Open Source

Let me start by introducing myself, my name is Hannes Foulds and I am a professional .NET developer from South Africa with quite a bit of experience, and a lot of passion for creating software.

Poor Rodney has been extremely busy lately, you know saving the galaxy and all that, and did not really have much time to spend on the Stargate TCG. Consequently he asked me to step in and help out where I can.

As with everything coming under new management there will be some changes around here. The first important change being that the source code for Wormhole X-Treme will now be open source.

I decided to host the code at CodePlex which will give me a nice Team Foundation Server source control environment. The project can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/wormhole

You will notice that the CodePlex site is a bit sparse at this point and I also have not checked in all the code yet. Please bear with me for a while to get everything setup, but remember that this blog will always be your first stop for finding out about new releases and read news of the ongoing development.

Drop me a comment below and tell me if you are still interested in this project!

A little Stargate

Firstly I would like to sincerely thank you for visiting my blog and taking an interest in how things are progressing.

Today you can download another preview to see what has been keeping me busy. In this preview you will see that I am another small step closer towards a fully playable game.

• Game Preview
• Microsoft .NET 3.5

When first launching the game you will see that the user input dialog (the gray box on the bottom right) ask you whether or not you want to be dealt a new hand, after selecting your option you are given your power for the turn, and cards that can be assigned or played from the hand are highlighted with a green border. Also when you play a card form your hand the player power is automatically decreased. Another thing you will see is that when you assign a character to the mission the points the card adds to the mission are automatically shown.

Here are some of the things I will be working on next.

1. Resolve a mission and allow a team member to earn glyphs.
2. Stop/Block cards and show the appropriate icon in the user interface.
3. Show the failed missions for the turn and allow the player to select the order in which to put them back in the mission pile.
4. Allow the dynamic display (on the cards) of card cost and skills as some card effects will change these during play.

After getting the above tasks out of the way I feel it is really important to start focusing on getting the two player element of the game going. To make life much easier I decided that I will use an IRC server as the game server for online play. What this means is that you will be able to play a game across the internet with anybody via IRC, and if one IRC server is down you can just choose another - for LAN only games you can always just run a local IRC server.

Anyway, thanks again for dropping by, and please keep visiting and commenting, it helps to keep me motivated to continue development ;-)

Jack O'Neill Starter Deck

In today’s preview download you will see that this application is starting to look much more like a playable game. I have added all the cards from the Jack O'Neill Starter Deck and you will notice that the team characters appear where they should when you launch the game.

You can try out the following actions:

• When you click on the mission pile a mission is played.
• When you click on the deck icon a card is drawn and placed in your hand.
• When you double click on a card in your hand it goes to the support card area.
• When you double click on an event in your hand it goes to the event area and then disappears after a couple of seconds.

When implementing online trading card games there are two things which I really see as the holy grail, they are automatic rules enforcement by the game engine and a good AI player. Right now I have a pretty clear vision in my head of how to enforce rules in a very efficient manner and want to tackle that task next.


To make development and testing easier I am only going to allow for single player solitaire games in which the player are given an unlimited amount of power (playing as the hero player) and will be allowed to play obstacles and adversaries against himself. Once I get all the rules going for the starter deck cards I will add the user interface elements for the villain player, and get the network communication going to allow for two player games.

Thank you for the interest you have shown, and please stay tuned to see some rules enforcement soon!

• Free Stargate Trading Card Game - Preview
• Microsoft .NET 3.5

Some Feedback

To date this project has not generated a huge amount of interest, and I suspect that it is because the Stargate TCG is not as well knows as something like Magic The Gathering, and therefore it does not have such a huge fan base. It is however a great game and it is very easy to pick up. The easiest way to learn it is to download the game client from Sony and play the tutorial.

• SOE Game Client
• Stargate Rule Book

As can be seen from the comments below it would appear that the Stargate TCG community is just not ready for a free game client yet.

EliteAnubisGuard - Thu Apr 03, 2008

Interesting notion. I think it'd be really handy. Especially when the game goes down which given SOE/CI's concern for the game seems to be the direction they're heading.

But until then I have concerns for you. I just don't wanna see you're ass getting sued.

DustMan - Thu Apr 03, 2008

I agree with EAG; you are treading on dangerous ground here.

It's one thing to play with programming a version of the game, and even getting your friends on board to play it toegther. It's a whole 'nother thing to promote and release a product designed to replace Sony's program. MTG can afford to allow these projects because they have such a large player base that leeching a few off doesn't really hurt WotC. Stargate TCG, though, is struggling, and can't afford to allow a competing product to steal customers.

I would suggest that, for now, you don't release anything online. Continue working on it, though, and if SOE's servers ever get shut down, wait a bit and then release it. The legal threat is decreased much more if Sony isn't actively losing money from your project. There is still a risk, though, so be careful.

(Also, copying Sony's layout actually makes it worse. At least make it visually different than Sony's rather than aping what came before).

The “Sony will sue your pants off for this” argument is not really news to me, in the TCG scene we have seen many MTG projects receiving cease and desist letters, and once my efforts produce a playable game I expect nothing less from Sony Online Entertainment. The fact that the Stargate TCG is struggling is also not surprising to me (despite the fact that it is a great game). I did a very quick “I am feeling lucky” search and sentiments like these help explain the situation:

DrNate: ...Hm. Looks pretty Star Trek CCG-ish. Still, if I had a job, I might try it out (Teal'c starter!) but random product is not my friend...

suedenim: What are the prices of the virtual cards? If they're at a significant discount from the "real" ones, I might give it a spin....

Mr. Sanity: Sadly, it's 100% MSRP. That's what keeps me from buying in. I did that for a couple years with Magic Online, but there could at least justify it with the *huge* user base. A number of other non-mainstream CCG/CMG games at least had the decency to have a lower price as a lower barrier to entry for folks.
<rant>
For these Worlds Apart/Decipher/Sony games, their new MSRP pricing has pushed me out of the buying pool. It's kind of a chicken & egg problem from what I can see. They ask a premium price, but don't have the opponent userbase to justify it. I mean, why plunk down $50 to play the same 6-10 people day after day? When I play a CCG, my goal is to face novel decks & challenges, not to face Bob's Favorite Deck 1.02 for the third time in a night.
</rant>

Finally for “aping what came before” I am guilty as charged. My mission here is to get a playable user interface completed as soon as possible so I can start on the real interesting stuff namely rules enforcement.

If you have a radically cool idea for the user interface please let me know, in the mean time I will not be deterred and will cary on with development ;-)

Invitation

Just to prove that my little project is producing some worthwhile artifacts I would like to invite you to download a little peak at the story so far. Since the game client utilize all the new stuff from the Microsoft .NET framework you will also need the .NET 3.5 Runtime if you do not have it already.


You will notice that this FREE Stargate Online TCG client looks strikingly similar to what Sony have on offer with only a few subtle changes to make it look just a little bit better, please let me know your thoughts on how to improve it even more!

As mentioned before I chose to implement the user interface with Windows Presentation Foundation and really think that this was a good choice for this kind of application – the alpha blending and gradients are such a big help when trying to create “attractive and effective” user interfaces.

I also found Microsoft Expression Blend to be a great supplement for Visual Studio 2008 and use it to visually prototype my controls before coding them in VS 2008. If you are interested in getting started with WPF check out this nice little tutorial on how to create a glass button, I am sure that it will open your eyes to the possibilities XAML have!

So far I am also very pleased with the application architecture that is evolving: There are currently two distinct parts namely the user interface and the game engine. The game engine only know about the game and objects in the game but does not have a clue on how to render this, while the user interface obviously knows how to show pretty things and render information from the game engine. To ensure that the UI component is aware of any game state changes that should be displayed the engine objects raises many events that can be caught by the UI. Because of this model and the designed separation it will be quite possible to implement alternative user interfaces using the same underlying game engine. But let’s get back to the downloadable demo for a moment...

Since the first playable release will required rules enforcement by hand you will see that right click and left click actions have been implemented for you to set values on the interface, go ahead and give it a try, these are the areas of interest:

• Player Picture
• Player Score
• Power Line
• Assigned Number (centre screen)

Next on my agenda is to implement a small card library and allow a card to be placed in your hand when you click on your card library icon on the left of the screen. Anyway, thanks for reading and visiting, and please keep in touch and post a comment!

• Free Stargate Trading Card Game - Preview
• Microsoft .NET 3.5

Welcome

Welcome to my blog and thank you for visiting. Let me start of by introducing myself and tell you a little about what is in store for you in the future:

My name is Dr. Meredith Rodney McKay (you may call me Dr. McKay) and I am from the Stargate Universe. A little known fact about me is that I really enjoy Trading Card Games (TCG) and specifically their online variants like Magic The Gathering Online. I am sure that you can imagine my excitement when I discovered the Stargate Online Trading Card Game. The Stagate TCG is fairly new and currently there are only two sets available namely the SG-1 and System Lords set. The game is however a lot of fun and the promise of future sets is very exciting.

The reason I have such a liking to online play of TCG is that in this medium it is much easier to find an opponent to battle with regardless of the time of day, the downside is however that these games are very expensive to play since the virtual cards are just as expensive as the physical cardboard. I almost ruined myself financially a couple of times with MTGO and was very interested when I found MTG Forge which allows you to play with a lot of cards against an computer AI without buying the cards you play with.

There are however quite a few problems with MTG Forge in my opinion: Firstly the game has a truly terrible Java user interface, secondly Magic The Gathering has a huge number of card sets and therefore a great many cards which means that MTG Forge only implement a small fraction of cards available, thirdly it only supports single player games, and lastly, I examined the Java source code (even got it running under the Microsoft .NET Framework with the aid of J#) and found that the game has a horrific implementation with many architectural weaknesses.

My intent is to provide Stargate TCG players with a free client that will support all card sets and allow for two player games. I’ve started with the client already and implemented the Windows Presentation Foundation control to layout cards in your hand. I will continue on the user interface until all the elements are implemented and will then provide a game client with no rules enforcement. Eventually rules enforcement will be implemented, but I feel that the sooner we can get a working free client, the sooner we can start playing free games!