Defined Board Zones

[Trevor]

Each zone would need to be distinguished from the next, so using a number for each autoplayzone# would be the likely solution.

I was thinking their position and area would distinguish them. And people would be free to list them in any order. They don't need a label, as far as Lackey is concerned. And the definition, including things such as type, should be easy enough to read as an ersatz label.

[Ascent]

Normalized coordinates work better than actual coordinates because normalized coordinates are scalable. Suppose there is a 4 player game. Instead of playing cards to your half of the table, all your cards go to your quadrant of the table. That's less confusing if things are all normalized to a player's allotted space.

There are number of CCGs that just won't work with this system. There are a number of specific cards that will not work well with this system. (Consider a card that is attached to an opponent's card.)

But I suppose, for some CCGs at least, a system like the one described will produce the desired result most of the time, which is useful. I will implement a system like this soon and plugin makers can give me some feedback. I want it to support a number of different kinds of CCG, but at the same time I realize that it likely won't work for all CCGs. But in the worst case scenario, a player would just be doing things as they are now: manually, so there is no down side to me implementing this.

That would be awesome.


I was thinking there might be an easy way of helping plugin designers do this within Lackey by letting them drag to draw a square box and when they release the mouse, a dialog box comes up with a dropdown box choosing the column to define the data it looks for when a card is double-clicked in hand.

I suppose giving it the default eval "IS" makes it the same as saying you can't send anything with more than one type to that zone. Though letting the plugin designer choose the eval and the column (even more than one column) would be more robust.

[Ascent]

Each zone would need to be distinguished from the next, so using a number for each autoplayzone# would be the likely solution.

I was thinking their position and area would distinguish them. And people would be free to list them in any order. They don't need a label, as far as Lackey is concerned. And the definition, including things such as type, should be easy enough to read as an ersatz label.

Yeah, as long as Lackey can distinguish in some way, that's all that matters.

[Ascent]

I was just thinking that in the appearance area of Lackey, you could let the players "Turn on zone colors" that makes the zones visible. This would not only be useful for players, but for plugin designers, to make sure the zones actually appear as they designed them. It's an excellent accuracy check. Perhaps you could even let the plugin designers choose the color of each zone's outline. For example, in SWTCG, the Character zone would be outlined in Purple, the Ground zone in Green, the Space zone in Blue and the Build zone in white, as well as coloring the Location zones in their arena colors and the Resource zone in orange.

[Trevor]

I was thinking there might be an easy way of helping plugin designers do this within Lackey by letting them drag to draw a square box and when they release the mouse, a dialog box comes up with a dropdown box choosing the column to define the data it looks for when a card is double-clicked in hand.

I generally don't try to spend a ton of time making the interface great for plugin makers. What you're suggesting would take a lot of time to implement, and only people who make plugins would ever see it.

What I will do is explain how to do it in a tutorial (http://lackeyccg.com/tutorialplugin.html) and plugin makers should be able to figure it out easily enough.

Regarding the option to draw it with a color, I'm not sure about that. It's an interesting idea, but I have 2 concerns. If there were the option to draw it, drawing it may interfere with the other graphics, such as the playmat. If there are a bunch of preferences options, well, that makes a ton more preference options that people need to wade through whenever they want to change preferences.
I do not add preference options lightly, and it's not because of laziness on my part.

I think a playmat people will generally use will clue them into their plugin's "areas". And if they have no such visual queue, it isn't that much of a problem.

And plugin makers don't need something like this to test. It's easy enough to spawn a ton of card X and see where it goes. And again, I don't want to spend too much time helping a small minority (plugin makers) when I could spend more time improving the experience for everyone else.

[Ascent]

No problem.