More fixes

It seems those fixes never stop

Again, there is no new feature today, but a batch of 10 bug fixes. I’ll just mention the most important ones, if you want the full story you can check it out on the bug tracker.

- Fixed a crash when someone removes a card from the table at the same time another player adds a card to the table;
- Fixed a crash when moving a card to the bottom of a pile from the “Top X” window;
- Fixed performance issues in the token dialog with big databases;
- Fixed a crash when trying to use a variable in the addmarker script action.

I’ve also started to think of some more important changes, more about that later…

Small fixes

I am publishing a small update to the client (0.6.1.2).

I have fixed a few problems and regressions and I tweaked the look and feel a bit. This is a small maintenance update, there is no breaking change since the 0.6.0.0 release.

If you are bored and want to a list of the most important changes:

- Added support for variables to addmarker and removemarker actions;

- Markers aren’t displayed with 1-3 images anymore. There’s always on marker image and a number next to it;

- Fix: unable to start two instances of OCTGN on the same computer;

- Fix: random card selection never selects the last card in group;

- Look and feel changes: you’ll have to find out for yourself (hint: most of the changes are visible in the “view cards” window).

I think next time we’ll have new features

PS: if you are writing game modules for OCTGN 2, I made a post yesterday, which may be of interest for you.

Updated XSD files available

This will only interest game authors. If you are a player you may skip this post.

I’ve updated the xsd schemas for the game and set definitions. They were terribly out of date.

Game schema: http://octgn.net/octgn-client/Game.xsd
Set schema: http://octgn.net/octgn-client/CardSet.xsd

Those two files may be used by your xml editor to validate that your file is correct. If your xml doesn’t validate against those schemas, chances are OCTGN will not like them.

Let me know if something is still wrong in those files.

To a lesser extend they also contain some documentation. Here’s for example an overview of the set files:

Minor update: fixes and improvements

Hello everyone,

after a far too long period without updates, I’m pleased to announced that I’m publishing 0.6.1.0.

As you can tell from the release number, it’s a minor update, which is compatible with the previous one and even uses the same network protocol (that is: no new message is exchanged between clients).

So what’s new?

• The way xml game definitions are read has drastically changed. The previous way required almost no code at all, but it was extremely troublesome to maintain the parsing of actions. This has changed and it is now much easier to extend the available tags for your game scripts. In fact I already fulfilled many past requests (like random card selection, bottom card selection, adding and removing markers, filtering by card orientation or highlight, and so on). An up-to-date list of the supported scripts is available in the wiki (that’s here for actions, boolean conditions and card selectors).
• The xml parsing update contains the only breaking change in this release. If you’ve used <persist>true</persist> as a workaround for the bug preventing persist=”true” to be set on the <newcard /> action, be aware that this has been fixed and your game needs to be updated. Only the attribute syntax is now supported (as it always should have been).
• Lots of bugs reviews and fixes. Too many to mention them all but if you are really interested you can check the recent activity at octgn.16bugs.com. Maybe the most important fix is the “cropped board image” regression some games had when I introduced the two-sided table.
• You still get some very small improvements, like being able to change your nickname before starting a new game!

There are still bugs I would have liked to fix that aren’t. But I figured that you’ve waited long enough, so you deserved some update just to know I’m still alive and kickin’!

Next time: maybe a few more fixes, and some small features (probably).

Update

Last time I wrote that I still had a few tasks I wanted to complete before publishing the next update.

Unfortunately, because of some problems I couldn’t do everything I wanted to… Those things are NOT done:
- Skinning the 1,2,3 and A-Z buttons;
- Thourough testing (this release has only be superficially tested, and it includes big changes. So hopefluly there won’t be too many bad surprises, please report any problem);
- Rework some contextual menus a bit;
- Review the way one moves card to the bottom of a pile.

Anyway, since you’ve been very patient since the last release and there is major new functionnality available I decided to publish the new update!

One is now available to view and manipulate Top/Bottom X cards, which is a major step forward. I think it enabled many new games/cards.

Enjoy!

New group window

Rainy water made me work on OCTGN! Lots of progress, although I’m unfortunately not ready to publish it.

In the “nice but not very noticeable” category:

- Pictures handling is a lot better, faster, and shouldn’t freeze the UI anymore (could happen when loading a lot of images at once, e.g. when revealing your whole library for the first time).

- I hope that I have fixed some keyboard shortcuts and disabled menus issues (you usually had to click on the table to fix them).

Now for the “long overdue” category: I’ve completed the new group window. It looks exactly like the existing one, but with this “toolbar” on top:

You can still close the window with the red X at the top right. It basically does that: it closes the window. Nothing more. Now recognizing that most games require you to shuffle after peeking inside your piles, there’s a shortcut to close and shuffle in one click. Speaking about that: the “Show to > me” non sense is gone as well. When you look at cards they are automatically revealed and hidden when you close the window.

Now, what are those mysterious 1,2,3 and A-Z buttons? Obviously there’s still some work required on their look!
The 1,2,3 view mode is exactly what we have today: all cards ordered according to their position in the pile. You can drag and drop from and to this view.
The A-Z mode is all cards ordered and grouped by name. A picture being worth a thousand words:

It’s ideal to quickly see everything there is in your opponent’s deck, or search for something in your own! You can even use move shortcuts or drag cards by the count label on them. If you do that, all cards with that name are moved. Quick example: you want to remove all “Giant Growth” from your opponent’s library. Put your mouse on the Giant Growth “x4″ label and hit “Del” key. Done.

Finally, if you still need help looking for cards, there’s the new “Search cards” box. Type anything in there and the view is filtered to only display matching cards (and automatically switch to A-Z mode). All texts on the card are searched, so it also works if you want to see only “Basic Land”, “Goblin” or “Plainswalk” cards. Game authors can exclude some card properties from this search by applying the new ignoreText=”true” attribute to them (e.g. exclude flavor text or copyright line). Hint: ESC key quickly empties this box if you want to see everything again.

Those are excellent improvements and I’m excited to share them with you! Unfortunately I still have a bit of work to do:

- The buttons aren’t skinned properly (very minor);
- The Top X and Bottom X feature, while mostly coded, needs to be completed and properly tested;
- I still want to rework some contextual menus a bit;
- (Probably not in next update?) I’d like to review the way one moves card to the bottom of a pile.

That’s not much (except maybe the last bullet) so you can expect an update as soon as I work on it again (yeah I know…)!

Enjoy the summer if you are lucky enough to have nice weather!

Work in progress

It’s be a month since I last posted, so I thought I’d let you have some news!

I haven’t worked on OCTGN for a long time, but I’ve resumed coding. The “View cards” functionnality is under heavy revision…

- First it disappears from pretty much everywhere except on piles.
- When clicked it automatically reveals the cards in the group. No need to manually select “Show to… me”.
- When the window is closed the cards are face down (it they were) again, and there’s a button to automatically “Close and shuffle”.
- You can select to view “Top X cards” or “Bottom X cards” only.

I still have some work to do to complete everything, but it should be ready soon. There are other modifications I’d like to do in this area, I’ll see if everything is done in one release or if I split it in two.

I have done more minor modifications as well:
- There now is a line in the middle of the table when playing in 2-sided mode;
- The content of input dialogs (e.g. when using Draw many…, or the new Top X…) is now selected and focused by default, so one can directly type (or hit enter) instead of having to click in the box.

Update Published

The update containing everything I talked about in this blog since the last update has been published right now. Your client should automatically update.

Breaking Changes

If your game uses a board, the game definition will require an update. The default table layout has slightly changed. Before it went from (0,0) to (width, height). Now it goes from (-width/2, -height/2) to (width/2, height/2). So old boards will be misplaced.

The communication protocol had to be extended to support some of the new features, that’s why the minor version number went from 0.4 to 0.5. This means that new clients can’t connect to old servers.

For most of you this means this is a “no game/set change” update.

Enjoy!

Two-Sided table

Finally, I managed to code the two sided-table.

It was so much more difficult than I expected! At first I thought it would be a relatively simple change (with some impacts, but not at too many places). After the obvious core changes, everything went wrong. There’s so much things related to card layout on the table: the drag-and-drop feedbacks, the targetting arrows, the table auto-fit when moving cards…

But after a lot of hard coding, here it is:

As you can see, the two-sided table is an opt-in feature. You can continue to play the same way you do now and the same way Octgn 1 always worked. Or you can choose to use the 2-sided table. The host is the only one, who can change those options and they affect everyone. If you check the “use 2-sided table” checkbox, you’d notice A and B boxes appears on the players. You can click on those to change your sides. There’s really no use for them in a 2 players game, but you can make your teams when there’s 3+ players.

So how does it work anyway? First the table is flipped so that your cards are always at the bottom of the screen. Second, the table has a virtual “split” in the middle. Everything, which is on the top half of the table is flipped as well. The result is this real-life looking layout:

Everything has been updated to provide correct feedback, especially the drag-and-drop “ghost”.

When can you grab the goods?

This week-end, most probably. Because this was a difficult change with a high-impact on the code base, I want to do some additional tests this week before publishing the update.

Stay tuned!

.NET 4 is on the horizon

As you probably know, OCTGN 2 is built upon the .NET framework from Microsoft. We are using the latest version, which is 3.5 SP1.

Right now there are a lot of discussions about .NET 4.0, which should be in beta soon and released at the end of this year, or maybe early next year.

Of course, this is very interesting for me, as I keep looking for stuff that may help me build OCTGN faster or add cool features. To be honest, so far I’ve seen lots of very interesting additions to the framework, but none that seems compelling enough to upgrade.

Currently there’s only one thing, which makes me want to use the 4.0 release when it’s out: I think Microsoft totally messed up their version numbers since 3.0. Every two weeks someone asks (either in the forum, the bug tracker, by PM or on this blog) why they can’t install OCTGN. And it always comes down to the same problem: you have .NET but not the *3.5 SP1* release (and it’s a mess to actually find out what version exactly you have installed). So being able to say “Requires .NET 4.0″ seems very appealing to me.

No worry, the .NET 4.0 release is still relatively far away. I won’t upgrade OCTGN before the final release, because I don’t want you to install a beta .NET framework. Right now I’m not even 100% sure I will upgrade at all.

How do you feel about it? Do you mind installing the .NET 4.0 release when it’s out?