Greetings my friends,
Sadly the time has come. The last few months have been extremely busy for me, with both work and family life, and has brought the realization to me that I cannot support the CCG Toolkit in good faith anymore. I love the Toolkit. I still see great things for it, should somebody see fit to carry on the torch. But for me it is time to move on to the next chapter.
I can't thank everybody enough for the support they've given me through the years. Some of you have supported by spreading the word, some have supported financially, some have supported by donating your time to filling out the template or downloading card scans to get the set releases in. You folks are the true heroes and kept things going for so long. If we ever meet up someday, remind me who you are and I owe you cup of coffee, soda, beverage of choice, and a hug (yeah, I'm slightly weird like that 8^D)
Fortunately there are plenty of resources to keep you going. Most of them have already carved out a good niche and have surpassed what the Toolkit has been able to do.
For starters, CCGDB is still going to be running, as far as Michael is still doing things there. Michael's site is really top grade and accomplished what I had hoped to do here, and get multiple CCGs into the programs for those of you that play more than one.
I think most, if not all, of you know about the Yu-Gi-Oh Wikia. They've got a top notch staff working there now and they have great quality scans and card releases as soon as I've seen any site to date. They also have the rulings posted for cards there as well.
Some folks are a little iffy about having card rulings posted on a Wiki page, since it can be edited, and there is a Geocities site that took up the helm and has all of the latest rules posted. In addition, a good friend that is still working hard has a judge for Yugi has a portable format for the rules using a program called Tome Raider. You can download the document (as well as WoW) from here.
YVD is still up and running, and from what I've seen int the past, they've updated their deck builder a bit more to coincide with the 9.0 release a while back.
These guys are keeping keeping the torch burning and I highly recommend them to you. The netrep site should be up until February of next year, when the domain expires, but I wager it'll lose its pull due to the fact that things aren't being updated as frequently.
For any of those geeks/hackers out there, I'll squeak out one little tip that I hope helps. All of the modules used in Deck Studio are using a free library called SQLite. It is a free database engine that is comprised of a single file. If you get a utility to manage SQLite databases, (such as the free SQLite Administrator), you should be able to piece together the schema and make updates as you see fit. You can use the manual update utility to make sure things get imported without hassle. I made sure to unencrypt the TCR when I updated my main library, partially in hopes of opening some APIs into the system. The image library will be a bit trickier, since you need the unique Ids from the TCR and have to store images in a "blob" format.
Sadly my Yugi time has dwindled down to none since moving, but I have gotten into another CCG (L5R) with a couple of buddies, so I'm keeping the gamer spirit alive. I might not be around the forums much anymore, but feel free to drop me a line (dillieo [at] gmail [dot] com) if you're ever bored and need somebody to chat with. I can usually check that from work throughout the day. Oh, if anybody is interested in a massive collection of Yugi cards, drop me a line. I'm keeping my precious Giant Kozaky and Fiendosity decks, but the rest of the cards can help pay some bills. 8^D
So thank you all again for a great ride for these past 5 years. I truly have felt that this has been a "by duelists, for duelists" endeavor, which is what I intended from the start. Somewhere here, or in heaven, I hope to see you again.
With the utmost sincerity, your brain collapsed Kozaky..
[:: Sean ::]
a.k.a. Dillie-O
Posted
14 Sep 2009 6:58 PM
by
Dillie-O