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!
