Magarena 1.16b

[ubeefx]

I played Magarena from 2 to 4am last night, insane just true, and I had a great time.

Might sound strange, but I had more fun programming this game than playing.
I did play it for a month before I made it open source and I liked it.
But after that I spent most of my time adding features to the game.

My personal theme is very usable, but still locked up on a bad hard drive. I will release it one day, I promise.)

Yes, I am still curious to see it Huggybaby.
During development of Magarena my harddisk crashed, all was gone.
Luckily I am one of those guys that makes backups now and then.

[melvin]

@mtgrares: when you said "when the AI kills one of my creatures" you mean during combat or with direct damage spells? build 1051 is actually before I released 1.16b. Up to 1.16b I was just tweaking code to try to solve the stuck game issue. Recently I found two causes for the problem, deadlock (due to excessive use of synchronized methods) and a bug with java.awt.Image .

The current daily build @ http://magarena.googlecode.com/files/Magarena_1115.exe has fixes for these bugs. I have a copy of build 1115 running on Linux for 17hrs without getting stuck, so far so good. Needs more testing on other platforms.

@Huggybaby: new users seems to get confused by the overlay because it makes the cards look "grayed out". The overlay seems to be too dramatic a signal and it also makes it harder to see the cards that can be played. These two reasons were behind the switch to highlighted borders. Shouldn't be hard to add in an option to bring back the highlights, will look into it. Btw, I'm very curious to see your theme as well.

[melvin]

Pretty much the same thing happened to me. I was playing Magarena a lot when I first found the game, but now I'm mostly playing it to test if some new feature works properly.

One thing neat about Magic is that the AI still surprises me at times, especially when it pulls off some cool combat tricks. The other day it used Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to clone Archon of Justice and I was like "what?! that isn't the most powerful creature on the board" (this was late game and the AI looks like it was losing). Then at end of its turn, I realized my mistake. I didn't have an answer to its combo that could remove one permanent every turn and I lost in the end.

[Huggybaby]

I'll try the latest exe. I've always had problems with graphical corruption after so many games that forces me to close down/restart. I think it might be related to my use of undo but haven't proved it.

Indeed, the highlight problem is due to misuse, not fundamental flaw. I think it shouldn't be hard to adjust the theme text syntax so that themers can have a choice between outline and highlight.

[beholder]

Same as Huggybaby, I also had to restart often (on average about every 2 games) because of graphical glitches. But I pulled the latest revisions today and it seems to have solved that problem I played about 3 hours without any problem.

Thanks melvin!

[melvin]

Glad that I was able to fix the crashes, I'm simply putting things back the way they were. Most of them are a result of my ignorance of the subtleties of the code as I try to "simplify" things

I'm surprised you all could stand the graphical glitches. I wasn't aware of the problem until the post by Aswan jaguar as I usually play one or two games and the problem doesn't crop up until after a few games.

Please raise more of a ruckus the next time I seriously break the game

[beholder]

Aswan talks about crashes, so I'm not sure if it's the same problem I was having. In my case it was the interface not updating correctly, making the game unplayable. I never had the application actually crash on me.

I'm so new to MagArena that I thought the problem I had could have been due to my system or something. I didn't want to call it a bug just yet. If it ever returns.. I will

[madmarcel]

I hit that bug as well in 1.15. The app would crash on some code related to images - usually toward the end of the second match in a duel - and then the GUI would stop updating. Haven't seen it since updating to latest version.

I start the program from the commandline so I can see the exceptions/errors in the terminal BTW, and I 'capture' all the text-output into a logfile. A necessity when you're implementing new cards and features

[oneiromancer]

I am attempting to upgrade from version 1.11 (by downloading the new release), and I am getting an error from both 1.15 and 1.16b. I am using a Mac, which I'm sure is the problem The error is:

/Applications/Magarena-1.16b/Magarena.command ; exit;
-bash: /Applications/cdf33_1-dist/bin/definitions.B: No such file or directory
OneiromancerMAC:~ Oneiromancer$ /Applications/Magarena-1.16b/Magarena.command ; exit;
Unable to access jarfile Magarena.exe
logout

[Process completed]

Is there anything I can do?

Thanks

[melvin]

Yay, a Mac user Thanks for trying out the new version. Mac support is not as good as it should be as I don't have access to a Mac. I'll need to depend on users, like yourself, to provide feedback on how things are doing.

It looks as if you are starting the game from the command line. I think the issue is that the Magarena.command script assumes that the Magarena.exe program is on the current working directory. So one solution is to first change directory into the application folder before running the command, i.e.
cd /Applications/Magarena-1.16b; Magarena.command

Is it possible to navigate to the folder on the GUI and double click on the Magarena.command file?

Do you know if Mac has the readlink command available?

[telengard]

Yay, a Mac user Thanks for trying out the new version. Mac support is not as good as it should be as I don't have access to a Mac. I'll need to depend on users, like yourself, to provide feedback on how things are doing.

It looks as if you are starting the game from the command line. I think the issue is that the Magarena.command script assumes that the Magarena.exe program is on the current working directory. So one solution is to first change directory into the application folder before running the command, i.e.
cd /Applications/Magarena-1.16b; Magarena.command

Is it possible to navigate to the folder on the GUI and double click on the Magarena.command file?

Do you know if Mac has the readlink command available?

<raises hand>, Mac user too. Runs great on my box. I did have a game hang last night. I gave up after about 20 minutes waiting for it to return. Is there a log file somewhere tucked away I could post in the event something like this happenes again (or maybe just the decks used and the random seed etc)?

~telengard

[melvin]

I had my doubts on whether the game works on Mac as I've not been able to test it, thanks for the confirmation Btw, how do you start the game on Mac?

Regarding game hangs, is the GUI still responsive? If so, then it could be due to the AI taking too long to respond. This generally happens with the minimax AI and when there are lots of creatures. You may want to try playing against the monte carlo AI as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much.

If the GUI is stuck or glitchy, then it is probably due to a GUI bug which has been fixed and the fix is available in the current daily build @ http://magarena.googlecode.com/files/Magarena_1118.exe (download and rename to Magarena.exe).

At the moment, logging is not enabled by default so the best way to describe a bug is to attach a screenshot of the program. This is definitely something that we need to improve in the future.

[Huggybaby]

I'm still getting hangs with 1.16b, but I've had them since the beginning so it's not your fault melvin, it's an old issue. I hope this new build fixes the problem for good.

There are at least two different kinds of problems. With the one I had a while ago, a card in my hand disappeared, and no popup either, but there was the mana overlay. I only found out what the card was when I played it and it went on the stack, I could read what it was though it remained invisible. Through all this the game remained responsive.

Another type of malfunction is when the screen will go black and the game goes non responsive. You can force part of the screen to redraw by moving your mouse around, but you can't play.

[ubeefx]

I knew from other users that Magarena works quite well on Mac, you could have asked.

[melvin]

@ubeefx: It wasn't anything urgent and I knew that theoretically it should work, still it is good to hear from actual Mac users. Do you know if the Magarena.command script work for folks using Mac? I saw another game provide this script for Mac users and copied the idea for Magarena.

@Huggybaby: I know exactly what you mean! Recently, while stress testing the GUI (AI plays both sides) I saw a card on the battlefield where the card image is missing and the pop-up is blank. The overlays still show and everything else works. Still cracking my head over how this could possibly happen