Magarena 2012 goals

by **jmartus** » 02 Jan 2012, 10:27

Wonder what some goals are for Magarena for 2012 from the developers.

by **melvin** » 02 Jan 2012, 14:00

What an interesting question, it really got me thinking... I think the top three things I would like to achieve for Magarena in 2012 are:

1) Getting more devs. In my view, this is the single most important thing for the project. We have a real gem here, great UI and strong AI. In 2011, quite a bit of work was spent in cleaning up the code base to make it easier to modify and extend, I hope that in 2012, we can attract more developers to the project.

2) Improving the AI. I initially worked on the implementation of the monte-carlo based AI. There are still a number of open issues with it that needs to be solved such as how to make a decent non-cheating monte-carlo AI (http://code.google.com/p/magarena/issues/detail?id=92). The AI still makes a number of tactical errors at times (http://code.google.com/p/magarena/issues/detail?id=114), it would be great to eliminate these as well.

3) Making it easier to add more cards. The goal is to gradually move from programmed cards to some kind of card script. This consists of two steps, one is to shorten the card implementations, the second is to replace implementations with an even shorter script. To this end, we have started on creating a basic card script which makes it possible to added keyword only cards, see http://code.google.com/p/magarena/wiki/ ... ntingCards

by **beholder** » 07 Jan 2012, 12:14

I second the above goals, especially number 1.

I'm really just a hobbyist programmer and don't have the ambition to become much better at it. That means that at the moment Melvin is the only one who can make complex changes to the code and it would be much better if other capable developers can help out.

Another thing I'd love to see in 2012 is... more users!
Looking at the number of downloads, we have about 600 users and I really wish there would be much more.

by **Arrdem** » 30 Mar 2012, 03:50

Well, here's one coder answering the call. I'm a researcher at UT Austin interested in automated deck generation for Magic and the Forge guys forwarded me over here because of better AI and AI vs. AI support.

I prefer Python to Java, but I'm dangerous at both so point me at the codebase and holler when I break stuff.

by **melvin** » 30 Mar 2012, 05:27

Hi Arrdem, welcome to the Magarena project

This is right up our alley, we have great support for AI vs AI testing as we used it internally for bench-marking the different AIs we have in the game.

To use the AI vs AI testing, you can download Magarena from http://magarena.googlecode.com and install it, then invoke Magarena as follows:
java -cp Magarena.exe magic.DeckStrCal

Running this command by itself gives you the following output which explains how to use it.

Usage: java -jar <path to Magarena.jar/exe> magic.DeckStrCal --deck1 <.dec file> --deck2 <.dec file> [options]
Options:
--ai1 [MMAB|MMABC|MCTS|RND] (AI for player 1, default MMAB)
--ai2 [MMAB|MMABC|MCTS|RND] (AI for player 2, default MMAB)
--strength <1-8> (level of AI, default 6)
--games <1-*> (number of games to play, default 10)

If you need to make changes to the AI vs AI mode, I'd recommend starting your own clone of the project at https://code.google.com/p/magarena/source/clones and push your changes there.

If you have any questions about the code base, do post them on our public mailing list at magarena@googlegroups.com