Shandalar Mod (beta)

[Tapani]

Actually, the easiest solution is to use different decks depending on the chosen difficulty. I.e. mod the deck loader. 10 minutes to hack the code .... and a week to build the decks :-/

[McCrea]

McCrea,

that appears to be a missing file problem. That file is both in my original version and in Moks Manalink version. However I'll include FONTS.CV in to the release (and attaching it to this message - it's 4k compressed).
//Tapani

Thanks for your contribution Tapani.

My assertion went away -- my only guess is that Magic had to be on my C drive?
Unfortunately my deck editing problems persist.

Well, good night.

[0rion79]

[*] Remember that in Shandalar you don't have 20 lives - you start with 10. With many of the new, horrendously overpowered cards, this would make games in Shandalar even faster, and very dependent on your starting hand (and you are playing for ante!).//Tapani

Absolutely right: playing at hard level of that game, even with a solid deck was very difficult because of the reduction of basic life points. I remember that, a lot of time ago, when I also tried to change the decks in Shandlar to make them somehow better (both for thematic reasons and in some case to make them just more challenging, as for bosses, dragons and djinns), even assigning 4 Grizzly Bears, 4 Barbary Apes and 4 Giant Growth to the Beastlord was an extremely challenging choice, even if they are all common cards that in a competitive game wouldn't be more than a small hassle. The reasons are that I hadn't enough life points to substain the intial rush of creatures and, also, I was missing the appropriate spells to kill them all down.

If we can add some more cards, I would glady remove the 5 laces and add some card to make Green a more valid alternative, rather than a side color only for Regrowth, Fastbond and Sylvan Library.

Ah, I attach my decks list made with Excell and the original ones: maybe they can be of inspiration for Tapani

[scherbchen]

well making Shandalar more difficult would only improve the core game imho.

the problem is not going up against theme decks with 10 life and having Wall of Brambles as one of your best cards. the problem, if we are talking about replayability, is that there are very few choices to build a deck.

you will eventually win against the AI, let's take that for granted. it would merely be nice to be more original about it.

4 Serra Angel
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Spirit Link
yadda yadda yadda

or you stack up on broken cards and win with a Whirling Derwish on turn one. we have all been there, done that and bought the t-shirt.

make it more difficult, gods, yes. as long as you give me some new toys

[0rion79]

Sure, but you also have to reach that point. Harder is the starting level, more junk from other colors you'll find in your deck and thus even lame decks made by common but effective cards may prove deadly in the most early stages of the game.

Also, another thing that I've always hated is that dragon and djinn characters in Shandlar didn't use nor dragons or djinns, but I bet that it has been fixed, lol! (at least I did)

[Tapani]

McCrea,

I have another tester who has the same problem as you, but using Vista. I have preliminary traced this to a memory allocation problem in cardartlib.dll (s_lcardart).

For programmers: HeapAlloc returns an invalid pointer, and my working theory is that there is a double free (or similar) going on in there (My preliminary trace is that this happens during DLL load, so it requires some special tricks to debug). Any hints on finding these are very welcome! I do not have heavy duty tools like Rational purify, and my usual approach of valgrind+wine does not work for Shandalar.

The good side of fixing this could be that Shandalar might start working uder Vista as well =)

Orion79,

Thank you for the decks! I took a peek on some of them (don't know if I want to spoil them for myself - if I am going to testplay, those might be a refresher!). There are a few of my decks I am not happy with, and I will be looking at your variants for ideas.

About dragons for dragons -- there are not many dragons in Shandalar, just Shivan Dragon. And all dragon decks aren't even supposed to be red. I wish the Elder Dragon Legends would be in Shandalar - so they could have one each of those. (My guess those in-game opponents were made with Elder Dragons in mind, they play just the right colors for them!). But the genies have quite a few djinns and efreets (but can have some other creatures as well!).

Scherben, Orion79

I agree with Scherben that there are several "broken" cards - i.e. Swords to Plowshares. Many of my decks ends up being W/R, B/R, W or so. The options are:

• Either start restricting, limiting or removing cards
• Boost many other cards to same power lever
• Create opponents decks that assume that you have a deck of broken cards

My approach so far has been to have some of the top creatures assume the latter. I really don't want to remove any cards, since the people who still play Shandalar somehow liked it and I want it to be as unchanged as possible.

I agree that green needs a boost, (maybe blue too?) - I have already identified some of the new Manalink cards I would like to add. (Like Trained Armodon, since it is a vanilla creature and reuires no rules to write). Maybe replace Hornet Cobra, since there already are too many green creatures for some Shandalar GUIs to handle.

Jatill,

I also looked into missing graphics/black screen problems, and I don't know how to resolve that. Seems like Magic is made for DOS originally (or by DOS programmers heh), and that is an artifact of that cludge.

For programmers: drawing happens using BitBlt, and it does not seem to be updated using WM_PAINT messages. Need to investigate this further, but 1st prio is crashes in cardartlib.dll (s_lcardart).

//Tapani

[0rion79]

Imho, Swords to Plowshares is not broken, just powerfu. Shandlar is a mix among duels with tribe decks and sealed deck and, if you think carefully, the ability to exile a permanent is not relevant since most foes can't recycle cards in graveyard or don't have any mean to take advantage from it. While the ability to assign life points may prove to be heavy to tollerate. If you use it even on a lame card as Craw Wurm and you are attacking with a white knight, you are giving 3 free turns to your opponent.
Anyway, I agree that doing big changes to the game would seriously alter its balance, probably in a bad way.
If we have to make some choice, I would like to assign more tribe cards and the elder dragon legends to the dragons in Shandlar, lol!

[Gargaroz]

Tapani, it's possible to install only the bugfix and not the mod from the archive you posted ?
If not, can you please upload another archive with only the following bugfixes you did :

Technical changes:
* Shandalar runs in a window.
* Reduced CPU usage when game is idle (i.e. in villages).
* Bugs with missing text has been remedied in many cases.
* Bug with default player name fixed.
* Shandalar is made independent of Manalink 2.0 by separate DLLs.

Thanx in advace for your work on Shandalar and Manalink 2.0 !

[McCrea]

Regarding my problem of having no cards in the bottom of the deck editor: I notice that the deck editor switches to my desktop resolution. The usual game window seems 1024x768, but if I edit deck, that window is 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 or whatever I have my desktop set too. At 1600x1200, it crashes to desktop promptly.

Setting my desktop to 1024x768 does not help. Maybe you could whip up a new deck.exe? I'm just grasping.

[Edit]
Oops. I just realized that shandalar does not use deck.exe.

[gmzombie]

i think you need the magic.reg file or the fix from here. goto the new users and goto the download microprose game files thread at the top and download the SMILING SPECTRE'S ACT FIX. do as it says you may need an additional file which is below it.

[McCrea]

i think you need the magic.reg file or the fix from here. goto the new users and goto the download microprose game files thread at the top and download the SMILING SPECTRE'S ACT FIX. do as it says you may need an additional file which is below it.

It's not the registry since that only contain manalink autostart and default options. I'm familiar with and constantly trying compatibility fixes to no avail. I'll search for spectre's though. Thanks for your assistance.

[Edit]
No joy, specter's is just the old compatibility fix for Mok's and old 1.3 manalink. *specifically, NoGdiBatching

[Tapani]

Tapani, it's possible to install only the bugfix and not the mod from the archive you posted ?

Short answer: no.

This mod has been gradual, small changes done since I was still on win98. I do not have any intermediate versions left.

Your choices are:
- Install all but the decks folder - this way you get all bugfixes and mods, except the new opponent decks.
- Install just adv*.txt, this way you get some missing text bugs fixed. (And nothing else).

I'm sorry, that's the best options I can come up with.

//Tapani

[McCrea]

Well, it might help if I wasn't blind. I thought my deck editor window was rather normal except for being oversized (this screenshot is 1200x1024 per my desktop). But it isn't normal....

http://i991.photobucket.com/albums/af32/SupremeAsshole/ShandalarMOD.jpg

...The right most button or so is cut off. Again, my problem is the lack of cards at the bottom of the deck editor.

[edited to remove bad image preview]

[Tapani]

McCrea, you were on the right track.

Changing resolutions to 1024x768 made this version of Shandalar to work on Vista! Thanks for hint! (More testing needs to be done to be 100% sure though).

Your screenshot seems ok btw. That's how it looks like when you have all your cards in the deck and a resolution > 1024. Did you say that all cards you move out from your deck disappear? Tried lowering resolution even further?

I should probably have the deck editor to run inside a 1024x768 window just to be sure.

//Tapani

[McCrea]

Changing resolutions to 1024x768 made this version of Shandalar to work on Vista! Thanks for hint!

Your screenshot seems ok btw.

No, the screen shot is not okay. I'm only showing 4 of the filter buttons, and your version has 6 filters (includes the artist list). Look closely and you can barely see the edge of the cut-off 5th button.

Not that matters... that's just a symptom of not drawing the window functionally for me. When I do run it at 1024x768, the buttons fit normally, but there is never any cards at the bottom to see, let alone to drag into my deck.

Nonetheless, Glad I can help through my misfortune!