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Some people have each player roll a die to see who goes first. That requires everyone to roll, and if people tie, you can have to do that a number of times.

Some people flip a coin to decide who goes first. That requires you to specify heads or tails before you flip, but the bonus is that only one player needs to do anything, and it isn't possible to tie. The down side is, this only works for 2 players.

But the best method to randomly choose a player is... a function that was designed to do exactly that.
It's called "/playerchoose" (or "/pc" for short). You can set a canned message for "/playerchoose" for one-click use, or you can also just type "/pc" in the log.

BONUS TIP: In addition to setting canned message buttons in the "Chat & Macos" section of the Prefences, you can also quickly save a canned message by entering in the message you want in the chat log input field, but instead of hitting return to send it, instead RIGHT click the canned message button you want it saved to. From then on, you can LEFT click that button and it will post your canned message.

Regarding the Appearance Preference: "Zoom playmat with table zooming?"

Some plugins use game boards where the position of items put on them matters, like chess. For those sorts of games, people need to let the playmat zoom with the zoom done on cards. That is the only way to assert that a card is on a particular spot over the table playmat image no matter what for all players.

Some plugins just use playmats just for decoration, and they may not want their playmat zoomed along with card zooming.


The only benefit in allowing the option is to let people using plugins in the latter group to have better looking table images (under certain circumstances).
The downside of allowing the option is that when people SHOULD have playmat zooming along with card zooming, and they don't (typically because of ignorance of the option), then they can disagree with what the board looks like and things may not line up as expected.

I am now leaning towards disabling the option to disconnect playmat zooming with card zooming. It will simplify the interface and give people less to get confused about. First off, I don't think many people disable playmat zooming. And even for those people who do, the worst that would happen is they may see a playmat zoomed in why they didn't want it to be, and that (I believe) could only be an aesthetic issue.

I had made the option available before I had a Scale feature. Scale shrinks or enlarges cards while keeping the camera the same. Zooming works like a camera, where you zoom in or out on the whole table. The cards will appear to be a different size, just as they will with a Scale, but the way the accomplish that is different.

I have always kind of thought zooming in on cards on the table and having the table playmat NOT zoom looks kind of weird and unnatural; counter intuitive.

[Does anyone have any better ideas for an algorithm for placing tokens?]

I am redoing how the card counters work. First off, the size of the text label and the size of the drawn token of the counter are now independently controlled. It used to be that you had one preference and it affected both the size of a text counter label and the drawn counters.

I am also going to be drawing the counters with images, and letting plugins use custom images for counters.

What I would like feedback on is the layout of the counters and how they look. There are 2 modes you can view card counters currently: as a text number or as a quantity of circles. As a text number, the plugin maker can specify where this number is drawn on top of the card. When drawing circles, that method becomes infeasible since there is too much to draw and it could not be controlled with any order.

So for drawing counters, I was thinking about making them work like this:

The top row shows the arrangement of 1,2,3, and 4 red counters. (These would be drawn and not text, despite what the image implies.) The placement of the red counters starts at the bottom middle, and they ascend upwards as more are added.

The 2nd row shows what things look like with 2 different counters. The counters are each made as close to the center as possible.

The 3rd row shows this same idea, but with 3 different colors of tokens.

Does anyone have any better ideas for an algorithm for placing tokens?

I am also considering an option to have card numbers be drawn over a counter image, as pictured on the red token in the image at the bottom left. Alternatively, I am considering drawing the number adjacent to a counter image, as in the bottom middle.

I am not sure if I should give people the option of drawing counters 3 different ways: text only, image only, text+one image.

Also, I'm not sure what the default setting should be.

Please give me any input you have on this soon as I am going to be finishing up the coding as soon as I can. If you have other ideas, sending a picture would be nice.

http://www.lackeyccg.com/changelog.html

Card Funcions can now be called as log commands. E.g., "/cardfunction1" (or "/cf1") will invoke the first card function on selected cards. You can string them together with semicolons, like other commands.
Shared Zone functions have been improved, with additional "Reveal to" and "Reveal top X" sorts of functions.
Fixed a bug that would cause unbound keys and buttons to execute all unbound functions.
Fixed a bug that prevented card sound preferences from being saved.

Posting more info later....

I am looking for C++ code that loads a common file format for 3D animated models. Lackey already uses opengl and a lot of 3D stuff. All I need is some 3D model code and I can let people use 3D animated models on the table.

If you know of any code like this, please let me know.

http://www.lackeyccg.com/changelog.html

The main thing I fixed in this was an issue that caused the previous version to not launch on windows and linux. That should now be fixed. Let me know if anyone still is not able to launch Lackey.

Linux users may need to do an additional step. I' not sure if it's required and I welcome feedback either way. Linux users, if Lackey still does not launch, you can try 2 different things.
1. In Terminal, navigate to the lackey exe and launch it by typing "wine LackeyCCG.exe".
2. In Terminal type "winetricks vcrun2008" and it will run an installer. Once the installer is done, Lackey should run.

A number of changes...

http://www.lackeyccg.com/changelog.html

For info about how to add card sounds, check out http://www.lackeyccg.com/tutorialplugin.html#cardsounds

I think I fixed the bug some people reported that would cause a bunch of functions to perform when certain keys were pressed. If you experienced this in previous versions, let me know if the problem persists or has been fixed.

I'll post more later.

Please let me know if you are running Mac OS 10.5 and are available for a quick test. IM me on AIM at Lykos4, or on Facebook at trevoragnitti.

I am considering only supporting Mac 10.6 and 10.7, which are the latest, and the 2nd most latest versions of the OS. I might also keep supporting 10.5, and just drop 10.4.

Supporting the older OS are a pain, and I'm wondering if anyone still uses those. If there is a decent amount of old mac OS users out there, let me know.

Anyone know any statistics on mac users and what OS they use?

http://lackeyccg.com/changelog.html

Plugin makers can now add card sounds to plugins that play when cards are played. The card sounds can also be played explicitly by users. This is a really fun feature. Enabling it is simple. The plugin maker puts sound files in sounds folder (which should automatically download via the updatelist). And then the plugin maker makes a new column in card data file with a header named "Sound". In this column, he puts the sound file names (you can omit the .wav suffix). The corresponding sound will play automatically whenever that card is first place onto the table. You can also CTRL+ALT+ mouse click on a card on the table to have it play it's sound. Or in the deck editor, you can also CTRL+ALT+ mouse click a card, but clicking in the deck editor will not make the sound play for the opponents.

Fixed some depth related bugs.
Automatically sorting cards on the table has been disabled (possibly temporarily). This is the option so a card that is higher in the Y axis will appear on the top (or bottom) of lower cards.

When a deck is loaded, the Shuffle sound now plays.

Scripts in canned messages can now be labeled. E.g., "!Set Display!/zoom;/scale;/tilt;/pancenter;/erasedrawing" will appear as "!Set Display!" .

Lackey can now better import funky characers such as ? or smart quotes.

http://lackeyccg.com/changelog.html


Plugin makers can now make cards hover on the table. The syntax is like the other card functions:

Code Select Expand

<cardfunction><label>Hover</label><kind>HOVER</kind></cardfunction>
This is a new feature and I welcome feedback on it, such as how high things should hover, the difference between the apex and trough of the animation, the speed of the animation, the smoothness of the animation, how things look like with a tilted table compared to a flat one, and anything else you come up with.

Players can now customize key bindings. This is new and I'm still debating about a few things. I haven't (yet) included the contextually dependent binding options. For example, while you are moving a token card from the token list, you can:
Hit the right and left arrow keys to increment and decrement the number of tokens you are dragging;
Hit the number keys from 1-9 (on keypad too) to set the amount you are moving to that number.
And so forth. Those key bindings vary based on the context, and there is a lot of other bindings that are also context dependent. I haven't implemented a good system for changing all of the context dependent keys.

Plugin makers can define default keybindings (that override the lackey default bindings for their plugin).
When a player loads a plugin, lackey will first check if you have saved key bindings for that plugin. If not, it will see if there is a default key bindings for that plugin. If not, lackey will set some default keybindings.

The area to the right of the table is now separated into 3 tabs: Zones, Tokens, and SoundShare.

I'm looking for some non-qwerty keyboard users to help me finally add proper support for non-qwerty keyboards.

Please email me or better yet, IM me on AIM or some other instant messenger.

Also, please tell me what kind of keyboard you use.

http://lackeyccg.com/changelog.html

I fixed some bugs, including some involving shared zones.
Function buttons that appear below the table and zone tabs that appear over the zone area below the table will now resized based on the allotted width.
There is now the option to declare in plugininfo.txt <definition><kind>DOTOKENSDISAPPEAROFFTABLE</kind><value>yes</value></definition> and that will make tokens moved off the table disappear. By default, they do disappear when moved off the table.
You can now enter the log command to shuffle a specifc zone by name (including shared zones), like "/shuffle Hand".

I'll post more later...

There's a great board game for Battlestar Galactica.
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=18&enmi=Battlestar%20Galactica

I am trying to make complex board games able to be played (well) on Lackey. So I decided to make a plugin for the battlestar galactica board game as a proof of concept.

I am looking for people who know how to play this game, and are willing to test out the plugin with me. I'm not necessarily talking about playing games, but at least talking about how things work, running through parts of the game as practice, and in general making sure lackey supports everything to make playing the game work.

I've played the game once (in real life) and it was cool.

Let me know if you are interested.

If this sort of game can run well on Lackey, people can start making plugins for ideally any kind of game played on a table. I've already made a few changes, inspired by me studying BSG. For example, the game uses tons of little decks, so Lackey now better supports this by having game zone tabs automatically resize based on the allotted space. That's the sort of thing I want to learn from this experiment: how I can improve Lackey to make it more powerful and versatile.

I am now maintaining a page which lists the different changes from version to version. This will be a persistent list that I will add to with every update.

http://lackeyccg.com/changelog.html

[Screenshots]

Just posted a new version.


Started logging changes in versions at http://lackeyccg.com/changelog.html.

Screenshots
Added screenshot ability, and screenshot gallery creator. (only saves screenshots as .bmp for now)
You can take a screenshot by choosing "Take Screenshot" from the main menu, or using control+shift+s on your keyboard. This will take a screenshot of the current Lackey window and save it to your currently loaded plugin's screenshots/ folder.
You can also choose "Browse Screenshots..." from the main menu, which will open up a screenshots related menu. In this menu, you can look at previews of all screenshot's you've made, delete screenshots, open the directory in your default window, or view all screenshots in a gallery.
Whenever you take a screenshot, Lackey will update a file at plugins/PLUGINNAME/screenshots/index.html. This file, if you open it, will show you a gallery of all your screenshots. The gallery that is created is a bit crude, but I will make it look more fancy later. At present, screenshots are only saved as .bmp files, which are the actual dimensions of the Lackey window when the screenshot was taken. If you want to convert them to jpg (or another image format) and resize them, feel free to use whatever program you want to do so. You can delete the old bmp version, and the next time you take a screenshot (or delete an old screenshot), the screenshots/index.html file should be updated with the changes you've made (such as the new image file suffix).
In their current format, bmp, the files are somewhat large, so that might be a good idea if you want to upload the whole screenshots/ folder to your website. One cool thing about the screenshots folder that is created is it is properly formatted such that you can just upload the entire folder, and you will have a website for your screenshots.
Screenshots (and screenshot gallery) are new features and feedback is welcome.

SoundShare panel added in Other tab (next to the token list)
Added SoundShare interface in the Other tab. This makes sharing sounds convenient and fun.
This is described at http://lackeyccg.com/tutorialsoundshare.html and it looks like


All sounds now should go in either the general lackey sounds folder, sounds/, or the plugin-specific folder, plugins/PLUGINNAME/sounds/. Use of the chat/ subdirectory in both sounds/ folders is now obsolete. Plugin makers: You may need to update your updatelist.txt files if you have sounds listed as being downloaded to the obsolete chat/ folder. They should now go the parent sounds folder.

All canned messages are now localized to each plugin, and each plugin's canned messages are independent of the other plugin's canned messages. These are saved in pluginpreferences.txt and if you have never saved canned messages for a plugin (such as when you freshly install it), you will have the initial canned messages set to the contents of that plugin's defaultchat.txt. If a plugin does not have a defaultchat.txt, then Lackey will use general default canned message values. As a side effect of this change, old canned messages will not be preserved from older versions of LackeyCCG, but they will going forward.

If you type common phases, like "hello", lackey should speak that to you as it has done so before (unless you have disabled sound in your preferences). This is not a new feature. If this doesn't work for you any more upon updating, this could be caused by you missing a file called chatconfig.txt that should be put into your Lackey's sounds/ folder. You can get it from http://lackeyccg.com/chatconfig.txt if you need it. Previously, this file was located in your sounds/chat/ folder, but the subdirectory chat/ is now obsolete. It should be at sounds/chatconfig.txt.

Gonna write more here later today....

I updated the LackeyCCG tutorial.
I'll continue to improve it, and I plan on redoing the video tutorials since they are a bit out of date now.

Let me know if you see any mistakes, or have any questions, or suggestions.

I haven't made http://lackeyccg.com/tutorialfaq.html yet, so I am aware that the "FAQ, Troubleshooting, & Tips" mentioned in the table of contents is a broken link.

The tutorial is at: http://lackeyccg.com/tutorial.html

I fixed a number of bugs. I think the proxy need tester should now work properly. Please test that and give me feedback. If you can host without proxy server, but it tells you you can't, let me know. If you can't host without proxy server, but it tells you you can, let me know. In either case, there is an error in the tester and I need to fix it. If there is an error in the tester, you can override the proxy need tester recommendation.

I made a proxy server tutorial button to help people who might be confused.
http://lackeyccg.com/tutorialproxyserver.html

I'll post more later.

I just posted a new version with a number of fixes and some new improvements.

First, due to the method I used to fix the bug where people see the wrongs, some saved games may not work. And more important to plugin makers, some start.txt files may need to be remade. If you use a start.txt with your plugin, double check that it still works properly.

One change is appearance preferences are now localized to the plugin. This includes skin choice, table image, and zone image for now. For example, if you load a skin and table background image for the chess plugin, and then you load the scrabble plugin, you can save a different set of skin and table background for that plugin, and it won't interfere with other plugin's settings. Note that your selections prior to the current release will not be imported to the new system, so you will likely see the default values as soon as you launch Lackey.

Some new features plugin makers can use are:
Plugin makers can now define in the plugin that all players should be treated as if they are sitting on the same side of the table. This is useful for a game like scrabble. Unlike real life scrabble, you don't need to rotate the board or view the board upside-down.
To use this, you can define in your plugin:
<definition><kind>SITONSAMESIDE</kind><value>yes</value></definition>

Plugin makers can now define in their plugin that the deck editor should be disabled. More and more kinds of games are being created and played with Lackey. For some of them, it doesn't make sense to be loaded a deck. With chess or scrabble, for example, instead of loading a deck, you just select New Game from the main menu.
To use this, you can define in your plugin:
<definition><kind>ENABLEDECKEDITOR</kind><value>no</value></definition>

As mentioned previously, appearance preferences are now local to plugins. If a person has never saved a table background while using a plugin, they will see the default table background image the next time they load that plugin. If you want to use a plugin specific table background as the default, you can define one.
Take a look at the chess plugin for example. If you install the chess plugin, it includes the following in it's plugininfo.txt:
<definition><kind>CUSTOMTABLEBACKGROUND</kind><value>chess.jpg</value></definition>
That means it will load a default chess board image. Note that you should also include this image in your updatelist.txt, and you should download it to where your other table background images are, namely images/backgrounds/chess.jpg. Note that this is a shared backgrounds folder, so you can have multiple plugins load the same background image.
Similarly, you can do the same with skins and zone background images.
<definition><kind>CUSTOMSKIN</kind><value>chessskin.jpg</value></definition>
<definition><kind>CUSTOMZONEBACKGROUND</kind><value>chesszonebackground.jpg</value></definition>
A few notes on this:
This is NOT intended for the plugin maker to set everyone else's play mat to what the plugin maker likes best aesthetically. This is more for games like chess or scrabble or some other game where pieces need to be placed at a certain place and it is to assert that everyone should at least have some basic table play mat. You can only change the default values, so of a person is newly loading your plugin, they will see these settings. Don't assume that people will keep it. When you make backgrounds and skins, please use smart naming conventions. In other words, use a name that is both descriptive, short, and unlikely to be coincidentally used by another plugin (or user).

I fixed the bug where some of the right click menus weren't working.

Let me know if you find any other bugs.

I just posted a new version that should fix a number of bugs people had reported. The issue where people would see the wrong cards should now be fixed, as long as the players are indeed using the same version of the plugin.

The Lackey updater.exe should now work properly.

Plus other stuff. I'll write more later.