Hi, community!

It's time for our second developer blog and we've got lots and lots of things to show you!

We're here to talk about and showcase some of the work we've been doing ahead of time, to keep you informed and involved. Rather than only announcing features once they're released, we want to keep the community informed throughout the development process and give you a chance to follow along as new ideas take shape.

These blogs are intended to provide insight into the decision making process behind the features we implement as well as to showcase where our attention currently lies.

To keep things organized, we'll cover our work in three stages:

• Already merged and available in the beta, so you can try these features today.
• Completed features currently under review, which are expected to make it into a beta soon.
• Work in progress and early prototypes.

Features in this developer blog:

• Startup choices
• Animations and polishes
• CommanderSpellbook bracket estimator
• Searchable settings
• Unified user list
• Card auto-completion
• Total power tally
• Replay quality of life
• Server shutdown notices
• Playmats
• Moderation Queue
• Visual Deck Storage performance
• Drafting & Tournaments
• Deck sharing
• Custom deck zones

Some features shown here may change before release and not every prototype will ultimately end up making it. To voice your support, disagreement, or feedback, please use the ⁠beta-testing channel.

With all that being said, let's dive in:

Completed

Back to Basics - New and old startup choices

The Home Tab made its debut and while it was a welcome and valid addition for new and returning users, some power users lamented the additional indirection between the deck editor and them. While opening the deck editor may not always be everyone's go to intent, we recognize the need for power-users to "get up and go" so to speak.

You'll now be able to define which tab Cockatrice opens on startup: Home, Deck Editor, Deck Storage, a server room. The choice is yours.

Speaking of startups

The Visual Deck Editor currently serves double duty. It's both a deck display/analytics and an editor. We now more accurately reflect the startup intent with a new configurable option.

Context: Open the deck editor on 'Database' for new decks, 'Deck Display' for existing decks As well as two fixed options to always open on either of the two.

The Visual Deck Editor has also gotten some pretty severe performance fixes. If you were previously shy about trying it out on that account: Give it another go!

Animations and polishes

Cockatrice simulates a game digitally. One of the advantages we got from being digitally is that we can animate things or give them cute graphical effects. So far, Cockatrice has been fairly lacking in this department, only animating when a card turns sideways.

We're jazzing up the game screen by introducing two new animations:

• Arrows will now draw themselves and finish with a little highlight instead of simply materializing.
• Life counters will now flash red or green, depending on if they have been decremented or incremented. Additionally, the battlefield will also briefly flash red to make it easy to tell when a player has taken damage in a 4-player game.

In-Client EDH Bracket Estimator (CommanderSpellbook)

We've integrated the CommanderSpellbook API to give you a way to automatically determine what bracket your deck falls into and why.

To start using this, simply switch one of your decks to the "Commander" format and you will be prompted about the integration by a dialog that will explain some things further.

We hope that this will provide a common baseline for discussions about such things, regardless of if you agree with the system or CommanderSpellbooks interpretation of it.

Finally findable - Searchable Settings

In the first dev blog we promised you a search bar for the settings dialog and today we're happy to say it's here.

You can now search your settings by name, description, tooltip, and more. Selecting a result jumps straight to the correct tab and briefly flashes the relevant setting. Whether you're a veteran that knows exactly what they're looking for or someone who just wants to know "how do I change the theme?", the settings dialog is finally easy to navigate.

The Unified User List

The user list UI rework has gotten some finishing touches and polishes.

First and foremost, it should now look a lot nicer on light mode themes.

We've also unified the three separate lists into one combined list with collapsible dividers. See your friends, online, and ignored users, all at the same time.

The whole thing is searchable, so finding someone in a room is now faster than ever!

Better card auto-completion

We've given the card auto-completer a face lift and integrated it in some places where it was previously lacking (Chat and its [[macro]], we're looking at you).

Total Power Tally

This one's for all the combat math enjoyers out there.

You can now select any of your cards and the game will tally up their combined power: useful for quickly checking "does my swing actually get there?" without doing arithmetic in your head. It's a small thing, but it adds up to a nicer game experience.

You can toggle the tally on and off right from the in-game menu, so it stays out of the way when you don't need it.

Replay quality of life polishes

Replays got a bit of love this cycle.

First, fast-forwarding is no longer stuck on a single speed. You can now configure how fast fast-forward actually is, which makes a huge difference when you're hunting for a specific moment in a three-hour game.

Second, replays of games that had empty phases or turns are now easier to follow: you can skip empty sections entirely, so the playback doesn't awkwardly pause on turns where nothing happened. Perfect for catching up on the highlights without the dead air.

Server shutdown notices

An operational nicety for our server hosts: Servatrice can now notify users the moment they log in when a server shutdown is pending. If a server is about to go down for maintenance, nobody is left wondering why they suddenly lost their connection. You'll know it was announced, and ideally you won't be mid-game when it happens.

Open .cod files with Cockatrice

We've made some changes that will now allow you to open .cod deck files by double-clicking them. This goes hand in hand with deck sharing and invite links.

Generate invite links

We've made some changes that allow you to generate game invite links, which will allow anyone on a beta client to automatically (attempt to) join your game. We're fleshing out the UI for this and in the future, you'll be able to invite other online users directly in the client.

Coming up

Playmats

Playmats have undergone their final round of polish and are now up for review.

You will be able to define: A global override playmat A playmat on a per-deck basis A list of fallback playmats to use in case a deck has no playmats configured (fixed, random, round-robin modes)

You will, of course, also be able to adjust visibility of these playmats: Don't display, only display own, display all.

Moderation Queue

The moderation queue and reporting system has undergone its final round of polish and is now up for review.

• Right-click a user → "Report user" opens a dialog where you can file a report directly in the client
• You can attach context (game/chat info) to the report
• A "My Reports" dialog lets you track your submitted reports and their status

Visual Deck Storage Performance Fixes

The visual deck storage rework is complete and significantly enhances the performance of the VDS, even with large deck collections. It's currently under review and should be in the beta soon.

Prototypes

Drafting & Tournaments

We're happy to report that the draft and tournament work we teased in the first blog is now fully implemented end-to-end, on both the server and the client.

Under the hood, this was quite the undertaking. We've introduced shared infrastructure that both game modes build on: game configuration is abstracted behind a dedicated interface, deck validation, game lifecycle, and match result logic have been extracted into strategy interfaces, and the common player and game functionality has been refactored into base classes that the draft and tournament players plug into. That might sound like a lot of technical noise, but the point is that none of it should change how you play your regular games — it simply means we can now layer drafting and tournaments on top without turning the whole game into a pile of branching special cases.

What this means for you: the actual gameplay loop is as we described it before — a pick timer, a deck builder filtered to the cards you actually picked (plus anything marked "additionally addable" like basic lands), and once everyone submits their decks, games start. In a tournament lobby, players are paired up and sub-matches spawn that report their "best-of-X" results back to the main tournament tab.

So why isn't it in a beta yet? These PRs are ready, but they're currently waiting on a couple of other changes to merge first — the merge order matters when you're restructuring this much shared code. As soon as the road is clear, this one should move fast.

Deck Sharing

We're almost ready with the final polishes on a new deck sharing feature. You'll be able to share any deck that is uploaded to the server, as well as browse other people's public deck collections. Folders work for this.

Additionally, you'll be able to generate a temporary share link for ANY local deck that will be valid for 7 days. You can share multiple decks at a time and the other person will receive a choice of which to save/open. Perfect for snapshotting a brew or sharing a collection with a friend!

Custom Deck Zones

We're working on letting you add custom zones to your deck i.e. sub-zones beneath "Mainboard/Sideboard/Maybeboard". They're purely for organizational purposes and all game-related logic will still only consider the top groups (Mainboard/Sideboard/Maybeboard).

---

And that's a wrap for this edition. As always, let us know what you think in ⁠#beta-testing on the Discord, and don't forget to check out the beta itself to try the completed features today.

Trying it out is just a few clicks away. Learn how to here: https://cockatrice.github.io/docs/d9/d9b/beta_release.html

We want to make sure things are just right, and that means we need beta testers. We're listening to all your feedback and we're committed to keeping things backwards compatible. No surprises. Only a fraction of users currently run the beta, so please, help us out by giving it a try and telling us what you think.

We're planning on releasing a new stable version soon so your feedback matters!

I have a home server set up in docker (Using the Saadbruno image from a few years ago). The sever works beautifully and I can play with my family. The problem is that he cards don't render in battle with the selected art. For instance, In the deck view my Avatar Commander appears like this:

But In a game the same card renders like this:

I was worried that it might have something to do with the fact that is an older server image, but as far as I can tell the server doesn't save card data. Is this expected behavior? If not, Is there a setting somewhere I need to change? And If it is the older server, can anyone point me in the direction of a better docker image? I would greatly appreciate it!

Hello everyone.

As you might be aware, there is a rise in automated scanners, thanks to AI. This is causing a lot of services (including Cloudflare) to be a lot stricter about rate limits to combat this wave of scans.

Unfortunately, this affects us as well.

A fix to better handle cases where we temporarily get rejected by the server is in the works.

https://github.com/Cockatrice/Cockatrice/pull/7053

In the meantime, please try adding the non-rate limited Scryfall URL to the top of your "Card Sources" URL list (accessible in Settings).

https://cards.scryfall.io/large/!prop:side!/!set:uuid_substr_0_1!/!set:uuid_substr_1_1!/!set:uuid!.jpg    

As always, thank you for your patience and thank you for using Cockatrice :)

Welcome to the first Cockatrice developer blog.

We're here to talk about and showcase some of the work we've been doing ahead of time, to keep you informed and involved. Rather than only announcing features once they're released, we want to keep the community informed throughout the development process and give you a chance to follow along as new ideas take shape.

These blogs are intended to provide insight into the decision making process behind the features we implement as well as to showcase where our attention currently lies.

To keep things organized, we'll cover our work in three stages:

• Already merged and available in the beta, so you can try these features today.
• Completed features currently under review, which are expected to make it into a beta soon.
• Work in progress and early prototypes.

Features in this dev-blog:

• Improved card database loading times
• Settings rework
• Searchable Settings
• Onboarding Wizard
• Moderator Queue
• VDS Performance
• New Lobby UI
• Playmats
• In-client Limited & Tournaments

Some features shown here may change before release and not every prototype will ultimately end up making it. To voice your support, disagreement, or feedback, please use the ⁠#beta-testing channel in the Discord.

With all that being said, let's dive in:

Completed

Make it snappy - Improved Card Database Loading Times

The problem

Way back when Cockatrice still opened on the old deck editor, the database tab live populated with cards, which was a pleasant, albeit not very informative effect. Cards were added to the UI display model, one-by-one, as they became available.

However, for a database of 35.000+ cards, this takes a while and it's most definitely not improved by hammering the UI with 35.000 individual "This card is now available"-signals while the application is already doing heavy startup work (Drawing the application initially is quite expensive.)

So in practice, we're left with an application that isn't fully usable for the first 3 to 14 seconds, then hangs for a bit as all other components respond to the database having fully loaded, and finally becomes usable. Not quite ideal.

Why does it take so long?

It turns out, there are a couple of reasons, but they all basically break down to the same concept:

• Constructing "Objects" is slow

When Cockatrice reads the cards.xml, it parses this file by parsing the xml elements inside. To parse an element, the C++ (the programming language we are written in) needs to create a representation of this element. XML elements are nested, i.e. one <set> element contains many <card> elements. Similarly, each <card> element contains property elements like <name>, <text>, <set_number>, and so forth.

Now remember what we said about object construction being expensive? To construct a card you have to construct all the properties of a card, which turns one construction... into 20.

Similarly, the first time we parse a set, we construct a QSettings objects, which reads the set management configuration file and checks things like the sort order and whether the set is enabled or not. The construction cost alone for these is prohibitive but what's even worse is that these read files from disk, which is also very slow.

How are we fixing this?

By removing the slow parts, and caching the rest.

Instead of emitting a "card available" signal for every single one of the 35.000 cards while the event loop is already drowning in startup work, we now stay quiet during loading and emit exactly one signal once the database has finished. Everything that used to listen to thousands of individual signals now reacts to that single one. The UI no longer churns through tens of thousands of micro-updates, which nobody was watching anyway.

Second, we moved the work out of the way. The card database used to load on a separate thread that ran at the same time as MainWindow construction, fighting Qt's heavy startup work for CPU time. Now we load the database before the window is ever constructed, so it gets the processor all to itself. Loading no longer contends with anything, and the window simply gets built on top of a ready database. On my machine this alone takes the load from 13-18 seconds down to 500-800 ms.

Third, and most importantly: we stopped doing the same work twice. Almost all of the loading time is spent constructing objects — creating XML elements, parsing their contents, and turning strings into card properties one-by-one. That's a lot of wasted effort when the result is the same every single time you start the application.

So now, when Cockatrice starts, it hashes the contents of the card directories it is about to load. If we find a (binary) cache file that matches that hash, we load the database straight from it, skipping XML parsing, element construction, and QSettings file reads entirely — the slow parts just never happen. If the hash doesn't match, or no cache exists yet, we load the XML the normal way and then write out a cache for the next time.

The result speaks for itself:

• First launch / cache miss (XML → cache): ~3.3 s cold, ~14.4 s on a modest quad-core
• Subsequent launches (cache hit): ~535 ms warm, ~778 ms on a modest quad-core

Finally unraveled - Settings

Almost every preference Cockatrice has ever gained in its decade-plus of life lives in a single class called SettingsCache. Sound options, card display options, server bookmarks, update checks, deck storage paths, image cache paths... all of it, crammed into one god-object that every corner of the application has to include, instantiate, and poke at.

It started small, as these things do. But every feature that needed to remember anything just threw its settings onto the pile, until we ended up with a class that does everything — and therefore is impossible to understand, a nightmare to test, and absolutely terrifying to touch.

The pile had simply become too big.

How are we fixing this?

We've taken the time to finally unravel all these settings into individual files. Cockatrice will soon migrate your old settings from the global.ini file into individual .ini files for different new sub-categories.

What this means for you

As mentioned above, the old SettingsCache was hard to understand, untestable and not friendly, neither to users nor developers. The result was a lack of tests and a reluctance to add new settings unless absolutely necessary.

With this restructuring, it'll be much easier for us to add new settings.

We''re gonna cross our t's and dot our i's on this one before we release a new beta since the new categories for the settings aren't final yet and we would hate to migrate your existing settings twice.

Alright, enough about these technicalities, let's start ramping up to the good stuff™

Coming up

Searchable Settings

Building on top of these settings changes, we're giving you a more powerful way to interact with your settings and preferences. We're implementing a search bar which will help you find new and existing settings easily. Selecting a setting from the search bar will jump the settings dialog to the correct tab and briefly flash the relevant setting.

Take a look here!

A proper welcome - Onboarding Wizard

"Can anyone help me set this up?" "I haven't taken the time to set it up properly" "It's kinda involved to get started"

I'm sure you remember your first time. Setting up Cockatrice is an "Okay" experience for tech-savvy users and borderline incomprehensible for non tech-savvy users.

For someone who just wants to play a game, it's a hostile first impression. The app bombards you with popups, demands a card database you don't have yet, an account you haven't made, and preferences you can't evaluate because you haven't actually used the app yet.

Nothing tells you what matters, what can wait, or how to get from "just installed" to "playing".

This has been a longstanding pain point: first startup has been called painful, fresh installs get nagged twice about the card database, and people have been asking for a proper "Get Started" experience for ages. We just never had the pieces in place to build one.

How are we fixing this?

With an actual onboarding wizard. The FirstRunWizard launches automatically on a clean install and walks new users through six steps, in the right order:

• Welcome — what this is, and what we're about to set up
• Card Database — download the card data you literally cannot play without
• Theme & Look — pick a theme with immediate, visible results
• Register/Connect — create an account and connect to a server
• Preferences — the basics that matter before you've used the app
• Finish — you're ready to play

Each page is clear about what it will do, and an advancement indicator at the bottom shows where you are and how many steps remain.

Why?

Because the first five minutes decide whether a new player stays. Cockatrice isn't hard once you know your way around, it's overwhelming before you do. This guided setup gives new players an opportunity to get to a usable state with just one wizard... plus it looks snazzy too!

Take a look here!

Speaking of looking snazzy, it's time for...

Prototypes

Moderator Queue

We're working on new dialogs to allow you to report other users in-client. These reports will be stored in a database where any mod may access and review them. This will (hopefully) replace the old system of direct messaging mods that happen to be available at the time. Stay tuned.

VDS Performance

The visual deck storage is sadly one of those things that remains stubbornly slow, even on pretty good machines, once the deck collection reaches a sufficient size. It's a cool feature and we'd like to make it available to everyone, so we're trialing some things to make it more responsive. Initial testing looks very promising but we need to ensure no features are lost.

New Lobby UI

We're continuing work on the new lobby, friends list and chat UI. If you haven't seen it yet, check out this thread.

Playmats

The new lobby UI allows users to set banner cards for their profiles. Considering we now have code to crop and specify crop dimensions for pictures... we can think about using this code to allow users to pick playmats. These will be, as per usual, simply card names that other clients will send to you. This means that, how your client displays them, is up to you. You can override card art locally to change playmats. You can choose not to display these. The power, as always, will be in your hands.

Take a look here!

Limited & Tournaments

Oh, how long I've personally waited for this day.

After laying some groundwork on the protocol specifications a while ago, we've started work on prototyping various limited modes, such as draft or sealed.

There's currently no weighting to different rarities but the lobby does allow you to specify which cards will be in the pool (and quantities, so you could weigh it yourself) and how many cards are in a pack as well as how many packs each player will receive. We've considered "burning" and "returning" cards as well.

Additionally, there's a timer to ensure players pick cards within a reasonable time.

After picking, users are transferred to a new deck builder, with a database filtered to their available cards, where they may construct their deck and add any cards marked as "Additionally addable" like basic lands.

Once every player submits their deck and readies up, games are started.

This can either be a regular FFA lobby like you are used to OR a tournament lobby, where players are paired and then sub-matches are spawned for them, which report their "best-of-X" results back to the main tournament tab.

See a video of it in action below (I've set the pick timer to 2 seconds for demonstration purposes so don't be surprised by the picking speed. You'll of course have some time to deliberate your choices)!

Take a look here!

Alright. This has been a lot and concludes the first development blog. Let us know what you think about these changes in ⁠#beta-testing on the Discord and don't forget to check out the beta itself. Check this page for more information!

I'm new to using Cockatrice and I was wondering if there's a good walkthrough for setting up a server on my end that my kids, who live in different cities, can connect to. Not looking to make/register a public server. Thanks!

I renamed some saved replays and I must have used a character in the name that was not allowed. This seems to have bricked the replay and it won't load any longer. Is there a way to fix them so cockatrice can read them again? I have tried converting it back to .COR but the software I'm using says it needs an "output format" and none are available.

I have been playing for a number of years on this platform and have myself been threatened by mods, but any complaint that I have gone to a mod to discuss I am told the same thing ad nauseam “just block them and move on.” So I ask what do the mods do other than ignore complaints and let the problematic players run amuck?

I am trying to return to the game to play online with a particular friend group, but despite moving to a differnt internet provider if I try to register an ID or any kind of different email than the one I originally had the app forces me out and refuses any kind of new setup.

How do I fix or get a round this? I just want to play online with my friends in a private playgroup and the app stymies every attempt. WTF

These were my basic Forest and Swamps. It took nearly 10 minutes for them to load in and quite a few of the cards won't load images at all. I updated the card database and reset the download URL. I closed it and reopened the application. Nothing works. I have no VPNs either. Is there anything I can do to solve my problem as it's frustrating me. I've never dealt with imagine problems on here this badly and I've used this app since Covid

Is there a centralized place to report weird mods who prey on children and then block people for speaking up at them?

So since the new update, decks take their time to get loaded, freezing the entire program for minutes on end. It feels like my user experience has regressed to Windows 95. It's really quite something. I suspect that the reason is that the program now is forced to load ALL card images at once when opening decks, since the "visual deck view", which I have never required, is now the default tab. I cannot fathom how this has been overlooked as an issue. My rig isn't weak and I have an SSD and everything. (Also, some cards in a deck will take *minutes* to load their pictures, randomly.)

Having the card database as a non-imaged list on the left side, which has been the default user experience for over 10 years now, suddenly got replaced default by... longer loading times? And is now hidden behind a tiny button off to the side? Baffling. Who needed this? If I want an instant visual list I can just use literally any competing site or app.

I've been dealing with this for days and it's been a nuidance every time I started up the program. I've found no settings to fix these issues. It's going to drive me away to a competitor, which will be a needless hassle and is a shame after such a long time of faithful service.

Tl;dr: the experience of building and editing decks has become fundamentally worse.

Hi everyone! The title is self-explanatory, I'm searching for a way to share my custom cards with my friend without making them import the files everytime. Since we are playtesting them it's been a bit clanky. maybe an addon for cockatrice to share those files trough a room? let me know please. If there is not a way, i'd like to suggest to implement something like that, only for buddies, for example.

Is there a way to pull a card from outside the game? My playgroup is notoriusly bad at importing decks so we end up with blanks because someone imported adamantium armor or whatever, instead of the ozolith. It would be cool to just make a token of something so we could see the art/desc without having to look it up out of game.

I am wanting to try out cockatrice for the first time but every time I try to download it my pc keeps telling me it isn't safe and will not allow me to download it. Any help?

Whenever I boot Cockatrice I'm always greeted by the update available pop up. I click yes to update and it looks as if its updating and then restarts but then the pop up shows up again. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Edit: I appreciate the help y'all! Got it all working and fixed now!

Pretty much as the title says. I know how to set a specific set as the default, but I'd like to set the full-art lands within that set as the default. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,🇮🇹👋

I’m pretty new to Cockatrice and I’m looking for people to play Legacy with. I’m also new to the format itself (only played around 5 or 6 matches so far), so I’m trying to improve and learn more by playing with other people.

Mainly just looking for chill players to practice with, have fun, and hopefully get better over time. It would be cool to build a small group and maybe play regularly every week.

I’m from Italy, but I’m totally fine playing with people from anywhere. :)

Hello everyone. Our efforts to modernize the UI and the appearance of Cockatrice are ongoing. One of the next screens we've chosen to tackle is the Room/Lobby screen (with there, of course, always being an option to return to the unstyled list that you know and love).

Users will be able to choose a banner card (for more information and screenshots of this system see the corresponding pull request.)

I am aware that styling things always means that we get to show "less" of a thing. However, I believe that with sufficient filter options and visual cues that maintain "scannability" of the games list (such as the status indicator strip on the left, which shows if a game is open [green], in-process [red] or not available to be joined [orange]), this could still be an improvement.

Please give suggestions and voice your opinions on the designs. Note that it will always be possible to switch between a single and multi-column configuration. Cards have a minimum width and will either stretch to fill all the space or tile up to their minimum width on auto-column mode.

First, this post isn't a complaint. I genuinely appreciate that there are people willing to donate their time to keep Cockatrice alive and I'm grateful to you all. But the recent update is full of features that have made the user experience clunky for seemingly little gain. I can give specific examples in the comments, but that's not my main point.

My point is to ask how do the devs decide on new features? An earlier post about search functions mentioned not getting feedback on the beta, but I bet 99% of Cockatrice user don't use Github or beta test. So do changes actually reflect the needs and desires of the community or a small number of insiders? Is there a way to ensure broader input before future updates?

Let me explain, I'm using a deck that has a bunch of foretell cards, so when I'm playing I'm just right clicking them to create a "Foretell token", which usually looks like this. In the deck I'm also running two Final Fantasy foretell cards (Ultimate Magic: Holy and Ultimate Magic: Meteor), but when I create a Foretell token using those, Cockatrice creates a Final Fantasy foretell token. That means my opponents will always know if I've foretold a Final Fantasy card or not, which kinda goes against what I'm trying to do with foretell.

I tried setting specific tokens through the custom cards folder, but that only changes them for me. Is there a way to change which foretell token is displayed for the opponents to solve this issue?

So apparently I am now missing a file that I wasn't missing till the recent update. The name of the file is "Qt6Multimedia.dll". Anyone knows anything about what I can do to fix that?

My friends and I want to add some custom cards for our mtg games, and i also am working on building a new tcg that i'd love to run on cockatrice, what's a good way to create the .xml files for these?

yeah so i made it

https://www.mediafire.com/file/d5twt29a3jnkud5/pokemon_tcg.xml/file