Hi, Trevor. I'm sure you're sick of seeing these, but thought I'd throw a proposal out...
We have a moderately sized group of players that uses Lackey as the base for a casual play league (http://www.lunchgroupgamers.com/) and we make extensive use of the card pool feature. By assigning users points for playing that they can use to 'buy' boosters via the Add a pack feature, we find this gives the game a lot of depth and lets us come a lot closer to approximating the feel of playing the real thing.
Since cards have virtual worth in our play environment, it allows for players to trade or barter cards. This is possible, albeit very sloppily, by manually editing both players' card pools. This has frequently made us wish there was some way to trade cards between two players' pools within the game. It seems like a relatively simple feature to add: two players throw down a card, select them, and lackey checks to see if both players card pools have the requested card and add/remove the appropriate entries if so, return an error if not.
I understand this is probably beyond the scope of what your original vision for the card pool feature is (making an educated guess, I'd assume it was originally meant to emulate sealed play,) but it seems like a natural extension of the system and a feature that could really add a lot of depth to the program. I was wondering what the possibility of seeing it in the future would be?
Either way, thank you for all of your hard work on Lackey. It doesn't go unappreciated.
I'd like to add collection management and trading, but for the foreseeable future, I'll be working on more important things.
The good news is there is already a few pretty good ways to do what I think you want to be doing.
Here's my suggestion:
It's as simple as saving your card pool with the "Export as txt" button. That will output a very simple to read text file with a quantity and a card name. You can send the file to your friends to peruse, or upload it to a website, or even paste it to a forum. When you agree to a trade with a friend, simply update each of your lists (and there's lots of ways of doing that). When you load your card pool again after you saved the changes, you will have the updated card pool.
And here's a cool way to browse each other's card pools: Say you have a saved card pool file uploaded to a website. A person can copy the URL to his clipboard, and in the card pool section of the deck editor, click the "URL" button. Your card pool will load in their deck editor and they can browse your cards.
Or if you don't have a nice place to actually upload your card pool files, simply post the contents to a forum post or something like that. Someone can box select what you posted and copy it to their clipboad, and in the card pool section of the deck editor, click the "Paste" button and Lackey will load that card pool from their clipboard.
If you want a really easy way to copy your card pool (so you can post it to a forum post), simply click the "Copy to clipboard" button in the card pool section of the deck editor, then paste to the forum.
NOTE: You don't need to export as txt, but it makes it more readable that way. You could use the default .dek format for the card pool, but that's slightly more cryptic. The major advantage of using .dek over .txt is the former preserves the set the card came from, whereas the latter might pick a card of the same name from a different set.
Lackey handles card pools the same way it handles deck files. Card pools are stored at a different place, and they only have one section (as opposed to decks which can have additional things like sideboards). So you can actually load a person's card pool as a deck and vice versa. A card pool file (either .dek or .txt) is essentially also a deck file. So, to browse someone's card pool, and compare it with your own, you could load your own card pool to the card pool section, and load their card pool to deck section, or vice versa.
Since both the deck list section and the card pool section each have their respective "Copy to clipboard" and "Paste" buttons, it's easy to switch them as you are browsing. If you want to look at the cards in deck list in the card pool section, click the top "Copy to clipboard" button and the bottom "Paste" button.
Remember that the filters (such as the ones that allow you to look for a card by type), apply to the card pool cards too, so that can help you browse.
There is a whole lot of things you can do. There is a lot power and utility in the functions already present, if you know about them.
QuoteIf you want a really easy way to copy your card pool (so you can post it to a forum post), simply click the "Copy to clipboard" button in the card pool section of the deck editor, then paste to the forum.
Most of my players are laymen, so up until now I've been having them use the 'save as text' > manually edit the file method. This has lead to a few headaches with them properly managing their cardpools, but this was also before the ability to load multiple card pool files from within lackey was present (you still had to swap the files manually.)
You're absolutely right about Lackey being extremely flexible. I've written a few custom pack files to represent products they can buy with their points that don't already exist in the plugin and have coached them through manually editing their .dek files for trading purposes, but I was
completely oblivious to the "URL" feature. It presents an excellent work around for card browsing since the group has a dedicated website.
Thanks for taking the time to write out such a well thought-out response!
QuoteRemember that the filters (such as the ones that allow you to look for a card by type), apply to the card pool cards too, so that can help you browse.
I did notice an issue regarding this, however. I did some testing with it this morning and will submit a separate bug report.