Magic Set Editor 2 Template Creation Tutorial

Transcription

1 Magic Set Editor 2 Template Creation Tutorial Basics Several types of folders, called packages, must be set up correctly to create any template for MSE. (All files related to MSE template creation are in the Magic Set Editor 2/data folder) Each template consists of one folder named [game].mse-game. [game] is the name of the game, for example heroscape.mse-game. This folder contains information that applies to all the different card styles in that game. The template also consists of at least one [game]-[style].mse-style. This folder contains specific information for the style named. Other types of packages can be seen in the data folder, such as.mse-include and.mse-symbol-font. These all do different things to supplement the main mse-game and mse-style packages and are not necessary for a basic template. magic.mse-game is a folder that contains information applying to all Magic cards. The various magic-[style].mse-style folders, such as magic-new-flip.mse-style, contain information on specific styles of Magic cards in this case, a modern flip card. Each mse-game folder contains at minimum a file named game, which contains all the global information for that game. Each mse-style folder contains at minimum a file named style, which contains all the specific information for that style. Usually the mse-style folder also contains images for things like card backs. Syntax game To understand what each of these files contains, we ll go through an existing template. Download the Poker template from It s a fairly simple one, which is why we re using it for this purpose. Open poker.mse-game/game in Notepad. You ll see six lines at the top. These define some properties of the mse-game package and the game itself. mse version is the version of MSE the template was made for. This is checked when the template is run to make sure the user has a compatible version. full name is the full name of the game. If you run MSE, click New Set, and look at the top row of games, the second line of text is the game s full name. Another property that doesn t appear in the Poker template is short name. This is the abbreviated name of the game, the first line of text in the New Set window. installer group is an internal MSE directory where the template s information is stored (can be viewed through File -> Check Updates).

2 icon is the filename of the image (from the base directory of the mse-game folder) that will appear in the New Set window. The image should be in the mse-game directory. position hint will indicate where the game should appear in the New Set window a value of 00 will make the game try to appear first, a value of for example 999 means it will try to appear at the end. version is the date this version of the template was created. This allows MSE to make sure people aren t using a new mse-game package with old styles, or the other way around, possibly causing errors. Next up in the file is a line of # signs, followed by some text. In MSE templating, # is a comment symbol any line that begins with a # will be ignored when running the template. These lines are simply for the programmer s reminders and reference. Between this comment and the next one is the init script of the game package. This is where you put any scripts you use in the game package. Scripts are a bit more in-depth, so we ll go over them later. The final part of the game package is the set and card fields. Open a new set in MSE (any game). Card fields are anything at all that appears on the card graphic text boxes, images, and the card itself. Now click the Set Info tab. Anything that appears in here is a set field. At minimum, one of these fields has a type and a name. type: text name: cardname Indentation is an important aspect of templating ensure that the contents of the init script, card field, and set field areas are tabbed over once. Other fields within those may need to be tabbed further. For reference on what properties can be defined in card and set fields, see this page: Note that such properties as position, color, and font are defined in the style packages. style Now find the folder poker-standard.mse-style. Open the style file in Notepad. It will look very similar to the game file, but there are important differences First, you ll see an extra value at the top of the file game. This tells which game the style is for. It should exactly match the part of the.mse-game file that comes before the.mse-game (the [game] part) and is case-sensitive. You ll also notice, in addition to the version, some depends on statements. These identify packages (and their versions) that the style needs to run correctly. MSE will give an error to the user when they run this style if these packages can t be found. These should list such files as the relevant game package and any symbol fonts needed.

3 The final difference in the header is a set of statements about the card graphic area: card width, card height, and card dpi. These are simply the width and height of the card in pixels, and the resolution in dots-per-inch. Another new addition to the style file is styling fields. If you open a new Poker set in MSE and click on the Style tab at the top, you should see three text boxes. These were defined by the styling fields in the style file. Now for the most important part of the template the card fields. The statement card style says that we re going to start placing the card fields defined in the mse-game package. Each field is listed by its name, followed by a colon. Then (indented) come the properties of the field. These will vary depending on what type the field is, but some basic ones are: left How far from the left side of the card (in pixels) the field is. top How far from the top of the card the field is. width How wide the field is (in pixels) height How tall the field is. z index Fields with higher z indices will appear on top of those with lower ones. More information on these values can be found here: scripts MSE has a lot of cool features for templates, such as wordlists, keywords, and the symbol editor. However, the last point I ll cover in this tutorial is scripts. For information on these other features, see the MSE documentation: Scripts are the most difficult part of MSE to get, so if you have questions, ask on the MSE forum! Basically, a script can be called from any scriptable field. When the script is called, it may take some input variables, and it will return (be equal to) a certain value based on those variables. type: choice name: card type choice: jandar choice: utgar #Choices omitted for clarity default: card_type( card.general_bkgrnd ) show statistics: false

4 The default field here is calling the script card_type, with the parameter card.general_bkgrnd. It will represent whatever card_type returns. (card.fieldname will return the value in the field named fieldname. Replace any spaces in the fieldname with underscores). Let s look at the card_type script itself: card_type := { cardgen := to_lower(remove_tags(input)) if cardgen = "jandar" then "jandar" else if cardgen = "utgar" then "utgar" else if cardgen = "ullar" then "ullar" else if cardgen = "vydar" then "vydar" else if cardgen = "einar" then "einar" else if cardgen = "aquilla" then "aquilla" else "utgar" }@( utgar ) From this script you can see the basic syntax needed for scripts. The name of the script, containing alphanumeric characters and _ only, appears on the first line, along with := {. The script is closed with }. (These curly braces are located below the backspace key, for those who don t know). The first line in the script uses some of MSE s build-in scripts to simplify the input and make it easier to check. to_lower() returns whatever is input into it in lower case. remove_tags() does just what it sounds like it returns the input variable, but without any tags such as <b> or <wordlist>. cardgen is an arbitrarily named variable. The name has no significance. It is used to temporarily store a value. := is the sign used to set a variable equal to something. Therefore, the first line is storing the value of the variable input, set to lowercase and with tags removed, in the variable cardgen. (input is the variable in which the value input into the function is stored) Next, we have a list of IF statements one of the most important concepts in programming. An IF statement checks a condition to see if it is true in this case, it is checking to see if the value in cardgen is equal to jandar. If it is, it will return jandar to wherever the script was called from. If it isn t, it will then check if cardgen is equal to utgar and so on. Finally, if cardgen is equal to none of those things, the script will return utgar. utgar ) sets the default parameters for the function. This means that if the function is called with no parameters (card_type()), the program will automatically make the input parameter utgar. This has little use in this case, but can help simplify things when a script is used often with the same parameters. Let s look at one more example: wordlist := {

5 } input := remove_tag(tag: "<word-list-") input := type_over_type() tag := "word-list-{uselist}" if upper=1 then "<{tag}>{to_upper(input)}</{tag}>" else "<{tag}>{input}</{tag}>" This one uses a feature called wordlists. This feature allows the creation of drop-down menus like the one used for creature type in the Magic templates. Wordlists are added with tags in the text. The function call looks like this: type: text name: general bkgrnd script: wordlist(uselist: "generals", upper: 1, value) editable: false show statistics: false card list allow: false You should quickly notice something different about this one it has a lot more information going into the script. The bits of information that go into a script are called parameters. This one has three. When you are using multiple parameters in a script, they can t all go in the input variable, so you define some other variables to but them in. uselist is going to have the value generals. upper will have the value 1. The third parameter is value (whatever is in the text box). Because we haven t defined a variable for it, it will go in input by default. Now for the script. The first line uses another built-in script this one removes any instances of a specific tag from the input. In this case, we want to remove whatever wordlist tags we had before so they don t keep stacking. The script type_over_type() is also a built-in script. (A list of built-in scripts can be found here: Next, we ll create the tag to add to the field. We add the uselist parameter to some other text to accomplish this (this uses a word list that was already defined before with the name generals. See the docs or look at magic.mse-game/wordlists for more information). Finally, we wrap the tags around the value of the field, making it uppercase if we need to. Whew. But don t fear, ask lots of questions, read the documentation, and you ll be able to bang out the scripts you need in no time. And always consider using existing templates as a framework for your own, especially when you re still learning, so you don t forget anything critical.