New in this Update

Bug Fixes

Core Plugin

• Fixed minor memory leak when removing cards introduced in v1.3.0
• Fixed touch input bug when selecting cards. There was a different bug for MZ and MV but both should be resolved. 
• Fixed crash from touch input on the Card Library scene
• Fixed crash when adding party members mid-battle

Party UI Plugin

• Fixed crash when removing actors from party mid-battle.
• Removed button order code for compatibility with 1.3.2
  

New Features

Core Plugin

You can now reorder the buttons/hand in any configuration!

I've removed the parameters that ask you if you want to display the item button or the end turn button and replaced them with one parameter where you can determine the order of these things or omit them entirely.

For instance if you set it to "Hand Item End" then you'll get the configuration that IsiahCGCPartyUI_A was designed for, with the item button and end turn buttons both to the right of all the cards in the hand.

If you set it to "Hand End" then the item button will not show up at all. If you set it to "Item End"... then you can't play any cards. So I recommend against that one.

It is case sensitive, which I may change in a future update. I don't really like strict formatting but I couldn't avoid it this time.

But the main plugin isn't the only thing I'm updating this time.

Party UI Plugin

You can now look at other party members' hands during an actor's turn.

As you can see in this screenshot, it's Therese's turn, but I'm looking through Harold's cards. I can't play any of them, of course, and if I hit Cancel I'll return right to Therese's hand.

If you press Up during an actor's turn it will let you scroll through the status window above and select and actor to peek at. It won't execute their Start of Turn Actions, which means on the first turn most hands will be empty.

I wanted this feature in the main plugin but it really needs the UI to support it, so it's in the UI plugin at least for the time being.

Added Plugin Compatibility

This is a new section of the Dev Log where we cover compatibility with other plugins! We've heard your requests and are spending some time figuring out how to ensure that our plugin works smoothly with those of other plugin makers. Here's a few plugins we achieved compatibility with this patch:

• Irina_AutoMessageColor
• RS_MessageAlign
• Eli Message Actions

So where's VisuStella compatibility?

As you may know, the VisuStella team encrypts their plugins to make it harder to steal their code. As a result, extending or adding compatibility to their plugins is basically impossible without their assistance. We reached out to the team and the response was rather discouraging. It seems they have no interest in helping us make sure our plugin is compatible with their suite of plugins.

Lots of people have asked us to offer this compatibility, but it's basically out of our hands. I feel like MZ devs are really getting the short end of the stick here but there's nothing I can really do. We are looking into compatibility with Moghunter and Olivia plugin suites for the future which we hope will help MZ folks in the long run.

What to look forward to:

So this could just be copy-pasted from my last devlog, as those features are still planned for v1.4.0.

Just to quickly reiterate those:

• Card Types
• Card Filtering
• Card Actions that effect the Target rather than the User

But I want to add something else to my plate:

More Card Action triggers

What do I mean by this? Well in a lot of card games, certain things happen when a specific card is discarded, or drawn, or removed from play. This simple addition will add a ton of utility to the plugin.

Now, these four features are quite a lot, and I don't want to over-promise and under-deliver. The "more Card Action triggers" feature may be added in a minor update after the major one, just to make sure I can get everything out in a vaguely timely manner.

Final Thoughts

I'm not happy with how the rollout of 1.3.0 went. I introduced a ton of bugs and immediately disappeared for a month so I could move across the country.  I wouldn't call it a rushed release but there was definitely a time constraint that isn't normally there. The good news is I'm nice and settled in and I'm back full time.

A part of me wants to do smaller, more frequent updates, but the pipeline for releasing the updates is fairly time consuming and it works better for my team if they happen less frequently. I don't know when it happened but Card Game Combat surpassed 5,000 lines of code, and it grows every update. It's almost as large as YEP_BattleEngineCore, and will probably surpass it in size by v1.4.0. All this means that checking that nothing breaks between updates takes longer and longer each time. I'm going to do what I can to speed up the pipeline without any quality drops, because I don't like making people wait for features that are already finished while we're checking on unrelated systems - but again, right now we can only afford to work on this plugin one day a week.

Just some quick math while I'm thinking about code count: Card Game Combat is 1/7th the size of MV's vanilla code, not including the pixi library. Based on how old the plugin is I wrote an average of 700 lines per month (we're not included deleted lines). At that rate of development, it would take me 4 years and 2 months to reach the exact line count of vanilla MV. 

Those are rookie numbers. I want to go faster.

Last but not least, if your card game uses a lot of State Effects and you don't have enough space to fit those descriptions, we recently released a brand new utility plugin called State Info Popup! This creates a set of custom windows where you can show descriptions for each State Effect applied. The descriptions can be very easily added in via notetags. It's lightweight, it's cheap and it's 100% compatible with Card Game Combat. Enjoy!

-Isiah (@IsiahGames)
MythAtelier