Mad Wizard

[ubeefx]

Do not despair my friend, I have plans to share Magarena with a wider audience so who knows what the future will bring.

Sounds cool. There is no despair. I enjoy playing my games.

You can also be proud that you are one of the only software projects to ever actually be finished!

True, but when is software really finished?

PS Yes, many of us here have heard of the great Carta Mundi!

The new game screen layout sounds exciting, hopefully Magarena 1.x can also make use of this improvement as we did not diverge much in the UI aspects.

Sure.

The other changes are also very cool, such as the pattern matching and AI changes.

Pattern matching was really exciting. But it is far from a silver bullet.
I expected even more from it but it showed me that a lot of different Magic card mechanics exist.
The joy of adding cards is still a favourite for the community.

Great to hear that many of your new ideas in Dreamwalker are now part of Magarena 2012, it will certainly help to inspire and advance the state of Magic engines.

Well I sure hope I already did so with the original Magarena. Magarena 2012 is just some more icing on the cake.

[ubeefx]

Release 1.9 is available on the project page as a download.

[donpastor]

One question: in previous versions I could make a portable installation by including a "Magarena" folder along with the executable. With the new version, it doesn't recognize this folder anymore and tries to save its data at %Userdir%/Magarena 2012/

Is there any way to tell the program where to find the data?

[ubeefx]

Hi donpastor,

indeed this feature got removed.

But luckily there is a way to tell Java where to find the user home folder.

Code: Select all

java -Duser.home=c:\arena\ -Xmx256m -jar Magarena.exe

java -Duser.home=c:\arena\ -Xmx256m -jar Dreamwalkers.exe


In this case the c:\arena\ is an example where the home folder is located.
Inside that folder the Dreamwalkers or Magarena 2012 folder will be used.

Hope this helps.

[ubeefx]

I renamed the Magarena 2012 project to Mad Wizard. Release 1.0 is available for download.
I reused a name of an old project to create a new AI that was discontinued.
The wizards are indeed mad in this game, they duel with each other using random spells.

The card pool is currently around 2300 cards.
Only black bordered modern frame cards are included for consistency.
Also some additional logic is used to filter cards not well suited for random decks.

Programming AI has never been my main interest, but it was necessary to have a fun game.
Designing an engine that would allow a good AI was actually the biggest challenge here.
I also like that AI is very fast as waiting for a computer is not something I like to do.
And in that regard when I compare it with the current Magarena release, it seems to be much faster.
For this sacrifices were made in the scope of cards that are supported and by having only partial rule conformity.
The way mana is for instance handled was really important to achieve this speed.
The way the AI evolved was by first taking minutes to do a single move to finally less than a second.
This by finding as many intelligent ways as possible to reduce the number of choices.
In this way domain knowledge is also heavily used with for instance a Monte Carlo approach,
which I called Vegas, because also there the smart choices are used to reduce the randomness.

While the old arena-card-game project page is deleted, it can still be partially viewed thanks to the
Wayback Machine if someone is interested in the history.

[ubeefx]

Mad Wizard 1.1 is available for download.

• the help information is extended
• a single row of cards is shown larger
• improved quality of background image
• full screen mode can be toggled in menu
• 12 cards are added (2323 cards)

Both of my games now got some nice improvements after a year. Enjoy.

[ubeefx]

Mad Wizard 1.2 is available for download.

It now supports the Magarena 1.65 tokens folder in the MadWizard folder in your user folder.
If the folder is present and the specific token can be found, that image will be used instead of the generic token image.

[ubeefx]

Mad Wizard 1.3 is available for download.

2645 cards are now supported. While card count is nice, it is not the goal of this project.
For playing random duels it just does not matter as much as for playing constructed.
I prefer to have minimal custom card code so most cards are supported by rule text patterns.
I also prefer cards that work well with the original Minimax AI that I wrote for Magarena.

New in the duel dialog is the "Use filtered cards" option.
When this is disabled, more cards can be used to generate the decks but the decks will be less optimal.
By adding this mode I was able to increase the amount of supported cards.

There is an improved intro screen like Dreamwalkers with a fancy random card animation.
In the duel screen a custom background image can be used, look at help for more information.

There is now a configurable pause between phase changes (default is 0.3 s).
This makes the game transitions a little less abrupt.
Also the turn and phase indicator is improved for more clarity.

Enjoy.

[ubeefx]

Just a small hidden feature, at startup Mad Wizard copies all supported card names to the clipboard.

I did not do significant changes to the AI after the Magarena gold release.
One of the main changes was adding a maximum thinking time, but that only prevents the AI from taking too long to finish.
It is still pretty capable as it used to be, but far from perfect.

Some of the weaknesses of the current AI are :

• when the AI is losing, it tries to lose with the "best score" and not by surviving as long as possible, it can even do things to lose faster
• playing an aura on an opponent's creature just to play the aura, while it should rather be on own creatures
• playing stuff that does not alter the game state in any way but consumes mana, for instance tap an artifact that untaps artifacts to untap itself again
• playing abilities or spells too soon, for instance already pumping potential attacking or blocking creatures in the first main before blockers are declared
• the AI can use good removal spells on a small creature while it should save it for bigger threats
• it does not take into account unknown facts which can be abused easily, for instance attacking with a small creature, letting the AI block it and then playing a pump spell

This very same AI, tweaked for the less complex Dreamwalkers game, performs very well in Dreamwalkers and is quite capable at winning against me.

Feel free to add examples you think that are not working well in the current Mad Wizard AI.

[ubeefx]

For Mad Wizard 2.0 I completely reimported the cards from Scryfall.

Sets : 80
Supported : 5070 / 16611
Cards : 2775
Land : 118
Spell : 424
Creature : 1899
Equipment : 60
Aura : 121
Enchantment : 66
Artifact : 87

Cards is number of unique supported cards.
Supported is number of cards with duplicates like basic lands that are supported by the machine card to code translation.

[ubeefx]

5070 cards gives 937 MB of card scans.

[ubeefx]

Sets : 82
Supported : 5200 / 17150
Cards : 2803
Land : 118
Spell : 430
Creature : 1918
Equipment : 60
Aura : 122
Enchantment : 68
Artifact : 87

Added M21 and IMA sets.

[ubeefx]

User interface changes for Mad Wizard 2.1.


Notice the dice button to switch between MiniMax and Vegas AI.


Statistics :

• Sets : 146
• Supported cards : 8385 / 27025 (31 %)
• Unique cards : 3456
• Land : 142
• Spell : 525
• Creature : 2374
• Equipment : 66
• Aura : 154
• Enchantment : 83
• Artifact : 112

[ubeefx]

I still need to do some play testing before releasing.

Another new feature of Mad Wizard 2.1 is true support for a portable mode.
It is possible to make a zip file with the scans and tokens folders in them.
These can be found in the Mad Wizard data folder.
Of course first the image downloader needs to do its work and download all 8000+ card images.
There are releases of Magarena with a compatible tokens folder, that is where I got mine.
Preferably no compression is used but just store.
My MadWizard.zip file is currently 1.55 GB. The price of high quality scans.

In the options the filename of this zip file can be specified.
Then restart and it should work.
It seems to work well with a good usb stick.
So only MadWizard.jar and the zip file are then needed to run the game anywhere.

[Huggybaby]

I love portable apps, thanks ubeefx.