Update for opt

nico on 2009-01-24 17:02 EST

Hello to all.

As you can see from the title of this post, there is a new version of the opt client released. If you are interested in playing some games, and testing the program, you can download it here.

The server to log on to for league play is opt.magic-league.com .

A guide for using OPT is in the works and can be found

here.

If you haven't played on the magic-league server, using opt, you will need to create a new user account.You do this by logging in on the magic-league server with the username New (watch the caps) and no password.
When you are logged on to the server, you tyoe in the following command: /reg name password, where name is the desired username and password is the desired password.
If registration was succesfull, the magic-league server will be added to the main menu on the top under server --> main servers --> magic-league server.

If you click that one, you will be connected to the magic-league server.

To make it a bit more interesting I will try to find the time to run some constructed tourneys on OPT in the coming days.

For the sake of completeness, I will paste a list of bugs that have been fixed/options that have been added, as mentioned by jorbes.

If you happen to find new bugs, we are very interested in hearing from you. You can report bugs by making a post in the OPT beta forum, or becom a member of the OPT group on 16bugs.com (registration is needed before you can become the member of the group).

bug list/options added:

- Fixed the ntdll.dll bug that occurs when you want to get an item from a strings object that is empty.
(well, i didn't fix that bug, cause i am not MS, but i made extra checks in the source so it shouldn't happen anymore) This was the bug you probably got when closing the program.

- Portable Networks Graphics FTW! All images are now png. I made this choice after seeing the dramatic improvement in space used for the themes. The default themes were about 9MB in unpacked sized, now they are about 1.8MB
This also meant that the installer file went from 5.67MB to 3.88MB.
You should be able the use the transparent features of png. If this doesn't go the way you want somewhere, please let me know.

- Clients leaving the table... Instead of printing: Player lost, you get a much more usefull description about what happend.
* If a player closed the program -> Player has left the table. (closed the program)
* If a player disconnected (either by force or "isp", there is NO way to tell) -> Player has left the table. (disconnected)
* If a player went back to the lobby -> Player has left the table.
Note how the last one is just the default message.

- Added a button "Performance Test" under Extra. It will ask you for the number of times to draw the table.
About 30 frames per second is enough to play without the program feeling "laggy". On my AMD 1000Mhz cpu it get between 45 and 55 frames per second.

- Fixed the "wrong card" bug. Sometimes a player would play card A and you would see them playing card B.
The cause was... sideboarding :) The deck sync still used the old deck and therefor the sideboarding was never synced.

- Attaching aura's now actually shows them "on" the enchanted card (below them actually)

- In line with the previous bug: Sideboard itself now works better too. You can 1:1 trade with library or just board in/out.
You can also RFG a card to the sideboard, in case you 'wished' for the wrong card by accident and want to undo that.

- Performance bug: There was a flaw in my code that caused the hand backgrounds to update every draw. This caused a framerate of about
7 frames per second. Even now the program was still usable, so that should tell you enough about the desired 30 frames per second.
Obviously, this bug is now fixed.

- Pictures: During draft, you would see quite a lot of cards come by, each needed their own jpg loaded. Internally a jpg is uncompressed, so a 200kb image
becomes a +/- 1MB image, times "quite a lot" is about 90MB of ram in use. This was a problem for some people. Now when a card needs it's background updated
either because it turns facedown/up or resizes, the jpg is loaded from disk again. This causes some delay, but on a very fragmented disk with 1100mhz cpu,
you won't notice it that much. In the future i might implement a cache folder, where the program can store pre-sized bmp versions of the cards. Testing
will have to tell if the way it works now is acceptable to most users. (note that this doens't only apply to draft, that's just where the problem was found)

- Compatibility bug: Players could before set the size of the permanents. This had to go away, because large sized cards on one side, with small sized cards
on the other side (now imagine 6 sides in multiplayer) would cause a very odd display of permanents.
The permanents are now autosized to fit 13 cards from left to right.

- Security Codes: OPT now uses the same sec. codes as MWS

- Server bug: The Teams feature didn't work right, you should now be able to make a team and challenge another team. Teams will be "free'd" upon disconnect.

This is just a small list of "public" bugs. I did find some others in the code that were invisible to the end-user.

From now on, bugs will be gathered on http://opt.16bugs.com , feel free to submit your own (you need to register)

Comments (10)

by whitebread on 2009-01-24 18:49 EST

Yes Opt uses Mws security codes thanks to us :P lol I like Opt alot. Jorbes is doing an amazing job on it so far.

by Socks3 on 2009-01-25 10:49 EST

I find Opt to be nicer than MWS so far - it's easy to do just about everything, it all makes sense.

It just runs at about 2 fps on my hardware :(

by Farseer on 2009-01-25 11:36 EST

Will OPT take over from MWS for ML league play in the near future?

by dragon1299 on 2009-01-25 17:54 EST

Wait, so can people using OPT play against people using MWS?

by Craze on 2009-01-25 20:16 EST

When you start holding OPT trials, I'll start caring...

by ShadowMaster on 2009-01-26 07:17 EST

4GBs DDR3 RAM @ 1066 MHz
Core 2 Duo P7350
GeForce 9700 GTS, 512 MB

It runs at 15 fps, something is wrong.

This is on Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)

by Azania on 2009-01-28 21:57 EST

Not recommended to run on linux under Wine, very low performance (5 fps) takes ages for actions to take place.. (3~5 secs at least in solitaire mode, hate to see this testing on the server, most likely even worse..) As soon as you switch desktop you get access violations for unable to draw the play field. Had to kill the process to shut it down ><..

by HdH_Cthulhu on 2009-01-30 18:58 EST

Yeha opt seems to have really good features, but a very low performence!
It is just a card Game so it dont has to lage...

by Lynolf on 2009-02-01 13:03 EST

by Craze on 2009-01-26 01:16 GMT

"When you start holding OPT trials, I'll start caring..."

LOL I couldn't have said it better. ;)

by oldmac on 2009-02-01 20:14 EST

Hey
since MWS doesnt work on my PC atm for some unknown reason I want to try OPT but when I want to connect to M-L server it says "Socket Error # 10061 Connection refused"
can anybody help me out with the problem since i really wanna play online again

thx