CVCache utility & L5R Card Images PLEASE REPLY

There has been no response to my questions...could someone please
pick up the ball?

Thanks,
JJ



From: "Jonathan" <bayushi_hanjo@y...>
Date: Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:02 am
Subject: Re: CVCache utility & L5R Card Images



<snip>


> That being said, if you've got all the images, perhaps you could
help us
> out with getting something made available for download via the
data files. :-)
>
> Thanks, Rob


Ok, so lets assume that i have all the files on my hard drive. What
next?

What format do they need to be in?
How should they be named?
What structure do i need for the folders?
(I'm assuming just a separate folder per expansion set...)
How can I get them to be seen by Cardvault?
Do I need to publish them on a website or what?

Sincerely,

JJ









>
> At 07:51 PM 7/22/2004 +0000, you wrote:
> >Hi Rob,
> >
> >Just checking in... is there any movement forward on L5R Card
> >images? If not, how can i manually map card images which i have
on
> >my own HD to Cardvault?
> >
> >Thanks!
> >
> >Jonathan
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
> Rob Bowes (rob@w...) (650) 588-8252
> Lone Wolf Development
www.wolflair.com




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I think the guys are at one of the Con's that goes on this time of year and that they will get to your questions when they return.

I can tell you that as of right now there is no way for Card Vault to read the picture files that are currently on your hard drive. I believe that they are thinking of coming up with a solution in the next version but I can see where some companies that sell CCG's wouldn't be too thrilled with that. Anyway - as it stands now CV can only pick up images thru CV cache that are already on a game developers site (ie; Decipher or Wizards.) IF you had the pics on a server somewhere that would be different. Then CVcache could go to that server's URL and download the pics for you. As I said, admittedly very badly, right now you can not use CV Cache to read the pics on your own harddrive. Publishing on a website should work. Provided that they were publish singlely and not in a zip file. The legalities of that are pretty questionable. Hope this helps for now till the guys get back.

Jim
LotR datafiles author
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan
To: cardvault@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 11:18 PM
Subject: [CardVault] Re: CVCache utility & L5R Card Images PLEASE REPLY


There has been no response to my questions...could someone please
pick up the ball?

Thanks,
JJ



From: "Jonathan" <bayushi_hanjo@y...>
Date: Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:02 am
Subject: Re: CVCache utility & L5R Card Images



<snip>


> That being said, if you've got all the images, perhaps you could
help us
> out with getting something made available for download via the
data files. :-)
>
> Thanks, Rob


Ok, so lets assume that i have all the files on my hard drive. What
next?

What format do they need to be in?
How should they be named?
What structure do i need for the folders?
(I'm assuming just a separate folder per expansion set...)
How can I get them to be seen by Cardvault?
Do I need to publish them on a website or what?

Sincerely,

JJ









>
> At 07:51 PM 7/22/2004 +0000, you wrote:
> >Hi Rob,
> >
> >Just checking in... is there any movement forward on L5R Card
> >images? If not, how can i manually map card images which i have
on
> >my own HD to Cardvault?
> >
> >Thanks!
> >
> >Jonathan
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
> Rob Bowes (rob@w...) (650) 588-8252
> Lone Wolf Development
www.wolflair.com



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Actually, there probably is a way though it's definately not easy to setup and CVCache would be a *lot* better. Okay, here goes.

Basically, the laptop I have Card Vault on doubles as a web development platform for me. Meaning I use it as a little internal web server. I use it primarily for Magic: The Gathering, but I would surmise that most of the data sets have a similar format.

As a test, I took a full picture of the Ice Age card, Abyssal Specter and placed it in a virtual website. Then I went into the ia.dat file and edited the URL there to point at that file. I was then able to "download" that file, placing it into the cache directory of Card Vault, where such downloaded pictures reside. Thus, it is possible to use pictures on your hard drive, but certainly not easy by any means. Truthfully, you're probably much better off waiting until someone can host them so that you can just use the CVCache program.

If you didn't have apache or some other web serving program installed on your machine (which I wouldn't recommend for just this, you'd leave your machine open to way to much to make it worthwhile) then I have to agree with the statement below. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to get Card Vault to read files on the hard drive directly even if you have them in the appropriate folder in the C:\CardVault\cache directory and know how they should be named.

Just my two cents,
Scott

> From: "Jim Beszhak" <dizpatch@gte.net>
> Date: 2004/08/05 Thu PM 12:55:29 EDT
> To: <cardvault@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: Re: [CardVault] Re: CVCache utility & L5R Card Images PLEASE REPLY
>
> I think the guys are at one of the Con's that goes on this time of year and that they will get to your questions when they return.
>
> I can tell you that as of right now there is no way for Card Vault to read the picture files that are currently on your hard drive. I believe that they are thinking of coming up with a solution in the next version but I can see where some companies that sell CCG's wouldn't be too thrilled with that. Anyway - as it stands now CV can only pick up images thru CV cache that are already on a game developers site (ie; Decipher or Wizards.) IF you had the pics on a server somewhere that would be different. Then CVcache could go to that server's URL and download the pics for you. As I said, admittedly very badly, right now you can not use CV Cache to read the pics on your own harddrive. Publishing on a website should work. Provided that they were publish singlely and not in a zip file. The legalities of that are pretty questionable. Hope this helps for now till the guys get back.
>
> Jim
> LotR datafiles author
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Jonathan
> To: cardvault@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 11:18 PM
> Subject: [CardVault] Re: CVCache utility & L5R Card Images PLEASE REPLY
>
>
> There has been no response to my questions...could someone please
> pick up the ball?
>
> Thanks,
> JJ
>
>
>
> From: "Jonathan" <bayushi_hanjo@y...>
> Date: Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:02 am
> Subject: Re: CVCache utility & L5R Card Images
>
>
>
> <snip>
>
>
> > That being said, if you've got all the images, perhaps you could
> help us
> > out with getting something made available for download via the
> data files. :-)
> >
> > Thanks, Rob
>
>
> Ok, so lets assume that i have all the files on my hard drive. What
> next?
>
> What format do they need to be in?
> How should they be named?
> What structure do i need for the folders?
> (I'm assuming just a separate folder per expansion set...)
> How can I get them to be seen by Cardvault?
> Do I need to publish them on a website or what?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> JJ
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> > At 07:51 PM 7/22/2004 +0000, you wrote:
> > >Hi Rob,
> > >
> > >Just checking in... is there any movement forward on L5R Card
> > >images? If not, how can i manually map card images which i have
> on
> > >my own HD to Cardvault?
> > >
> > >Thanks!
> > >
> > >Jonathan
> >
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
> > Rob Bowes (rob@w...) (650) 588-8252
> > Lone Wolf Development
> www.wolflair.com
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
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> c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
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>
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> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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>
>
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[rob]

So for not getting back to you on this. I completely dropped the ball on
it. There just aren't enough hours in the day right now, and I'm dropping
balls somewhat regularly these days. :-( Thanks for being persistent!!!

Alright, let's dive in to the questions you presented.....

>What format do they need to be in?

Card Vault currently supports TIFF, BMP, and PNG image files the TIFF files
cannot be compressed, though. If I'm forgetting a format, I'm sure Colen
will chime in with it. :-)

>How should they be named?

The image files can be named however you want if you are going to be
hooking them up within the data files manually. However, that would be a
VERY tedious process. For initial testing, manual edits of the data files
(e.g. using CVEdit) is the way to go. But if you intend to do things on a
larger scale, an automated process is needed, which means that names of the
files have to be automatically matched up to the names on the cards.

The images themselves should either be named with the approprate card name
or the card number. Personally, I think the card name is best. The only
caveat to this is that some names will have to be massaged with a standard
set of rules so that you'll have good filenames that are entirely portable.
My recommendation for these naming rules are as follows:
1. Eliminate all spaces and punctuation.
2. Limit the names to only the standard alphanumeric characters
(A-Z,a-z,0-9). Convert all "special" characters to a standard equivalent
(e.g. foreign letters with umlauts (sp?) and the like should be converted
to the "bare" equivalent character).
3. Eliminate case differences, converting all text to upper or lower case
(for portability to hosting on Windows servers).
4. Strip off the leading articles "the", "a", and "an". This is just like a
library does for books in its card catalog.

>What structure do i need for the folders?
>(I'm assuming just a separate folder per expansion set...)

For the long term, I recommend that all of the images for each release be
placed into a separate folder, just as you suggest. The folder should
ideally be named the same as the unique id used within CV for that release.
Then the folder will be easily matched up with the CV release in an
automated tool.

>How can I get them to be seen by Cardvault?

Every card within CV has one or more "artwork" elements. For L5R, there is
always just one. Within the artwork element, you can specify a "url"
attribute, which is a relative URL to where the image file will be found.

The "base" portion of the URL must be specified within the "structure"
element in the definition file. The relative URL is appended to the base
URL to yield the final URL that CV uses to find the image and retrieve it.

>Do I need to publish them on a website or what?

I had originally thought that you would have to post the images on a
website in order to see them. But I just had an idea that MIGHT work.
Please note that I THINK this will work, but I haven't actually tried it.

It is possible to specify a URL that references a file on your local
computer. For example, the URL "file:///c/cardvault/decks/mydeck.htm" would
reference the file "c:\cardvault\decks\mydeck.htm" on your computer. I'm
pretty sure that CV properly handles local file URLs like this for card images.

So let's assume that all of the images exist on your computer beneath the
folder "c:\l5rimages". Within this folder, you'll have a "de" folder for
Diamond Edition, a "woc" folder for Winds of Change, etc. Then within the
"de" folder, you'll have an image named "airdragon.bmp" (plus a bunch of
others). The complete filename for this card would be
"c:\l5rimages\de\airdragon.bmp", which corresponds to a local file URL of
"file:///c/l5rimages/de/airdragon.bmp".

To make all this work within CV, you would specify the base URL shared by
all files as "file:///c/l5rimages/" within the definition file. Then for
the card itself, you would specify a relative URL of "de/airdragon.bmp".
When CV goes to retrieve the image, it should assemble the correct complete
URL and then retrieve the file from your local hard disk.

If you give this a try with a few test images (it shouldn't take much
effort if you have the images), please let me know how this technique
works. We've had a few people asking about hosting image files locally, and
I've always told them that the files have to be on a website. But if my
idea works, images CAN be hosted locally.

Hope this helps,
Rob

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rob Bowes (rob@wolflair.com) (650) 588-8252
Lone Wolf Development www.wolflair.com




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[Colen]

At 03:08 AM 8/6/2004, you wrote:

> >What format do they need to be in?
>
>Card Vault currently supports TIFF, BMP, and PNG image files the TIFF files
>cannot be compressed, though. If I'm forgetting a format, I'm sure Colen
>will chime in with it. :-)

We don't support uncompressed TIFFs, but that shouldn't be a problem, as
you probably want to keep the images under 5mb each.

CV currently supports BMP, PNG and JPG formats for card images.

Hope this helps,


--
Colen McAlister (colen@wolflair.com)
Lone Wolf Development www.wolflair.com




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