Hi All,
To all of those who love magic (as I do), here is the new set of cards ready for Virtual Board: Dark Ascension is now published and compiled so you can build and test your decks, I already did my own and created the “Altar” theme deck… 
is mono-white and token based, here is the card list so you can enjoy it.
Deck: Altar
Non-Creature spells
Well… several issues had came up while developing the software and made me think about some improvementes needed and re-starting the whole thing again (still don’t know). For instance a comment from a user pointed that he wanted to tuck cards behind others, well virtual board is able to stack them over but tucking… still not available. So I decided to include the feature and here is where the issues started: first of all, you have to keep track of the order of the cards and its display position: on front or behind another card; in concept this is pretty simple and Java already allows it but when sending this info over the network is where you have to be carefull to paint the components back in the order you have them on the client who send the info, so the thing is you have to send only the status for that particular card and paint it accordingly on top or behind of other cards, so a very robust synch process has to take placed here to keep a copy of the game and its order and to maintain it synched up. Now, another thing I would like to re-design is the global disposition of the components, so far I haven’t been comfortable with the general position of the game areas and the card size, so I started thinking about shrinking the card size, placing the preview pane inside the main window and make the rest of the components smaller too… At the beginning I liked the big card size, but now I saw that you can still recognize the main drawing of the card even if they are smaller, this leaves more space to the main board and allows you to handle more cards on the board… Now, communication, for a Beta I did this pretty simply and is asynchronous, the thing is that the whole game is sent over the network whenever you perform any action, the ideal thing is to send only the delta but this implies a rough re-design and prepare it to handle multiple games, this is of course thinking on mounting a server to play and meet with more people…
As you can see designing and developing software always carries a lot of considerations, so I think my goal will be to publish the version of Virtual Board 2.03Beta and leave it like that so I can then turn into producing the global re-design of it on Virtual Board 3.0… Honestly for a personal project this has been challenging, particularly because the idea is to make it popular, so I do have to produce a good software… and as you remember, all of this started only because I wanted to playtest my MTG decks =P… comments and suggestions are always welcome…
Keep following…
It has been a couple of weeks since my last post, sorry for that but Virtual Board has reached a level where I’m spending a lot of hours testing and designing decks and I’ve came up with a couple of them, mainly I play mtg for fun but some friends of mine have also tested the app to build decks and play-test them, now we are buying a couple of cards for those decks and one has filled my eye with expectations 
I’ve made a deck for decking the opponent, it still work in progress but the mechanic is already defined and it is behaving pretty well altough it still not at the best level like for playing it on a tournament or something like that, it has been very fun to build it and perform several modifications on it, the base of my deck is the creature card named “Undead Alchemist”, at first glimpse you don’t think this is a card that might do too much for you but once any zombie hits your opponent the party starts!! I’ve been able to up to 44 cards from my opponents deck on a single attack, and If I recall correct the most zombies I placed were around 26… lol… mechanic is pretty fun but the whole deck still need some polish before letting it completely stable…
So here is the deck, you must have the latest expansions installed on your virtual board to be able to play it, take a look at the card compilations section to download them…
Deck: Countdown to Extintion
Non-creature Spells
Enjoy!!
I’m trying to create a community here where we can post our cards for several games and use them in virtual board, but one of my goals is also to have a place to trade with them. As several of you might had noticed, I’m a big fan of MTG and it is the main motivation that lead me to create Virtual Board. So besides publishing card compilations I created a public area on the forum were you can post cards you are looking for, willing to be traded, bought or selled, use it freely as long as it is related with trading card games (any trading card game), spread the word with friends. Also I included a small facebook-like chat were you can meet with friends and talk about your latest strategies, decks and favorite games.
Forum Chat
Keep following, I’m still working hard on Virtual Board
Cause:
A missconfiguration on the Virtual Board application causes it to not connect
Solution:
Download the latest version that was re-published to fix this issue, find it on the download section.
Thanks and sorry for the inconveniences…
Hi All,
As a Fan I finished a compilation of another set of images, please remember that all images belong to their authors and we are only spreading the word so you can go out and buy these cards after testing your decks on Virtual Board.
Remember to download the lates version of Virtual Board!
Downloads are available here:
MTG:
Rise of Eldrazi: http://imcsoftwarefactory.com/imc_documents/Rise%20of%20Eldrazi.rar
Token Cards Compilation: http://imcsoftwarefactory.com/imc_documents/Tokens.rar
Pokemon:
Black and White: http://imcsoftwarefactory.com/imc_documents/Pokemon%20-%20black%20&%20white.rar
Pokemon cards are small sized, couldn’t get anything bigger; anyone can contribute though, if you have a compilation of any cardgame you’d like to share feel free to sign up and post it, if file is too big you’ll have to contactme.
Enjoy current compilations! 
Finally! I managed my way out to finalize the latest version of virtual board with all of the features promoted on the preview which now are real. You can find the latest version on the download section of this Blog. Please notice that the new release is not compatible with the previous versions due to some changes on the communication modules, but you can still play your decks created on the old versions since the Deck Editor remains 1.0 Beta.
The new features are:
So several cool features were added, try it out it is getting really great. I’ll be populating the help over the days so you can have some reference documents, anyway I believe the software is pretty intuitive and you will find how to use it very quick.
Keep following and don’t forget to “like” and give +1!
This gallery contains 2 photos.
Still difficult to decide the look and feel, although I haven’t designed any skin yet since it will take a lot of time and I don’t feel confident enough to perform a full look and fill design ’cause I know … Continue reading
Artists… well it is quiet complicated to find a Digital Artist willing to contribute to Virtual Board project lol … so my main problem is that none of my friends do any kind of digital artwork, we are skilled on programming but not on designing so I had to come up with something, so basically I’m doing icons, so far, to try to avoid any permit or license problems on the images I’m using. I have to say that Digital Art is not one of my skills but I had managed to do a decent icon set for the commands available on Virtual Board… here is the set…
I’m still working polishing some stuff… I’ll try to have the next release with the features I promoted on the preview by the end of this week… keep following…
Give a like!!
Icon Set
Has it ever happened to you? To feel so anxious to finish some work to start sharing it whit everyone? Well… that is how I feel. I can’t wait to release the new version of Virtual Board, is taking so long because everytime I think about it new ideas come to my mind! So this is kind of a vicious circle, I want more but want to finish at the same time, and my project still growing on my mind! Lol… But so far I think I’m getting closer to the end of Beta 2.02. I also thinked about how big can the application turn to; stop for a second, and if I get a good impression, a community can finally turn to life around this app. I wonder, how did the guy from Battlegounds (Heruca) felt in the past about it?, how big did he ever think his project could turn?, How did he started promoting it? Those are my usual question, and not just for naming him, there are tons of people starting projects on all kind of areas and their expectations are always like that. I believe the main question will be “HOW FAR CAN I GO?”… Well, as far as your imagination can… the digital world is so flexible that you can create real magic in there, sometimes I think it may be similar to write a book, Why you my ask? When you write a book you have to immerse yourself in the history, start imaginating how things and characters look like, how do the objects the environment present, if it is rainy, sunny and so on… so programing and developing software (of course, entertaining software) is very similar, you have to create the whole idea in your mind, imagine all around the environment you want to create, surround with objects that will finally immerse your readers (users) into a great experience, I believe emphaty is what will turn your app into a final good experience… I might sound too enthusiast, but that’s really how I feel :p… To be honest, I’m already thinking on the next steps for this app… Once I make the Beta turn into the Real Live version I already have some plans to re-design it fully and make it a lot bigger, even a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine helped me mounting a basic cloud server… cool… it is part of my next ideas for Virtual Board… I hope you enjoy playing on it as much as I’m enjoying developing it….
Cya soon… Sotano42
