A Chaotic plugin for LackeyCCG

EDIT: Hey, I've finally written a tutorial on the basics of downloading and using the Chaotic plugin for Lackey! You can view it here: http://sta.sh/0133vucur7ab

I recently discovered a free and pretty nifty little CCG playing program called LackeyCCG, and noticed you could add games to it via a plugin. I searched the Internet hoping that there was a plugin for Chaotic somewhere, but sadly there isn't any. So, despite having very little plugin coding experience and Chaotic being somewhat one of the more complex TCG's in terms of setup, I attempted to script a plugin for it to use in LackeyCCG, and 3 days later I've got to a stage where the Chaotic plugin should be usable to play games. I've tested much of it and it seems to work okay.

The plugin has many features beyond just being able to play the game, both against yourself and against others though. I added a feature that lets you "open" random packs of Chaotic boosters and starter decks (to open a starter deck as you'd get IRL, you need to open a starter deck and one of the 4 card starter exclusive packs) and create a sealed pool, so if you want to play a Sealed Deck format (1 starter deck and 5 boosters), you can!

I've included decklists for all the official Chaotic starter decks so if you just want to test the gameplay, just load one of them up. The plugin is completely self-contained, it will work and load the card images even when you are offline.

So, if anyone wants to give the plugin a test by playing a bit of Chaotic on LackeyCCG, download the ZIP from here: http://sta.sh/0266e79scvof (make sure you have LackeyCCG downloaded first), and just unzip the file into LackeyCCG's plugins directory. Beware, it's quite a large file. Sorry I don't have an autoupdate URL for it yet so only people using LackeyCCG on a computer can use it for now. It might take a while to figure out and get used to the interface, but most actions should be doable. If the demand is there, I'll see if i can write a tutorial on using the plugin. Each player does need to use their first and second turns to set up their side of the Battle Board (you need to flip down the Battlegear and Creatures before putting them onto the table in the first turn, and the second turn should be for flipping up creatures and adding mugic counters to them)

Note the card database is incomplete - all the cards are there, but those beyond DoP still need their card text and stat field filled out. I will get round to completing it but it will take a while given the sheer volume of data there is. But as it is, the cards can just be read to get all the info as I've added all the stats to the creature cards on the card images, it just means you can't search for cards beyond their name yet.

Oh, and if anybody has or can find any reasonably high-res images of the Chaotic playmats (like the ones that came in starter sets) that I can use as a custom LackeyCCG table skin, I'd like to see it and possibly implement it, since right now there is no real guides as to where to position the cards at the beginning.

If you do use this plugin (you don't necessarily need another person to test the functionality as LackeyCCG supports playing against yourself), please do leave me some feedback on things I need to add or fix, because there's probably things I've missed or things that don't work as they should (I haven't tested Aa'une's unique flip ability yet for example). If you have experience with LackeyCCG plugins and can suggest some improvements for the core code, I'm all ears. I just learned to script this from a combination of looking at the MTG plugin and going through LackeyCCG's tutorial.

And most of all: enjoy!

Oh, and a credit to Chiodosin1 for compiling the list of starter deck exclusives and starter deck contents on this forum, without it I wouldn't have been able to write the code to produce "realistic" random boosters, or provide the ready to use starter decklists included in the plugin.

EDIT: Changed the download link to link to the ZIP file with a fixed XML file, so now booster ratios should work normally when opening packs.
EDIT 2: Changed download link to link to my new improved version of the Chaotic plugin.

EDIT 3: I've created a second version of the plugin for fan and community made cards to enable them to be played with, called chaoticcustom. Download it here: http://sta.sh/0f2volcbdz6 - this is a separate plugin from the one linked above, so people who want to play with just official cards can use the "chaotic" plugin, and if you want to play with custom cards, use the "chaoticcustom" plugin. You can have both installed in your Lackey plugin directory.

Apologies for double posting. How many people that come here actually use LackeyCCG? I've updated the ZIP download in the original post to fix a booster pack issue where it would only ever open packs with commons and rares, so now you should be able to reveal supers and ultras with similar chances that you would get IRL.

To the one person who downloaded the old ZIP file: to avoid having to download and unzip the whole ZIP file again, go and find the "packdefinitions1.xml" file in the Chaotic plugin folder (in the Packs folder), open it in a plain text editor, replace all instances of "62.5" with "63", all instances of "33.3" with "33" and all instances of "4.2" with "4" and save. Don't save as. Or copy the code from here: http://sta.sh/01504jdwbhft and replace everything in the file by selecting it all and pasting the new code. Again, just save, don't save as. You might need to do this in order to be able to play the plugin with others who download the updated plugin.

If anybody gets stuck anywhere, I'm happy to help.

A question for all: could somebody confirm that the ratio of an ultra rare appearing in a starter deck in place of the super was 1:5? I'm sure I read it somewhere years ago but I can't seem to find anything about it now. The ratio seems about right from personal pack opening experience but I wanted to double check.

I had looked at lackey years ago as an alternate way to play chaotic online. You've done some cool work with this. I stickied this in Announcements. 

First the tabletop simulator mods, then this, and an actual client in the works! I love this community <3

I believe the probability is still 1:24 even for starter decks

Awesome I already have a lackey

Sounds cool and I'll check it out but I'm honestly not a big fan of Lackey. I tried it for a bit for a different card game (cant remember which) and hated almost every minute of it. Granted that was also like two years ago so hopefully its improved since then.

So it's been a few days since I posted this. Has anybody tried out the plugin and got any feedback for it that I can take and improve it? I might see about adding in some custom "canned messages" since not all the ones currently in there are appropriate (for example, I just noticed one for taking a mulligan, I'm pretty sure you don't take mulligans in a game of Chaotic).

If anybody wants to test the gameplay aspect with another player and not the test dummy (which I know is a bit fiddly) and nobody else seems to be available, I may be up for doing some gameplay testing with you

So I have my lackey open and I downloaded the zip file and extracted it to my desktop. How do i get the plugin installed?

King A-Game Darini wrote:So I have my lackey open and I downloaded the zip file and extracted it to my desktop. How do i get the plugin installed?

You need to make sure you extracted the zip file into Lackey's plugin folder, which is {wherever you have LackeyCCG saved on your computer} > LackeyCCG > Plugins. Then once it's in the plugin folder, open LackeyCCG then go to the plugin tab and select "browse installed plugins to load one". The Chaotic plugin should be selectable from there, and once you load it for the first time it should appear in your recent plugins list in the future.

cool got it to work. just need a buddy to play with

Having played around with a few other Lackey plugins doing things like adding custom cards to other plugins, as well as realising that I could write script for individual cards to do things like look at cards in your Attack or Location Deck, I realised the Chaotic plugin I created needed a few tweaks. So having changed it all around and did some testing, I present an updated Chaotic plugin! You can grab the whole thing here: http://sta.sh/0266e79scvof If you have either of my previous versions of the plugin, I do recommend you update to this version, since everybody needs to be using the same version of the plugin to be able to host games and play with other people on the server. Make sure you save any non-starter deck files you've created in Lackey elsewhere before deleting the old plugin and unzipping the new one into the plugins directory. If you already have my previous Chaotic plugin and want to update the plugin without having to re-download all the images, instructions for how to do so are at the end of this post.

So, what's new in this version?

- Updated card database, now all card entries are completely filled out with relevant information. I've used post-erratum card text in the text column as TCO has so no need to have the errata PDF open to refer to. Now all cards have data, you can search for very specific things in the deck editor. Want to find all the Kha'rall shards or all Mirage Locations? Just type "shard" or "mirage" respectively into the class filter.
- I've added element counters to Creature cards. You can use these to clearly indicate which Elements a Creature on the board has currently. This is especially useful for decks that involve a lot of gaining or losing Elements.
- Added a spawnable Hive indicator. You can right click on the table and select Activate Hive, and it will spawn a "card" which says Hive is Active, so it's easy to tell when Hive is active or not. You have to remember to discard this indicator at the end of every turn though.
- You can set Mugic ability in a snap at the start of a game by right clicking on a Creature card and selecting "Set Initial Mugic Ability". Same with Element counters with the "Set Scanned Elements" option.
- For cards that require non-Mugic counters (like Stelgar VM or Khybon's Scrapyard) or give the option of looking at top X cards of your Attack/Location Deck, you can right click on that card and an option to add a specific counter or look at cards in your deck will appear. If the counter option isn't there, you can still use the add or remove counter button.
- Locations will now enter play horizontally. You can still rotate Mirage Locations if you need to.
- You can use player stats on the left hand side to track the current Energy and Discipline values of your engaged Creature. Both you and your opponent can adjust these as Attacks are played. For tracking the changing Energy and Disciplines of unengaged Creatures, you can use the Edit Note function (useful for decks that target unengaged Creatures a lot with damage, heal, destroy or change discipline effects).

Known bugs:
- For cards that let you look at the top cards of your attack or location deck and require them be put in different locations within the deck you're looking at, dragging and dropping the cards you want to put on the top or bottom of the deck or rearranging cards within the pop-up will reveal the name of that card you moved to your opponent in the chat log.
- When setting up a game, creatures and battlegear will not enter the game face down automatically. If you want to set them up face-down like you would in a real game of Chaotic, you must first select them in your creature/battlegear deck zone, right click and select "flip over". You can still see the cards on mouseover.
- At 100% scale, the table isn't big enough to accommodate a typical 6v6 Masters game! To see the entire battle board, I recommend you adjust the zoom or the scale to suit. You can mouse over a card to read it properly.

Enjoy! If anybody finds any errors or certain cards don't behave the way they should, post them here so I can iron them out. If you have any feedback or suggestions, I'm more than happy to hear them. If anybody gets stuck on how to perform certain functions like how to look at the top X cards of an opponent's deck, I'm happy to help, I can write a tutorial on how to use the plugin if needed. But above all, this new version should make it easier to play Chaotic on Lackey

If you would like to update the plugin but don't want to have to download all the images again, follow these steps:
1. In your file broswer, navigate to {wherever you have LackeyCCG saved on your computer} > LackeyCCG > Plugins > Chaotic > Sets. There is a folder named "setimages". Cut, copy or move that folder to a new location (for example, Documents).
2. Navigate back to {wherever you have LackeyCCG saved on your computer} > LackeyCCG > Plugins and delete the Chaotic plugin folder. Make sure you've saved any decks you created elsewhere first otherwise you will lose them!
3. Download the ZIP file from here: http://sta.sh/02vvq5ukd5d - this is basically the Chaotic plugin but with the setimages folder removed, so it's file size is 8.2mb as opposed to over 150mb. Unzip it into the plugin folder ({wherever you have LackeyCCG saved on your computer} > LackeyCCG > Plugins).
4. Navigate to wherever you've moved or put a copy of the setimages folder and move it into {wherever you have LackeyCCG saved on your computer} > LackeyCCG > Plugins > Chaotic > Sets.
5. Open LackeyCCG and open the Chaotic plugin.[/code]

Apologies for the double post again but... is anybody actually using or intending to use this plugin? Is it worth me trying to refine it and release new versions every so often until everything in it works smoothly?

If anybody wants to try it out by playing a game against another person then possibly give me some feedback on the experience (the one thing I haven't been able to test properly as the sole creator of the plugin, the best I can do is play against a test dummy), update to the latest version of the plugin and shoot me a message and I'll see if I can find the time to throw a decent deck together (or just play with the starter decks provided in the plugin) and play a game or two on it. I haven't actually ever played a game of Chaotic with another person before but I have a good understanding of the rules

Note: I did notice a mistake in the script for Aerodrone's ability, where right clicking it brings up an option to look at two cards of your attack deck. It should say four. Clicking it will show the top four cards of your attack deck though so it's just an accidental mislabelling.

I have it installed but I dont have anyone to vs. I'll get it on my gf's computer and play against her. I wish the players on tco would make the switch to it so you can add custom fan cards too. This game hasn't had a change in forever and it would be a amazing to see some new cards.


The only issue is with the 3v3 starter decks. they only have 5 locations and 10 attacks.

every format 1v1,3v3 and 6v6 all have 20 attacks and 10 locations. join the chat at the bottom of the home page and im sure afjak chio or I will be there to play you on TCO or Lackey.

King A-Game Darini wrote:I have it installed but I dont have anyone to vs. I'll get it on my gf's computer and play against her. I wish the players on tco would make the switch to it so you can add custom fan cards too. This game hasn't had a change in forever and it would be a amazing to see some new cards.


The only issue is with the 3v3 starter decks. they only have 5 locations and 10 attacks.

every format 1v1,3v3 and 6v6 all have 20 attacks and 10 locations. join the chat at the bottom of the home page and im sure afjak chio or I will be there to play you on TCO or Lackey.

Custom fan cards are an excellent idea, I have strongly considered adding some of the fan sets such as Chiodosin1's custom set to it (still need to ask him) and maybe even my own, it'd be fun to add them and enhance the game. I don't want to release too many updates before I can get the plugin hosted on a proper server (which I don't have any access to yet, hence why I've been hosting the plugin as a ZIP file on DA Stash) as that could lead to everybody running a different plugin version, but it's something I'll probably do in the future.

Yeah, about the 3v3 starter decks, they only have 5 locations and 10 attacks because they're basically what you get in the SOTLC starter decks. I've heard 5 locations and 10 attacks being a part of Limited play (might even have saw it mentioned in the Alliances Unraveled rulebook, but from what I've read about actual Chaotic Limited that seems pretty far from the truth) but I agree, it does make them hard to use with the 6v6 decks (the "half deck" even struck me as feeling a little lazy compared to the DoP and MI starter decks). I could probably whip up some "alternate" SOTLC starter decks with a full attack and location roster and make them available to all to fix that.

I keep forgetting there's a chatbox here I'll be sure to jump into it when I'm available for a battle.

is it updated with chios set :o ? If so what link is it.

King A-Game Darini wrote:is it updated with chios set :o ? If so what link is it.

Apologies, I've been a little busier than expected. But I've finally got round to uploading it, so here's the link to download a new version of the plugin with Chio's set: http://sta.sh/0f2volcbdz6

Note this plugin is called "chaoticcustom" so you will need to download this one to play with Chio's set. Just save it into the plugins folder. There's no need to touch the Chaotic plugin folder, I've intentionally kept the two separate.

Of course, if there's any custom cards or sets outside of Chio's custom set that you would like to see in the chaoticcustom plugin so everyone can play with it, do let me know in this thread or message me. If you have ideas for cards which include card art, I can create cards from that using the same templates that were used in Chio's set. Maybe to diversify the custom game more, I'll throw in a set I've been working on into the plugin when it's done, who knows?

Awesome works great. Just wish others would play

edit: How do I open boosters?


Alright I made a deck. First few things. I've been using lackey for (Adventure times)card wars!! and sometimes magic the gathering.

Lackey feels very very clustered compared to Tradecardsonline.com

Do you have a way of reformatting this? it seems like a issue with the program itself and not something editable.


also we need a Play mat. I know you already asked for one but i'll keep looking for 1.

King A-Game Darini wrote:Awesome works great. Just wish others would play

edit: How do I open boosters?


Alright I made a deck. First few things. I've been using lackey for (Adventure times)card wars!! and sometimes magic the gathering.

Lackey feels very very clustered compared to Tradecardsonline.com

Do you have a way of reformatting this? it seems like a issue with the program itself and not something editable.


also we need a Play mat. I know you already asked for one but i'll keep looking for 1.

To open boosters, go to the Deck Editor and then the Card Pool tab. There should be a button that says "add a pack or random deck". From there you should be presented with a variety of boosters and starter decks that you can open.

On the cluttered layout, I have tried to fix that but it seems it's something worked into Lackey's own code. I'm using a high resolution 23 inch monitor and even to me on this sort of screen it looks cluttered, not to mention the dropdown menus when right clicking on a card can be so long the bottom options can get obscured. I do feel that Lackey's layout is more suited to a game like Magic the Gathering than it is for Chaotic.

Do you think I should get rid of the element indicators function? I feel it might be cluttering the menus up more than necessary for relatively little benefit which some players may not even need or want to use.

Playmats... I do have paper copies but my scanner is temperamental and only A4 size so it's not really ideal for scanning playmats. I may make my own playmat template in Photoshop and get that optimised for Lackey, either way a playmat may or may not work. Playmats might be a player-defined thing rather than something I can code directly into the plugin. I'll see though, it's definitely something I still want to try to implement.

If you (or anyone else) wants somebody to play with on Lackey, if you see me logged into the forum chatbox that will most likely mean I've got some time for a Chaotic match on Lackey. Time zones might make that tricky though.

I'll PM you when you are on. I'm gonna join the discord thing too

I would be interested in playing sometime as soon as I learn how to use Lackey

please make a tutorial on how to use this on lackey. thank you

Hello,

I was wondering if there was a video on Youtube to see what it looks like and everything.
I mean, how it works, how to get it, what does it takes, etc.

Thanks

Hi guys!

Sorry I didn't see these earlier, I've been busy. But I did take notice that a tutorial on how to use the plugins would be helpful, so I did just that and wrote a tutorial, which you can view (and download as a PDF) here: http://sta.sh/0133vucur7ab - admittedly the plugin is a little clunky, probably not as streamlined as TCO probably is but that's more to do with the limitations of scripting within Lackey than anything else.

Sorry no YouTube tutorials, my computer doesn't have a screen recording capability (plus I don't have a YouTube account), so written tutorials will have to do for now. But if somebody wants to make a YouTube tutorial on how to play it they're more than welcome!

If anyone has any problems viewing the PDF file (it's on Deviantart Stash which seems to let you view PDF's right in the page but it may not work for everybody I suppose!) or I missed something, let me know and I'll do my best to answer

EDIT: Whoops, forgot to say credit for the table playmat image goes to KingCrazy, and thanks to King A-Game Darini for helping me source it

thank you