hi all

The game engine has been updated to simulate drawing cards from a real deck as opposed to just randomly drawing a card from an infinite deck. The Designer has also been updated to allow you to change the numbers of each card in the deck.

The default numbers are: 18 'A' cards, 18 'B' cards, 18 'C' cards and 2 wildcards. The code works by creating a randomly shuffled deck with the specified number of cards, and each time a card is drawn it removes this card from the virtual deck. Once the deck is empty a new shuffled deck is created.

In theory this should help give a more realistic distribution of cards in the game as well as allowing better designer customisation of the deck behavior. Many thanks to Hugh for coming up with the card drawing code.

As usual any problems let me know.

Awesome!
Is this information shown in the Rules or Cards tab somewhere for players to see? I would want to know if the deck is all Wilds.

It will be in the next version of the Player and it's shown under the card section of the Rules tab of the board info page.

One thing we're still missing is a way to actually view the card set as a whole. Currently you must play a game and then actually get one of each card in your hand to be able to see the whole set at once. I've played on a couple of game boards now where I still don't know what the wild card looks like because I've never gotten one!

Can the ability to view the card set without actually playing the game be added?

Doesn't that just add to the thrill and excitement of playing a new board RB?

It's like peeking inside presents the day before christmas day ;)

I'm a great admirer of good card set designs, and it frustrates me that I can't browse through the games and examine what other people have done with their card sets.

By the way, Tom, I'd like you to know that all of the card sets I've done for this site have at least one animated GIF in the set, if not all four.  I'm hoping that one of these days you'll switch on the animation and unleash the magic.

Red Baron wrote:

I'm a great admirer of good card set designs, and it frustrates me that I can't browse through the games and examine what other people have done with their card sets.

I agree. Card design, though it doesn't affect game play in any way, is a key component of world-building for a good map. It's part of the joy of browsing through games to see what mapmakers have come up with to complete their theme.

I added a cards tab to the board view page. RB I had no idea how cool your Antastic cards were!

Unfortunately animated GIFs are not supported by Flash so I'll need to try and find a custom component to support them in the Cards tab. Will see if I can incorporate that into the Player in the next version.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but would it be possible to add text labels below the card images to indicate which one is the wild? I know you can see the ABCW in the player info table, but it would be nice to see that information on the cards tab in the player when you're picking which cards to trade in. For many boards, it's not totally obvious which card is the wild.

It should already be there - which game is it not appearing in for you?

Here's one: http://www.wargear.net/games/view/6961

tom, in Work Mode the Card names are White Text on a White backdrop, meaning invisible.

Ah I think it's a problem when you're running work mode - the background color is white so the text isn't visible. I'll update the Player in the next version to fix that.

Thanks Yertle :)

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

tom wrote: I added a cards tab to the board view page. RB I had no idea how cool your Antastic cards were!

Unfortunately animated GIFs are not supported by Flash so I'll need to try and find a custom component to support them in the Cards tab. Will see if I can incorporate that into the Player in the next version.

Excellent!  I see you got the animation working.

There is a problem with the animated wild card in the Ribbon World game, though.  It looks fine in the game designer but is cropped in the cards tab.  Any idea what might be doing this?

EDIT: There must be something defective with the image.  It is the same image I use on Warfish (http://warfish.net/war/browse/boardcards?bid=1121676), but when I copy it from Warfish to my hard drive and view it with a browser, it gets cropped.

Yeah I get the same problem - if I save it locally, the image preview on the PC shows the rectangular image, however in the browser it displays as a square. Possibly there's something wrong with how the image was created?

btw if you're looking for awesome cards you need to simply look at a EN map.

Jigen wrote: btw if you're looking for awesome cards you need to simply look at a EN map.

Huh?  Most of his cards are just google images aren't they?

Red Baron wrote:

tom wrote: I added a cards tab to the board view page. RB I had no idea how cool your Antastic cards were!

Unfortunately animated GIFs are not supported by Flash so I'll need to try and find a custom component to support them in the Cards tab. Will see if I can incorporate that into the Player in the next version.

Excellent!  I see you got the animation working.

Working in the Flash?! Tom, can I go back and change card images? I hadn't been doing any fun animations, since no one would see it...