The Rat Blog

Sprint 12

I’ve tried to work on a few issues. One of the issues I ran into with trying to fix some of these issues is with disagreeing with the issue. Like this is the issue I tried to work on but stopped since I didn’t think it was an issue that needed solving https://github.com/Cockatrice/Cockatrice/issues/2663. The issue was essentially to add an option to simplify the dialog. So going from “Player 1 puts DireWolf from the graveyard onto the battlefield”, it’ll go “Player 1: DireWolf (Graveyard -> Battlefield)”, which simplifies the log but starting to actually do it, it kind of doesn’t work. Part of it is accessibility, I couldn’t find a way to make this accessible, and Cockatrice is already really unaccessible. The other part is that I felt like it didn’t really simplify the logs while adding a bit of unnecessary complicatedness to the code. Like with the existing code it’s essentially a lot of different if statements to craft the dialog and I ran into issues with converting it being a sentence into a simplified version. Since it kind of had a bit of an issue with converting it cause there’s certain statements that worked in code if it was a statement but not if it’s simplified which meant I would need to change a lot more, and the dialog was already not that simplified. Part of it is that there’s certain details that mattered that can’t be simplified, like “their graveyard” was important since it could be their’s or another player’s, so it can’t be simplified to just graveyard, or “into the deck, x cards from the bottom”, I felt like you couldn’t really simplify that without having to explain to the player what that meant at which point, it’s not really self explainatory, like it could’ve been “deck (5 bottom)” but you’d have to explain what that means and I don’t think that makes sense, so then it has to be the whole word, which is long and not simplified. At which point I decided it was just not worth it anymore to work on this since it doesn’t make sense, you can’t really simplify the logs and if you really try then the code gets a bit overly complicated. I have a branch for this but I didn’t make a PR https://github.com/lilyhuang-github/Cockatrice/tree/simpleDialog. But this kind of lead me to think about the issues on projects cause for example, I think on Hurl, there’s a lot less issues on it partially because there’s a lot of effort put into managing the issues made there. Like certain feature requests might get shot down for whatever reason, but for Cockatrice, there is a lot of effort put into managing issues, like duplicate ones, but not a lot on deciding whether is should be added or not.

Besides that I have two PRs that I’m working on getting landed. https://github.com/Cockatrice/Cockatrice/pull/5717 https://github.com/Cockatrice/Cockatrice/pull/5788

One of them was to update the card search so that keywords like NOT, AND, OR, are more specific, because there are cards like “Not Dead After All” or “Trick Or Treat”, where they contain the keyword, so the change was to make the keyword only activate with all caps, and I also had to add in a few tests.

The other one was a change in the logging of the time. So an action is done at 4:00pm, it’ll log that, but they also want an option to use in game time, so it’ll be 00:00:12 seconds from game start for example, and what I’m gonna do based off the review, is try to kind of refactor the code, like change one of the other functions, then make the code call on that function.