suggested image sizes?

[deadgames]

I'm looking at scanning some cards for possible plugin creation. I'll scan them at a high enough resolution that I'll be able to scale down to any size and still have the cards look good, but I'm wondering what those sizes should. Specifically, what are good dimensions for low, medium and high images, assuming standard card sizes?

[Trevor]

There are 4 possible quality versions: low, medium, high, max. Generally, plugins usually only use 1 or 2. The size depends on the cards.

Some rules of thumb: The medium sized one should be small, but not too small that you can't read the cards; I'd say maybe about 200-210 pixels wide or so. The medium one is usually used by people with smallish monitors.

The high one is for people who would like to savor the art. It should be large, but not too large to take up too much real estate in the lackey window. I wouldn't go too much more than 310 pixels wide.

Remember that all images should be the same size within a version of a plugin, and they should match the dimensions of the cardback.jpg file. If you have landscape images, they should be their height should be the same as the width of the others, and width should be the same as the height of the others. If you include a card image that is twice the size of the dimensions of the cardback.jpg, that card will appear twice as large on the table, so be careful.

I think cropping out the border of a card if that border is black or otherwise plain is a good idea, especially for the medium version of the plugin. Removing the border allows you to have the other parts larger, and this can make the cards much more readable.

As far as storing the plugins online, it is recommended that you have all files that are used by all versions of the plugin in the root folder online, and all files used specifically for the different versions should be in folders in the root folder labeled medium, high, and so forth. This makes maintaining the plugins easier.
In the medium folder, you would have the medium card images, the medium cardback.jpg and spawned.jpg, the medium updatelist.txt, and the new file version.txt. The high folder should mirror the medium folder, except it would link to different files.
The plugininfo.txt and formats.txt and card data files should be in the root folder.

[deadgames]

Great, thanks for the suggestions. 200 for medium and 300 for high seems like a good rule of thumb.