Daring Apprentice

Well... Not much happened in terms of development... but lots have been happening on the Magic front? Exile... and no more combat damage stacks?

Well, that's one of those things... we'll see how I go about exile, as it's only cosmetic, but it's nice being able to do cosmetic.

Anyway, so I am now trying to convert my code to git. Not just because, but also just because. I want to learn git, and DA is a good place to learn it on, and networking (with my starting over from scratch the whole time) would work really well with git.

I'm getting ready for some more coding, but I am hoping to get a wireless network adapter for my PC soon, and this will ease my network coding. I also now have a 2nd pc (laptop) to my disposal which also will make coding easier.

Unfortunately though July is a new financial year, and quite a lot of prep will have to go into my budget for work. Hopefully not too long after that, I'll be able to add some code to my brand new (now not existing) git repository.

Ok... So the last commit had some networking code in the release notes, but I have a feeling most of that will be lost. I have never truly felt comfortable with the solution I had, in terms of elegance and scalability, and network effeciency etc.

I asked myself, how can I get it right? Well, I decided I needed to look at as much of other people's network code as I can get. Unfortunately I've not found a great deal, but I did find Almindor's (the guy who wrote lnet, which I use for networking) Lentilwars code. This has some elegant solutions to some problems I wasn't sure how to get through. The other piece of code is called DataPacker - written by Theo Lustenberger, which will be able to compress the data I send (zip), and make it easy for me to incrementally "decipher" the messages that was sent.

So generally I have hope to get the networking fully going, but for now it's still far off. I'm trying to get at least 30m of programming in a day. Obviously some days it'll be more, and others will be less. But 30m of DA focus a day... (even if it's more research).

Unfortunately, revision 102 is not the big network release I'd hoped it would be. I'll talk more about networking after the revision 102 parts. (seperate post)

I fixed a bug that was reported on the Bugs part of the wiki (thanks for whoever added that), Also, while testing my next export for excel stats, I found that loading a deck didn't display in the titlebar, and also requested you to save, even though you didn't change anything. So those are fixed too.

I was playing around with Magic Set Editor, and found their statistics to be pretty cool. So I suggested that they maybe fork that part of the project to create more of their nice statistics. I was told no go. For me... the thing about stats is that it's not so easy to program graphs etc. and I already know an application which is pretty good at it... Excel. So I've created an excel spreadsheet which can handle the stats. And added a function in DA to export the stats to a little text file.

So now, via Excel, you can have Mana Curve + Type graphs, or Color + Type (the two I have in by default)... but it's Excel Pivots... just use the data available. You can analyse however you want. I added a column called "mana source" which looks for "add" and "to your mana pool" to check for mana sources. This might be crude, and could sometimes be wrong, but it's a start. Obviously this will not work so 100% if you're using a non-english database. --- Which is kind of a hole...

Revision 102:

C : Lots of "template" code
C : Split the NetSend and NetReceive codes
Fix : Delete from SB button now deletes from SB and does not add to SB (rev 100 fixed the code).
Fix : On deckopen, the filename is now displayed in the deckeditor.
Fix : Loading a file (in deckeditor) no longer makes it dirty. (doesn't prompt for save if you exit without changes)
F : Export tab delimited data to Excel for deck stats (note, it drops it to the folder where the .exe is installed)
F : Added DeckStats.xls to the installs to help with stats (I made it not use macros, for security)

I was contacted today an admin of the people over at http://www.slightlymagic.net to create a forum for DA... Which can now be found at: http://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=49

In addition he told me about this link: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=56796

But for now I will not add DA there, because net play is not featured. Hopefully as I said in the slightlymagic forum... it'll be here "real soon".

Now that Facebook has changed pages to be like profiles... You can now upload your screenshots onto the Daring Apprentice page. Obviously, you need to be a member, and you must not abuse it with screenshots of yourself! Just screenshots of the game.

My brother is a level 2 judge, and he has used screenshots in a rules questions posed to other judges. So maybe if you want to ask that tricky rules question, or discuss a play situation... Like would you attack here? Or how would you assign blockers?

Enjoy!