Suggestions/Ideas/problems?

I just got your product and I would like to say excellent job...

And of course everyone has an suggestion to make your product
better...

1. Card/Figure Images.
I know that this would make the distribution just HUGE, but as a
retailer I have a complete image library of all our cards. Maybe just
a image field so the end user can define where the image is... ie
c:\pictures\lotr\elf\001.jpg...

2. Resizable screens.
I noticed that you can't MAX/MIN the inventory screen... That would
be nice. :-)

3. Importing of current inventory files (Excel, Access, etc)
I haven't found a way to import my existing inventory in to card
vault. This is VERY important to me as I have thousands of cards in
my inventory... So if I over looked it, please let me know...

4. Authoring Kit.
When is your Authoring kit going to be available? I'm pretty eager to
get my hands on it.

5. Your card numbers aren't based on 3 card numbers, so when you
order by card number you get...

1
10
100
101
102
103 ...

6. The batch edit for Sell price and Buy price don't work...

7. Could you please add some keyboard functionallity? i.e. Hitting
return takes you to the next field (in inventory manager)

8. Multi-inventory options?

9. Import to Excel by Exporting XML give an error about extra
charactors for LOTR.

You have a great product here, I just hope that you can keep up with
the public/retailer demand...

One more thing, when is your website going to show some thing other
then "under construction" for most of the features?

Thanks,

--Trader Jim


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On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, traderjim42 wrote:
> I just got your product and I would like to say excellent job...
>
> And of course everyone has an suggestion to make your product
> better...
>
> 1. Card/Figure Images.
> I know that this would make the distribution just HUGE, but as a
> retailer I have a complete image library of all our cards. Maybe just
> a image field so the end user can define where the image is... ie
> c:\pictures\lotr\elf\001.jpg...

There is support within the data files to carry along a URL which could
point to the card/figure image. The trick though, is to find someone
willing to actually serve up all those images over the 'net, and not all
companies will make those cards avialable. Decipher's the only company I
know of off hand that has really made sure all their cards have digital
images available, but of course you may never know when they'll decide to
rearrange their website and break those URLs.

There's also the question of copyright and trademark on that data; One of
the reasons CardVault doesn't ship with the text of any cards is because
there'd be a legal issue with the "sale of copyrighted material". This is
(barely) skirted by having the card data downloadable for free, but
there's still the theoretical possibility that the person responsible for
making a system's card data available could be acted upon by the original
copyright holders. If you add complete card images to this mix, you end
up even worse off legally.

...Paul

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--- "...Paul" <cleggp@megadodo.com> wrote:
> There's also the question of copyright and trademark on that data;

A number of the companies have supplied Rob and others (including me) with data
for creating the data files, but not all of them. It does make the legal
situation a bit easier to deal with when the companies are *helping* you since
they realize the value of an application like Card Vault.


=====
---

Kuni Tetsu
Clan War rules guy
Moderator of ClanWar-l

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--- traderjim42 <traderjim@prhobbies.com> wrote:
> 3. Importing of current inventory files (Excel, Access, etc)
> I haven't found a way to import my existing inventory in to card
> vault. This is VERY important to me as I have thousands of cards in
> my inventory... So if I over looked it, please let me know...

How exactly would anyone do this?

I suppose you could generate a tab delimited file of card names and numbers,

...but how would you denote sets for cards that appeared in multiple sets? Add
codes that the CV data file can understand to the output?

Batch Edit lets you input the "bulk" card numbers (for common cards, etc) to
help you with just this problem. It will still leave you with the rares to
worry about, but at least you can just enter "10 of all common cards" and make
your life that much easier.

> 4. Authoring Kit.
> When is your Authoring kit going to be available? I'm pretty eager to
> get my hands on it.

It should hopefully be out soon. I suspect (having worked with the beta) that
the documentation is turning out to be a bigger job than Rob expected

> 5. Your card numbers aren't based on 3 card numbers, so when you
> order by card number you get...

That may be the fault of the data file author... but I am not certain. Can you
tell me what data set you are specifically talking about?

> 6. The batch edit for Sell price and Buy price don't work...

Can you be more specific on what your tried, and *how* it did not work? It is a
lot easier to either (a) help you if you are making a mistake, or (b) recreate
the problem so that Rob can find out why it is occuring and fix it.

> 7. Could you please add some keyboard functionallity? i.e. Hitting
> return takes you to the next field (in inventory manager)

Join the club! I have been complaining about this one for a while now

> 8. Multi-inventory options?

>From what I understand, it is on the way.

> 9. Import to Excel by Exporting XML give an error about extra
> charactors for LOTR.

Can you be more specific? Exactly what error message occurs?

> One more thing, when is your website going to show some thing other
> then "under construction" for most of the features?

Make up your mind! Do you want multiple inventories and an authoring kit, or do
you want the web page updated? Rob only has so many hours in the day!

Next you will be asking for professional *and* affordable child-care!


=====
---

Kuni Tetsu
Clan War rules guy
Moderator of ClanWar-l

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3. Just allow importing of CVS, There are just some things that have
to remain consistent. Names of cards, Cards released from what set,
Card #... Hell, even if Card Vault would give me a worksheet to fill
in and then allow that to be reintergrated (imported) back in to the
system that would be fine. :-)

5. Lord of the Rings

6. Its pretty basic. On the left you select the cards that you want
to update then on the right you check what attribute you want to
change. In my case it was Sell Price. Fill in the value and then
click OK, Card Vault warns you about overwritting mass data click ok
to that then "POOF!" nothing happens... :-(

9. I found the problem. Several of the LOTR cards have special
charactors in their names. Excel doesn't know what to do with those,
if you change them out in the raw XML then it imports just fine.

10. HAHA... I feel bad that Rob is working on all this alone. Sorry
to lay all this on you Rob, but I want this product to succeed
because it 1. keeps me from having to maintain this stupid MS DB file
and 2. gets rid of all my Excel sheets.

And hell if Rob can give me professional *and* affordable child-care,
God bless him... :-)

--Trader Jim

--- In cardvault@y..., Kuni Tetsu <kuni_tetsu@y...> wrote:
>
> --- traderjim42 <traderjim@p...> wrote:
> > 3. Importing of current inventory files (Excel, Access, etc)
> > I haven't found a way to import my existing inventory in to card
> > vault. This is VERY important to me as I have thousands of cards
in
> > my inventory... So if I over looked it, please let me know...
>
> How exactly would anyone do this?
>
> I suppose you could generate a tab delimited file of card names and
numbers,
>
> ...but how would you denote sets for cards that appeared in
multiple sets? Add
> codes that the CV data file can understand to the output?
>
> Batch Edit lets you input the "bulk" card numbers (for common
cards, etc) to
> help you with just this problem. It will still leave you with the
rares to
> worry about, but at least you can just enter "10 of all common
cards" and make
> your life that much easier.
>
> > 4. Authoring Kit.
> > When is your Authoring kit going to be available? I'm pretty
eager to
> > get my hands on it.
>
> It should hopefully be out soon. I suspect (having worked with the
beta) that
> the documentation is turning out to be a bigger job than Rob
expected
>
> > 5. Your card numbers aren't based on 3 card numbers, so when you
> > order by card number you get...
>
> That may be the fault of the data file author... but I am not
certain. Can you
> tell me what data set you are specifically talking about?
>
> > 6. The batch edit for Sell price and Buy price don't work...
>
> Can you be more specific on what your tried, and *how* it did not
work? It is a
> lot easier to either (a) help you if you are making a mistake, or
(b) recreate
> the problem so that Rob can find out why it is occuring and fix it.
>
> > 7. Could you please add some keyboard functionallity? i.e.
Hitting
> > return takes you to the next field (in inventory manager)
>
> Join the club! I have been complaining about this one for a while
now
>
> > 8. Multi-inventory options?
>
> From what I understand, it is on the way.
>
> > 9. Import to Excel by Exporting XML give an error about extra
> > charactors for LOTR.
>
> Can you be more specific? Exactly what error message occurs?
>
> > One more thing, when is your website going to show some thing
other
> > then "under construction" for most of the features?
>
> Make up your mind! Do you want multiple inventories and an
authoring kit, or do
> you want the web page updated? Rob only has so many hours in the
day!
>
> Next you will be asking for professional *and* affordable child-
care!
>
>
> =====
> ---
>
> Kuni Tetsu
> Clan War rules guy
> Moderator of ClanWar-l
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
> http://sbc.yahoo.com


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[rob]

I think I just replied to this message as a support email a few minutes
ago. But I'll address all the questions again here, since there are likely
others wondering the same things. Answers interspersed below...

At 07:39 PM 9/30/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>1. Card/Figure Images.
>I know that this would make the distribution just HUGE, but as a
>retailer I have a complete image library of all our cards. Maybe just
>a image field so the end user can define where the image is... ie
>c:\pictures\lotr\elf\001.jpg...

Provisions for this have been designed into the product. But the V1.0
release did not expose any of it for a number of reasons. Our hope is to
have this capability included in a future update to the product.

>2. Resizable screens.
>I noticed that you can't MAX/MIN the inventory screen... That would
>be nice. :-)

This is a priority item on the todo list.

>3. Importing of current inventory files (Excel, Access, etc)
>I haven't found a way to import my existing inventory in to card
>vault. This is VERY important to me as I have thousands of cards in
>my inventory... So if I over looked it, please let me know...

You CAN import inventory into Card Vault via XML. I need to get the
documentation on this written up and posted (hopefully next week). For a
start, export your complete inventory to XML and take a look at the file
generated. You can import your inventory into CV using a file of the exact
same format. I know that Excel provides some support for XML, and I think
Access does as well. We tried to keep the XML format simple enough that
other tools can readily generate data that can be imported into CV.

>4. Authoring Kit.
>When is your Authoring kit going to be available? I'm pretty eager to
>get my hands on it.

I just finished writing it earlier today. I still need to tweak the
CVExport tool (that generates import files). I hope to release it tonight -
tomorrow at the latest.

>5. Your card numbers aren't based on 3 card numbers, so when you
>order by card number you get...
>
>1
>10
>100
>101
>102
>103 ...

This is something specific to the data files. The author of the files will
need to regenerate the files using leading zeroes for the card numbers.
It's not a difficult thing to do, so please identify which game systems
this is occurring with and notify the authors of those game systems so the
correction can be made.

>6. The batch edit for Sell price and Buy price don't work...

It all works fine for me. Most likely, you are updating a DIFFERENT card
quality within Batch Editing vis-a-vis the quality that you are displaying
within the inventory window. Click on the little triangle button next to
the Quality display within Inventory and select "Show Quality Ratings". You
ought to see the price listed for the quality that you specified it for.
Within Batch Editing, you can use the droplist to specify which card
quality to you want to set the value for. The default quality is specified
via the Settings button within Inventory.

>7. Could you please add some keyboard functionallity? i.e. Hitting
>return takes you to the next field (in inventory manager)

Lots of folks have asked for this. It's a lot of work, so it didn't make it
into V1.0. It's on the todo list and is competing against all the other
things on the todo list (trust me, it's HUGE) for what gets included in the
next update. :-)

>8. Multi-inventory options?

This was a complete oversight that nobody thought of until the week before
we went to production. It's definitely a priority for the next update.

>9. Import to Excel by Exporting XML give an error about extra
>charactors for LOTR.

Which characters yield the problem? Any help in narrowing down this issue
would be most appreciated.

>You have a great product here, I just hope that you can keep up with
>the public/retailer demand...

That makes two of us. :-)

>One more thing, when is your website going to show some thing other
>then "under construction" for most of the features?

When I get them implemented. :-P There's unfortunately only one of me to do
everything technical (plus a lot of the non-technical stuff) around here.
So I'm juggling everything as best I can. Once the Authoring Kit is
released, I'll be focusing back on the website and data files.

Thanks, Rob

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


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[rob]

Actually, your assertions are only partially correct. Allow me to clarify....

1. One of the reasons Card Vault doesn't ship with the data files IS the
legal issue. However, just about all of the CCG publishers have given us
full permission and support for doing CV data files. So it's not a question
of whether we can get permission. It's a question of how complex all the
licensing becomes. If all the data files are separate from the product as a
FREE download, then the licensing agreements become INFINITELY simpler
because there's no money changing hands. Since any data files included with
the product will be out-of-date in a matter of months, and since including
those data files adds significant complexity for no real value, we opted to
keep the data files separate and make life easier for everyone. :-)

2. You claim that the free downloads barely skirt the issue of copyright.
If a CCG publisher protests the use of Card Vault with its games (none have
done so), then this is somewhat correct. However, if that same publisher
places complete spoiler data on its website, and if the CV data files
simply take that same data and reformat it, the publisher has incredibly
weak (if any) claims against the author of the data files. And if the
author of the data files isn't making any money from them, the most that
the CCG publisher could do is secure a Cease & Desist order that requires
the author to withdraw the files. But we don't want even that to happen, so
we've been actively securing the full support from virtually all of the CCG
publishers. :-)

3. One of the major factors with the card artwork is the legal issue. For
many CCG publishers, they don't actually OWN the artwork - the artists do.
Therefore, the publisher can't even post the artwork on its website without
paying the artist extra money. There is also the huge bandwidth
requirements to be able to serve all the card images from a webserver, and
that's a cost with minimal (if any) actual return for the publisher, so
there's little motivation to pay extra money to the artists for the
privelege of losing additional money on the web hosting costs.

4. The sheer size increase associated with adding card images to the data
files for Card Vault is prohibitive. So there are NO plans to provide that
within CV. Instead, the architecture allows for the artwork to be served
from sources where the artwork IS reliably available. As you pointed out,
there are few who do this and they can easily change the locations of the
images, thereby invalidating any links within the CV data files. So we're
trying to work out those issues with the publishers and achieve a mutually
beneficial arrangement before exposing the functionality within Card Vault.
It doesn't do anyone any good to have the functionality in the product and
have it be largely useless to the end-user. We're going to do it right or
not do it at all.

Hope this helps to clarify things a bit....

Thanks, Rob

At 01:43 PM 9/30/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>There's also the question of copyright and trademark on that data; One of
>the reasons CardVault doesn't ship with the text of any cards is because
>there'd be a legal issue with the "sale of copyrighted material". This is
>(barely) skirted by having the card data downloadable for free, but
>there's still the theoretical possibility that the person responsible for
>making a system's card data available could be acted upon by the original
>copyright holders. If you add complete card images to this mix, you end
>up even worse off legally.


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


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[rob]

At 03:11 PM 10/1/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>3. Just allow importing of CVS, There are just some things that have
>to remain consistent. Names of cards, Cards released from what set,
>Card #... Hell, even if Card Vault would give me a worksheet to fill
>in and then allow that to be reintergrated (imported) back in to the
>system that would be fine. :-)

You almost have that already. The XML inventory format allows full
importing, so using that file format should give you exactly what you want.
Unfortunately, I still have to document it properly, but there just aren't
enough hours in the day to get everything done (or even get HALF of them
done, it seems). :-(

>9. I found the problem. Several of the LOTR cards have special
>charactors in their names. Excel doesn't know what to do with those,
>if you change them out in the raw XML then it imports just fine.

What are the special characters that Excel barfs on? It may be that
something can be done to handle those characters differently when exporting
the XML data, so any assistance with this would be welcome.

>10. HAHA... I feel bad that Rob is working on all this alone. Sorry
>to lay all this on you Rob, but I want this product to succeed
>because it 1. keeps me from having to maintain this stupid MS DB file
>and 2. gets rid of all my Excel sheets.

I'm not entirely alone. I've got folks like Bob (Kuni Tetsu) slaving away
on data files for various games to help out. Which is MUCH appreciated. But
all the documentation, website, code, etc. all comes down to me. All I can
say is that I'm exhausted and VERY happy that I'll actually have help
coming on board later this month. Now I just have to find the time to get
him ramped up so that he can help out extensively. :-)

>And hell if Rob can give me professional *and* affordable child-care,
>God bless him... :-)

Uh, yeah. Just put that one on the todo list. I'll see if I can get to that
one as soon as I have world peace and world hunger handled.... :-P

Thanks, Rob

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


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Names like...

Úlairë Attëa, Keeper of Dol Guldur
Úlairë Cantëa, Lieutenant of Dol Guldur
Úlairë Enquëa, Lieutenant of Morgul
Úlairë Lemenya, Lieutenant of Morgul
Úlairë Nelya, Lieutenant of Morgul
Úlairë Nertëa, Messenger of Dol Guldur
Úlairë Ostëa, Lieutenant of Morgul
Úlairë Toldëa, Messenger of Morgul

Note the ` above the U and the umlaut's above the E...

That is what's breaking it... I'm going to recreate the data file
with those changes and I'll email it to you...

--Trader Jim

>>9. I found the problem. Several of the LOTR cards have special
>>charactors in their names. Excel doesn't know what to do with those,
>>if you change them out in the raw XML then it imports just fine.
>
>What are the special characters that Excel barfs on? It may be that
>something can be done to handle those characters differently when
>exporting
>the XML data, so any assistance with this would be welcome.



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5. Lord of the Rings is the one that I know about.

6. I got it to work, Thanks! How can I do a mass change to move cards
from "unspecified" to "mint".

Thanks,

--Trader Jim

>5. Your card numbers aren't based on 3 card numbers, so when you
>order by card number you get...
>
>1
>10
>100
>101
>102
>103 ...

>This is something specific to the data files. The author of the
>files will
>need to regenerate the files using leading zeroes for the card
>numbers.
>It's not a difficult thing to do, so please identify which game
>systems
>this is occurring with and notify the authors of those game systems
>so the
>correction can be made.
>
>>6. The batch edit for Sell price and Buy price don't work...
>
>It all works fine for me. Most likely, you are updating a DIFFERENT
>card
>quality within Batch Editing vis-a-vis the quality that you are
>displaying
>within the inventory window. Click on the little triangle button
>next to
>the Quality display within Inventory and select "Show Quality
>Ratings". You ought to see the price listed for the quality that you
>specified it for.
>Within Batch Editing, you can use the droplist to specify which card
>quality to you want to set the value for. The default quality is
>specified via the Settings button within Inventory.


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