I have updated my card creator with some improvements, and some tweaks that make it a bit more suitable for Mk4:
I also wrote a tutorial on how to use it, and included some example cards to demonstrate it’s capabilities.
Thank you so much! This will make demoing the game much easier!
No worries, I’m happy if it helps anyone. There is a tutorial on the page I linked to, and you can ask me if you have any questions about how to do anything. Feel free to share any cards you make!
Quick update: I’ve added functions to export and import cards. Exsporting creates files that cannot be viewed on their own, but can be imported into an existing card. This allows you to combine cards for printing.
BTW the page is sized around the 4- card window, so in Firefox if you zoom to 200% or 300% or something, so that the cards are larger than the view, then you can use the “screenshot” option and select “full page” to get a perfect image of the 4 cards for printing.
One function that I never spent much time on and I don’t think I saw anyone use was the background image. Well, I’ve improved the functionality a little, so it’s easier to add a background texture to a card using the “Set background image” and “Edit background image” options. For example:
Now I’m thinking of trying to making the opacity of the white fields variable, so the background texture can be made to come through if desired. However I’ve done this sort of thing in the past and there’s things that can go wrong if you weren’t designing the HTML to use transparency from the start, so it might turn out to be a lot of work.
Hrm. Now I’m wondering… do you still have the old one? My friends and I still play Company of Iron, so this might be helpful for us since there aren’t hardcopy or PDF versions of those cards available.
Yes, the previous two versions of the card creator are on my blog, as well as a couple of custom card creators designed around other games (Batman and Zone Raiders), you will find them all here:
I don’t really see a reason to use the old versions though; the newest version is visualy almost identical, and just works better.
I have updated the card creator. Mainly some small cosmetic improvements (larger faction logos, improved warbeast damage spiral, etc), and some new cosmetic options (transparent field backgrounds, transparent “white” text). They might be small changes, but they took quite a long time to do. Anyway, here’s an updated example:
Quick update: I added tooltips to all the options in the menu that show when you hover the mouse over them, and also added some non-standard base size icons for homebrew or use in other games.
I have actually built a version of my card-creator to work something like that in the past. It was based around the journeyman thing PP did one time, where you build up your own warcaster over several weeks. I had a system where it would read a configuration file and allow the user to build their warcaster by selecting from options, each of which cost points.
You can see it here, although it needs a config file and I don’t have the demo file to hand right now (I will try to dig it up and post it here later): SoulSamurai: Warmachine Homebrew Caster Creator v1
Adding a function to the new card creator to simply read values from a json should not be too hard, although I need to do a bit of research on doing it directly from an http request. I can look into it over the weekend if I find the time.
How do you see this working though? How does generating the http request take less work than manually populating the card? I’m curious about exactly what you have in mind.
OK, I’ve looked into loading data from a JSON in an HTTP request, and it looks doable. A bit ugly (because it needs to be part of the URL since I’m working client-side), but doable.
It will take some time to implement because the different types of card data need to be handled in several different ways, but I can start laying the groundwork for now.
Sounds awesome! If you’re willing to work on the app side, that would be great. I’ll start working on the data import and I’ll post my progress here.
Initially I’ll just focus on what makes sense on my side in terms of the data format, but I can always modify it later to handle data that’s easier to export.
FYI here’s the latest config file for my old homebrew caster creator that I linked a few posts back. I don’t think it’s working very well, not sure why, but it gives an idea of what I was going for if anyone is interested.
Quick update: while working on the json stuff, I realised that my previous “improvement” to the warbeast damage spiral actually broke it so the circles couldn’t be hidden anymore. I have now fixed that.
