LackeyCCG

i dont understand the whole how to make a plug in

Well the first thing I have to ask is where are you getting your plug in making info from?

the plugin creation tutorial

Quote from: greasontim on May 06, 2010, 12:40:54 AM
i dont understand the whole how to make a plug in

Can you be more specific? What exactly aren't you understanding?

Right now the setlist is what im haveing problems with

The easiest way to make a setlist is to open a setlist from a similar game and change names around using the names of sets in your game. If there is only one set your setlist will look something like this:
1
carddata.txt

1
Standard
1
SetName
If you have more sets it changes the last number and adds on the additional sets. For example, the Harry Potter setlist is as follows:
1
carddata.txt

1
Standard
5
Base_Set
Quidditch_Cup
Diagon_Alley
Adventures_at_Hogwarts
Chamber_of_Secrets

Try just doing this much. If your sets are divided into categories, like in MTG, then I can help your from there.

Im gonna have different sets in my game
but right now im just trying to get the first set done and playable
so what does each part do?

All you really need in setlist.txt is the file names the card data is in, after the number of them.

The other parts are for specificying formats, which is not required.

If you have all card data in a single file, you can have setlist.txt just look like:

1
CardData.txt

is it possible to add more than just
Name, Set, Affiliation, Type, Cost, Power, Defense, Rarity, Text
to carddata.txt ?

You can use whatever fields you want, as many as you want, and name them whatever you want.

sweet so than i can setup this up more the way i want to than
Cause each card has a set amount of Life n the Hero Race effects how many of each Type of summon you can have out at a time

It should explain all that stuff in the plugin creation tutorial. Just make sure your card data file has the same number of columns as defined in plugininfo.txt.

I have card info in carddata.txt but no cards show up in the card list in lackey
also anyone know any good card creators?

Do you mean people who create cards, or programs that create cards?
If program, MSE is a pretty good progam for creating sets of cards that have a uniform look, though it takes a bit of work to get used to the programming.

Ok found it,
doesn't look that bad i'll try it out still gonna need someone for the art but thats about it now

ok as for the updatelist.txt
can someone go into a bit of detail about this for me please?

ok well it updates which is good but the card images dont download.

The easiest way to make the images download is to have all images of a single size in one folder like http://www.lackeyccg.com/pluginname/medium/
then at the end of the updatelist.txt put the following:
CardGeneralURLs:
http://www.lackeyccg.com/pluginname/medium/

If you can not have them all in a single folder/directory, you will need to specify where each and every card is online.

well i have
WarStarter/(Image name.jpg)   (URL of the image)
in CardImageURLs1.txt
but it doesn't work

Why are they in a different file?

Yeah, at the bottom of your updatelist.txt is where you put the information I stated above, since it was the updatelist that you had asked about.

Oh... just read it again.  It's better to use CardGeneralURLs since you don't have to individually list each card.  They work like this:

In your cardlist.txt you will have an image 'column'.  Let's say the entry in this column is imagename, and it's from the set setname.

Lackey will look in plugins/pluginname/sets/setimages/setname/ for imagename.jpg

If it doesn't find it, it will then look for it at:
URL/imagename.jpg
and download it to the above location, where URL is whatever you have listed under CardGeneralURLs.

The only reason to use CardImageURLs is if you have a very good reason to keep the images separated by set on your web host.

I'll be keeping the sets in different folders

The only reason to have the images at different URL locations is if you are going to have to name two cards from different sets with the same name, which if the game is good, you won't need. I suggest (for simplicitys sake) that you name each card image file something unique and have them all in one URL location.

Quote from: mathman1550 on May 26, 2010, 05:27:25 PM
The only reason to have the images at different URL locations is if you are going to have to name two cards from different sets with the same name, which if the game is good, you won't need. I suggest (for simplicitys sake) that you name each card image file something unique and have them all in one URL location.

Ya, there are a number of ways you can store image files, but the best way is to have all image files uniquely named, like "SET001.jpg" and then keep them all in one folder that is online. Obviously, if there are image file name conflicts, you can't use this method.

It's pretty versatile how it's set up. You could put every single card image on a completely different website if you wanted, and as far as the user of your plugin is concerned, he would never know the difference. But it is a bit of an increased amount of work for the plugin MAKER, though.

Also, you can put in plugininfo.txt the following line right before the ISYOURFACEDOWNVISIBLE line.
REUSECARDIMAGES:"yes"

That will make all card images be downloaded to the general/ folder.

Let's say you have a card named "Bonk" from set "alpha" and a reprint with the same name is in a set called "beta". With REUSECARDIMAGES set to yes, only one card image will be downloaded. If you set REUSECARDIMAGES to no, you will get 2 card images, one at plugins/MyPlugin/sets/setimages/alpha/Bonk.jpg
and the other at
plugins/MyPlugin/sets/setimages/beta/Bonk.jpg

With REUSECARDIMAGES set to yes, you will get a single card image which is saved to
plugins/MyPlugin/sets/setimages/general/Bonk.jpg

There are pros and cons to each method. YES lets people download fewer card image files. NO lets people see alternate art and such for every version of the card. YES puts all the cards to a single download folder. If you omit this line in the pluginfolder, it chooses NO by default. So there actually is never a reason to put REUSECARDIMAGES:"no".

But remember, the file hierarchy of the folders and files online have nothing to do with the folders and file hierarchy of a downloaded plugin. A lot of plugin makers forget this and just want to upload their working plugin. You could do that, but it's smarter to remember that there is no reason to do so. This is especially important if one plugin has multiple card image quality versions. All versions should reference the same URL to download a file if they share that file, and this should be true for most files because the only difference between high and medium versions should be things that have something to do with the card images. You could have identical versions of the same files spread where ever you want, but that will be a headache to maintain.
The online and local  file hierarchy is determined by the updatelist.txt file (and optionally additional CardURLFiles).