Suggestions/Questions/Improvements

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>From "Inventory by Default":

>>What I'm proposing is being able to choose my own set of "safe defaults" as
>>a starting
>>point for each game, because some of those in the defaults now are
>>currently "junk" to me, and not having Rarity in the defaults is a puzzling
>>omission (okay, I'm talking the Inventory
>>system, but that's my current focus, and building decks for all my games is
>>a pipe dream anyway )))

>Understood. It's been added to the todo list.

>As for the Rarity being omitted, the rarity is not a core tag group that is
>required for every game. CV can only assume that the core tag groups exist,
>since a given author might choose to omit a given group or include it with
>a different name. So the default View is built only out of core groups that
>are guaranteed to exist in every set of data files. This is one of those
>little niggly details that impacts a generic product that has to adapt to
>every game system

But when NEITHER CARD NUMBER NOR RARITY is included in the inventory screen by default but ARTWORK is, it just seems ridiculous to me. Most of the games supported don't have artwork in the datafiles, if on the cards themselves (and that's putting aside the CMGs -- that are continuing to increase in number) Meanwhile, a preponderance of at least new games and older ones alike have collector numbers on them, not to mention rarity that is what makes then COLLECTIBLE Card Games to begin with. If some games don't have rarity, and I know at least several old ones don't have card number, I guess its understandable, But I myself see no value at all in listing the artist in datafiles at all. Now I'm sure there are others that do see value in an artist/artwork tag group, but I certainly see no reason why artist is listed by default when it has to a little( if at all) used tag group.

In my opinion, the default inv view should be as follows: Card Name, Set/Release/etc., Card Number, rarity, format, owned, target, excess, acquire, quality, sell $, buy $. It seems to me this or a similar set of defaults would provide the most value over all the game systems...


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And by the way, why not wait to add the buy $ and sell $ for when support for them is added? And does this mean you are just going to have a high and low price? And will the quality tag have an effect on the price tag? This could be terribly helpful, but it would have to see "unknown" as perfect condition for those that go by price no matter the quality.


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About suitcase, its important to note that I highly prefer your way of updating, of filtering for specific cards, etc. it's just the I don't know "style" of the suitcase interface and the way it handles inv, deckbuilding, filetypes, etc. What I mean by liking how suitcase does filetypes is that they are all easily interchangeable, movable,etc. For instance one guy was asking about moving inv on floppy from one PC to another. This is easily done with magic suitcase. It's just as simple as right-clicking the inv file as selecting send to floppy. I'm not sure why CV does things in a more complicated manner, so...why?


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While we're on the subject of suitcase, could you or the Magic datafile guy make a converter to turn suitcase decks into CV decks and vice versa? Also, a way to import a magic inv from suitcase, and export back out to suitcase would be extremely helpful.


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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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[rob]

At 07:30 PM 5/2/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>But when NEITHER CARD NUMBER NOR RARITY is included in the inventory
>screen by default but ARTWORK is, it just seems ridiculous to me.

See my reply to Bob's post on this topic....

>And by the way, why not wait to add the buy $ and sell $ for when support
>for them is added? And does this mean you are just going to have a high
>and low price? And will the quality tag have an effect on the price tag?
>This could be terribly helpful, but it would have to see "unknown" as
>perfect condition for those that go by price no matter the quality.

Why add pricing now? Because some folks are actually using that stuff right
now. Others are waiting until automated price downloads become available,
but not everyone.

As for the pricing model used, there are a number of different methods
employed by different pricing sources. There is no "standard". So the plan
is to have CV default to some reasonable behavior for now. Once pricing
data becomes more widely available, then we'll need to allow CV to be
configured in its behavior.

>About suitcase, its important to note that I highly prefer your way of
>updating, of filtering for specific cards, etc. it's just the I don't know
>"style" of the suitcase interface and the way it handles inv,
>deckbuilding, filetypes, etc. What I mean by liking how suitcase does
>filetypes is that they are all easily interchangeable, movable,etc. For
>instance one guy was asking about moving inv on floppy from one PC to
>another. This is easily done with magic suitcase. It's just as simple as
>right-clicking the inv file as selecting send to floppy. I'm not sure why
>CV does things in a more complicated manner, so...why?

For the average PC user, the notion of a right-click menu is obscure and
confusing. Folks look to the menubar at the top. So that's where the
functionality is placed within CV. There are precious few things that CV
does via right-click menus that aren't replicated under the main menubar,
and that's for a reason. :-) The right-click menu may be quicker for those
who are familiar with it, but for those who are not, it's bad news. You may
find the right-click approach to be preferable, but a large percentage of
PC users will find it an objectionable method. For the average user, the
Suitcase right-click method is more complicated and less obvious.

CV isn't designed for the technophiles out there. It's designed for maximum
usability by the largest possible audience. As we've discussed previously
with respect to the filter mechanism, sometimes that ends up with a
solution that is less optimized for the technophile. It's a nasty tradeoff
that has to be made within any software product. It's an unfortunate
reality in which it's impossible to please everyone.

Suitcase's notion of a deck being a database in the same way as the
inventory is an interesting model. However, I found it to be lacking in a
variety of ways. The most important issue is one of performance, wherein
the Suitcase model is horribly slow and limiting by comparison to the CV
architecture. Much of the "cool" functionality of CV that you really like
is made possible by abandoning the traditional database model utilized by
Suitcase and adopting a totally different architectural approach to the
problem space. If you tried to implement some of CV's functionality within
Suitcase, performance would grind to a crawl and be unusable.

As I've mentioned previously, I don't believe that CV is in any way "more
complicated" than Suitcase. Quite the contrary for someone who has never
used either tool. It can be strongly argued that CV is much more "obvious"
and intuitive to a new user when compared to Suitcase. However, for someone
used to how Suitcase operates, CV is "different". And different is often
viewed in a negative light, even if it's an improvement.

>While we're on the subject of suitcase, could you or the Magic datafile
>guy make a converter to turn suitcase decks into CV decks and vice versa?
>Also, a way to import a magic inv from suitcase, and export back out to
>suitcase would be extremely helpful.

We should have a tool in place soon to convert a Suitcase database into a
CV inventory XML file that can be readily imported. Colen is working on
that. There are no immediate plans to implement deck converters or to
output CV inventory files in Suitcase format. All are quite doable, but
we're going to focus our efforts first on adding some of the new
functionality you and others have been clamoring for. :-)

Thanks, Rob

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rob Bowes (rob@wolflair.com) (559) 658-6995
Lone Wolf Development www.wolflair.com


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