so I had been using the jar far (which works great btw).

EDIT: Read in the readme that you can rename the .exe to .jar. Working well!

~telengard

[ubeefx]

@jeffwadsworth

AI level for play is not set with deck tester but with AI tab in the duel progress window.
The new project will be very challenging but that is why I do it.
Currently I am composing a deck with very complex cards to use as test bed.
Most of these cards would be nearly impossible for the current Magarena engine.

About contributing to Magarena, that would be great!

@telengard

Thanks for letting me know the rename trick works well on Mac too. I only tested it on Windows.
This makes the download zip a lot smaller.

[ubeefx]

I did another mini sprint. I added 5 cards and displaying a random card at the startup screen.
The cards are : Lone Missionary, Predator Dragon, Vines of Vastwood, Soul Link and Mask of Memory.
Release 1.5 is available on project page.

The Predator Dragon has Devour 2. I did a trial implementation of this cool mechanic in the engine.
There are other and maybe better ways to do it, but this was by far the fastest way to add it.
It was nice to see the computer AI do a lot of devouring in the test game I made.
You probably guessed by now I like Dragons and this is certainly a powerful one with lots of flavor.

There are now 500 cards in Magarena!
I think I will keep it this way until February.
So if there are any more sprints, it will be for enchancements or bug fixes.

[jeffwadsworth]

Thanks for the update and new cards. In regards to your new project, would you mind sharing one of the complex cards you are testing?

[ubeefx]

I am currently composing a complex test deck. I will put it on the Mad Wizard Wiki TestDecks page.
Some examples are Angel of Salvation, Decree of Justice, Profane Command, River's Grasp.
I want to limit the number of cards I have to implement for this project.
So I will focus on small sets of cards that give a lot of options for the AI to evaluate.

[jeffwadsworth]

Did you consider the Storm mechanic? That is about as complex as it gets. Dredge is interesting too.