v1.0.2.1
Hey everyone, after a week of going through the priority list of features and updates, I have a new release for you.
Most of the changes made this week are behind-the-scenes performance improvements and rearranging/documenting code in preparation for creating an open-source project (I wasn’t able to hit my goal of setting that up this week, but hopefully by this time next week it will be there), but I was able to sneak in some new features, including one that many people have requested.
Due to the fact that I made some changes to the auto-updater functionality that are incompatible with earlier versions (before version 1.0.2.0), I would recommend re-installing it if you already installed a previous version, as well as deleting any cache files created by older versions in the folder at C:\Users\{{Your User}}\AppData\LocalLow\DailyArena\DailyArenaDeckAdvisor (your drive letter may be different).
Here are the features that have changed since the previous version:
One of the top-requested features was to be able to “ignore sideboards”. I interpret that as a call for best-of-one support, which isn’t quite the same as dropping the sideboard off of best-of-three decks.
I have added a “Format” drop-down in the upper-right corner of the window, which (so far) contains three options: Standard, Arena Standard, and Brawl. “Arena Standard” contains best-of-one decks without sideboards. A caveat: the Arena Standard data currently comes from mtggoldfish, and isn’t of the same quality as the data for Standard and Brawl. The plan is to get higher-quality data for this in the future, likely from another source.
I know that Brawl has not been added to Arena yet, but it was promised, and Brawl decks can be great guides for Singleton, so I figured it was worth it to add…especially since the programming cost was relatively low.
Next to the “Format” drop-down, two refresh buttons now appear. The first one refreshes the player inventory without re-downloading deck information, etc., from the server. This is useful for re-calculating the suggestions, etc., after you open boosters or otherwise collect new cards or wildcards. Just make sure to open your the Arena “Collection” page to dump the updated inventory information to the real-time log.
The second refresh button (with an exclamation point) re-queries the server to see if any data has changed, re-loads the card database and player inventory, and then re-runs all the calculations. Since all of the server-side information is now updated on a daily basis, this button is really only useful in the case where you leave the application running overnight and want to refresh it the next day.
A bunch of under-the-hood performance improvements have been made. The biggest improvements come from implementing a daily job on the server side to update any server-side cached data, and adding a client-side cache to keep the application from going off to the internet to download information more than necessary.
I also changed code around some of the more computationally expensive operations that were previously getting executed multiple times unnecessarily, to store the results of the initial operation and re-use it instead.