Mtgdb.Gui: search MTG cards, build decks, manage collection

[hidalgo]

• Improved Forge pictures replacement. Previously only existing pictures were replaced. Current version also adds pictures missing from forge pics directory.
• Separated Forge pictures replacement feature to a separate executable Mtgdb.Integration.Forge.exe

[hidalgo]

I accidently broke the links to MEGA storage used in Mtgdb.Downloader.exe. Sorry for that guys.
To keep downloading apply the patch to v.1.3.2.

Meanwhile the life goes on and since my last release there was one more change worth mentioning:
in v1.3.2 the forge pictures replacer will crop the images, as Forge draws the frame itself. Double frame wasn't pretty at all.

[hidalgo]

The information below only matters for those who consider using Mtgdb.Gui image downloader.

Next update is coming ~this weekend +/-. It will be mostly about speeding up image downloading with Mtgdb.Downloader.exe
Downloaded image sizes will be exactly as shown in Mtgdb.Gui - 2 sizes - normal - zoomed. And diveded into 3 consecutive bunches:

1. Small images will be 31k files, ~800MB. These are shown in search result - the main part of Mtgdb.Gui screen.
2. Zoomed images will come in two bunches. First zoomed bunch 31k files totalling 2.7 GB
3. Second zoomed bunch will be image variants of card. For instance most sets have ~4 different images of each basic land. 2nd-4rd variants will be in this bunch.

This way the total download volume is dramatically reduced from ~19GB to ~4GB without loosing perceived image quality in Mtgdb.Gui
As a side effect, using the new images improves scrolling smoothnes, because non-zoomed image is dowloaded from 50KB file instead of 500KB.

There is a possibility to further significantly improve image downloder speed by switching to torrent.
The idea is to ship mtgdb.gui with Deluge insntaller. Deluge is a very pretty cross-patform torrent client supporting command line inerface (CLI) besides normal windowed user interface. Using CLI Mtgdb.Downloader.exe can tell Deluge what torrent to dowload and where to.

Now guys I'd like to get some feedback from you:
Would you like to use automatic image downloading via torrent?
Or would it be ok to keep download from MEGA at 300 KB/sec and/or
download a torrent manually specifying correct destination directory?

[hidalgo]

First of all compact image packages still in progress.
The program directory structure was reorganized, so this time no patch, only full version.

Changed image directory location. To use already downloaded images for previous version

| Open

• Either move \Resources\Images from previous version to \images of v1.3.3
• Or edit etc\Mtgdb.Gui.xml to point it to your images from previous version.

New features:

• Most important: Added a filter by mana color in card text . Without it it was absolute disaster finding the lands producing types of mana you want. Now you can check the filter by card type "Land" and then narrow down the search by color in card's text as it is almost allways the color of produced mana. There is a limitation however. Basic mana cards have no text, so still you have to spot them manually. Not a huge issue since finding basic lands is easy.
  
  As a side effect you can also search by mana colors in the cost of card's abilities because they are also mana symbols in card's text.
  
• Context menu in zoomed card.
  
  • Allows you to restrict the list of cards you cycle through with scrolling on zoomed image.
  • Opens the viewed image in windows explorer or your default jpg viewer. This way you can quickly see the image even bigger than zoomed in mtgdb.Gui. Or maybe, who knows draw something on it and enjoy your art every time when seeing this card again in Mtgdb.Gui...
• Possiblity to stop hiding card duplicates in search result. It was allways enabled since namesakes can be confusing when creating a deck or builing some statistics.
  But sometimes you want to put into your deck a specific version of a beautiful island. Now you check Show duplicates button and can select any variant of card image to put to your deck.
• Tooltips on most available controls. Useful to begin, but honestly annoying. So they come in bundle with a button to disable them.
• Some visual improvements
• Realy a whole lot of bugfixes, mostly about intellisence in search text input, some about filtering. For instance one serious bug was that having black mana button disabled with black phyrexian enabled you weren't able to find any card with black phyrexian mana, because the regular black mana pattern was 'B' instead of '{B}' which led to prohibiting any type of black mana like {B/P}, {B/U} and etc., instead of only standard one

UPDATE: v1.3.3.1
Fixed corrupted all-sets-x.json. All card variant with different images were shown with the same one.
Fixed not restoring filters after restarting program

[hidalgo]

• Image downloader now targets compact image package consisting of LQ and MQ (for zoom) images
• Added Energy , any amount , tap , untap {Q} to mana filters
• Added mixed costs like {2/W}, {W/U} to filter by cost
• Right clicking the button on mana filter is doing simple check/uncheck rather than applying complicated usability logic
• 7+ button in cmc filter auto-unchecks like all others in cmc filter buttons
• Added possibility to reveal prohibited values zone in button filters. It allows you to explicitly prohibit some values bu checking on prohibit button rather than unchecking allowed button
• Made sorting undo/redo- able, as a consequence it persists through restarting program
• Fixed sorting by power and thoughness: was sorted as text, not as number
• Zoom no more closes when mouse leaves zoomed card. It closes only when you click something else.
• Displaying new fields:
  
  • legality and rulings texts
  • artist
  • set code
  • set release date
• Legality values added to search text intellisense
• Increased tooltip delay to 2.5 seconds
• Showing tooltips on card image and text fields (remember, you can turn off tooltips).
• Not counting sideboard when importing Forge deck. Presently Mtgdb.Gui does not support sideboard.
• Fixed Ctrl+Backspace behaviour in search string, now removes only current word.

[hidalgo]

• Showing symbols of mana, tap/untap and energy in text
• Using drag-n-drop from and to search result to add/remove cards from deck, Ctrl+drag-n-drop to add/remove 4 copies
• Showing cards that almost fit the window to make small window more effective
• Fixed printing not using zoomed image variant
• Fixed not refreshing statistics diagram after customizing statistics table

[hidalgo]

* Fixed highlighting word parts in search result that actually do not match search because of wildcards
* Fixed application startup crash in v1.35.5.32 - if you upgraded to 1.3.5.32 run executable from any prior version e.g bin\v1.3.5.31\Mtgdb.Gui.exe to upgrade to v1.3.5.33

[hidalgo]

Posted here a modified version of Riiak's DotP 2014 Deck Builder to allow saving/loading deck in Forge format which you can edit in Mtgdb.Gui

[hidalgo]

• CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fixes
  
  • Fixed not breaking lines in CJK text.
    
  • Fixed Search String not accepting clipboard paste with CJK characters
    
  • Fixed not highlighting CJK in search result. Example query: "リチ"~1
    
  • Prevented underlining field value in Search string query as to keep CJK
    characters readable.
• Tooltip improvements
  
  • Selectable text in search result tooltips - instead of messing with tiny
    text fields.
    
  • Highlighting search matches in tooltip.
    
  • Better tooltip positioning.
• Deck statistics window changes
  
  • The diagram has become more customizable.
    
  • There is no more table above the diagram
• MS-Windows-version-independednt snapping. Even for Windows XP
  
  You can snap the window to the left or right side of the screen or one of 4 corners.
  To snap drag the window header to a screen side or corner. Alternatively use keyboard:
  
  • for sides: Win+Left, Win+Right, Win+Num4, Win+Num6
    
  • for corners: Win+Num1, Win+Num3, Win+Num9, Win+Num7
    
  • to maximize: Win+Up, Win+Num8
    
  • to minimize: Win+Down, Win+2
    
  • to center: Win+5
    
  • move to next screen: repeat any shortuct above
• 2D language menu rather than a linear list
• More precise tab header highlighting where tab trapezes intersect.
• Fixed 'jumping' in search result and deck when clicking partially visible card.
• Showing search string intellisense below the word you are typing.
  
  
• Got rid of all DevExpress UI (User Interface) controls. DevExpress is a paid .NET
  Framework library providing extremly feature-rich controls to build UI. The consequences:
  
  • Loss of functionality
    
    • Custom filter is no longer available. Use search string instead.
      
    • No table above the diagram in deck statitics window.
  • Improved performance
    
    • Searh result filters, sorts and scrolls faster.
      
    • Creating new tabs is faster.
      
    • Resizing form is faster and with less visual glitches.
  • Reduced download size from 70 MB to 40 MB
    
  • Increased UI improvement potential:
    
    Many improvements in this release would't be possible if keeping DevExpress.
    
    ~30% of code was about getting around DevExpress design flaws, bugs and gliches.
    It looks carefully designed and clean in demos and advertising pictures while on
    practice it doesn't do well some basic things.
    
    An example of that is search result highlighting - it is by design incapable to
    highlight more than 1 match per 1 field text (which is ridiculous!). That alone
    forced me to do all the text rendering myself. To the less degree same was true
    for scrolling, displaying partial cards, sorting, tabbed document interface...

[Thy Holy Jesus]

This project is impressive , btw the new sets have hq images , could you provide the links to download manually all your sets , including the promos and pre-release cards
I´m using your projects MQ pics in Forge for the new sets because they are by far the images with the best quality available right now

[hidalgo]

Could you provide the links to download manually all your sets , including the promos and pre-release cards
I´m using your projects MQ pics in Forge for the new sets because they are by far the images with the best quality available right now

You can find all the links in \etc\Mtgdb.Gui.Default.xml

Code: Select all

<ImageSources>
      <QualityGroup Quality="Art" TargetDirectory="images\Artworks" FileListUrl="https://mega.nz/#F!mgY1SSga!iP67fkG5mHQT23uYXwdP5g">
         <MegaDir Url="https://mega.nz/#F!39B0xRqL!QRyz9vbrroXflw7pOWda6Q" />
      </QualityGroup>
      <QualityGroup Quality="LQ" TargetDirectory="images\Mtgdb.Pictures\LQ" FileListUrl="https://mega.nz/#F!Jp1wETwQ!CL2o0x_C-y2rpiiGBGQfsA" >
...
<QualityGroup Quality="MQ" TargetDirectory="images\Mtgdb.Pictures\MQ" FileListUrl="https://mega.nz/#F!M80UFbwI!oneHfFYU8YNvUYeWBD-AzA">
         <MegaDir Url="https://mega.nz/#F!gwkhgKrb!YEcQ9p2yvYkcpWjomvnHsA" Subdir="HOU" />
         <MegaDir Url="https://mega.nz/#F!Y9kRmLTT!zmjsEVPVPuPpplWcUXgjhg" Subdir="E01" />
         <MegaDir Url="https://mega.nz/#F!05NGGSQR!e870bVKIfcqowQfHH8ibSA" Subdir="CMA" />
         <MegaDir Url="https://mega.nz/#F!Bw8AnTwQ!Una9SEuD-lP2nFClXUtm-Q" Subdir="MPS_AKH" />
         <MegaDir Url="https://mega.nz/#F!94VD0BpS!ZYFLjmgkakOtCNgPaQf4KA" Subdir="AKH" />
...


The MQ images for HOU and CMA were made in 2 steps
1. Downloaded images with Gatherer Extractor
2. Applied Waifu2x scaling algorithm.

Provided that you have some source with better quality than Gatherer Extractor you may get better result applying Waifu2x to those better originals.

[hidalgo]

The project goes open source. You can find the source code here.

Why would you need that?
Well, I can imagine a c# developer re-using some of WinForms controls

• Draggable tab headers
• Tooltips with selectable text
• Album like data viewer
• Boolean filter buttons

These controls are located in Mtgdb.Controls project with no external dependencies just to make copy-pasting easy.

[hidalgo]

• Fine-tuned tokenization for search string index. +,-,/,½ are not
  considered word separators anymore. As a result you can search +1/-1 in text
  using a following query:
  text:\+1/\-1
  It wouldn't work in previous versions as +1/-1 was indexed as
  a sequence of two words "1" and "1" with +,-,/ characters omitted from
  index.
  
• Fixed search result highlighting for Korean - it does use spaces to
  separate words which I didn't know previously. An example query to see the
  difference:
  text:*신*
  
• Fixed search text not working because of duplicate Id for cards Jaraku the Interloper, Scarmaker in AllSets-x.json.
  
• Fixed startup delay between all sets loaded and images are selected.
  The reason was redundantly expecting artwork images lookup to complete.
  
• Fixed stretching non-zoomed horizontal plane images
• Render icon for {CHAOS} symbol

[hidalgo]

• Update window: added button to update prices
• Update window: shows progress bar when downloading images
• Updated prices without using Gatherer Extractor because it currently fails to download prices.
• Forge deck format: Fixed bug when loading forge 2 decks consecutively.
• Removed card property IsMagicDuels because Magic Duels game is changing with time and the list of cards it supports needs to be maintained. I don't do it so the list gets obsolete.

[hidalgo]

• Statistics window
  
  1. Added 'collection price' report
     
  2. Added 'filter by search result' checkbox. Use it to see the price of only the
     part of your deck or collection that match search criteria from the search result window.

  

• Search text input
  
  1. Fixed flickering in search input when text was ~100 characters or longer.
     It was usually happening when pasting big chunks of text into search input.
     
  2. Escaping special symbols when pasting into search input. 2004-11-20 converts to 2004\-11\-20.
     Without escaping 2004-11-20 gets interpreted as 2004 AND NOT 11 AND NOT 20
     
     1. Copy-pasting within search input does not involve escaping to avoid double-escaping
        
     2. When pasting a text into search input it gets separated by whitespaces from the rest of query to avoid field value to merge with field name of pasted text and vice-versa.
  3. When pasting text from tooltip to search text it is converted to a valid field-value query like ReleaseDate: 2004\-11\-20
     
     1. Allowed using $ in filter for number fields. Previously that would be considered syntax error. That makes pasting a price from a tooltip to produce valid query PricingMid: $1.50
• Tooltips
  
  1. Increased tooltip font
     
  2. Added 'selectability' icon on selectable tootlips. I hope this helps more people see they can select and copy-paste text in card tooltips