Hi,
I'd like to share some thoughts on how I and others might be able to help. And especially how you might be able to reduce the overhead of maintaining this project.
1) I believe that maintaining bug reports on this forum and on the google bug tracker unnecessarily increases the effort to keep track of issues and requests. I usually make a screenshot to remind myself of things I want to report or I write them down in a note on my phone while playing. I've now started keeping track where I reported them and you probably need to do the same.
I recommend closing the bug threads on the forum and simply direct everyone to report issues directly in the google bug tracker.
2) I'm no developer, I don't know C++ but I do know scripting and I'm learning python. I have tried to write something to check the card definitions but as has been reported in another post in this thread parsing the .dat files is not easy. It's probably possible in python as well but I haven't been able to figure that out yet. I tried a little sed magic to turn the .dat files into .ini type files but since every card's section is labeled [card] I ended up with a single card entry.
If you could either provide some hints on how I can parse the .dat files or (I realize that's probably a big effort) change to a different format I might be able to help track down existing issues in the card database.
3) To prove point 1) I'm not sure I reported this already but I believe a lot of issues with the card's like text not matching the actual abilities could be resolved by generating the rules text from the card's abilities.
You need to parse the abilities for every card anyway so generating a string based on that should be possible and doing so avoids any possible contradiction.
4) (apologies for the plug) The
feature request I filed to have logging of whatever happened during the game would help both reporters of an issue and whoever works on resolving the issue.
An alternative would be the ability to add a unit test.
I tried running the current test scheme on Windows but was unsuccesful and since I don't normally use Windows I have not tried again.
5) Maybe not strictly related to this topic but I'm unable to compile the game on Fedora Linux because the fmod library is not shipped by default. Debian based distros do have a (non official) package for it. If I were able to compile without this library I'd be able to test and hopefully help more.