The Future of MTG Player

It’s been over 2 weeks since the last update to MTG Player. I’ve had multiple people asking when the next update was going to be out.  Unfortunately, I can’t give a hard date. This is a project I’ve been working on by myself in my spare time. This means that anytime something comes up to distract me MTG Player suffers. For the last few weeks I’ve had major distractions in the form of Dragon Age: Origins and now Assassin’s Creed 2.

There are still tons of features I intend to add. Unfortunately, the project has gotten large enough that I can’t handle it alone anymore. To keep progress moving even when I have a new game to play, I’m going to open source everything. My hope is that by doing this I’ll be able to find some talented developers to help out. I expect to have this available within the week. I’ll make a posting here when it’s live.

If there are any talented developers who want to get involved, please contact me at andrew@andrewfaust.com. Currently everything is written in C# using .Net 3.5. The UI is entirely built in WPF and the network communications are WCF.

The features that I want to add and could use  help with are:

• A Game Lobby – Provide a dedicated server for people to find other players and launch games.
• Multi-Game Matches – Allow stuff like “Best 2 out of 3” matches. Will need to have some way to uniquely identify decks so there can’t be any illegal swapping between games.
• Sideboard Support – Needed for the Multi-Game matches and tournaments.
• Booster draft matches
• Deck legality validation – Ensure decks comply with rules for the various formats (Vintage, Extended, Standard, etc.)
• Enhanced searching capabilities in MTG Manager
• Support for all common deck formats – Apprentice, MWS, etc.
• UI Enhancements to both Manager and Player
  • Draw lines between cards to show target
  • Visibly marking cards
  • Configuring custom colors
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Etc.