Who created/programmed OPO?

[DarKBladE09]

Anyone know who the person is who programmed the Overpower Online program or how to contact them? I've started to work on my own version of the program and just wanted to know if they had a problem with me using the name Overpower Online 3.0 or modifying their code. I don't want to step on anyone's toes. I also would like to know what they used to code it. I'm guessing Visual Basic 6. It would probably be way easier to modify their existing code instead of start from scratch like I've already done.

On a side note, about my program, it will be a long time coming. I'm not great at programming yet, but am a software engineering student and have already started building the interface. I plan to have much less clicking involved, being able to watch games, maybe even play against the computer, and having an actual server for everyone to chat and find someone to play in. Cards will be bigger, better resolution, easier to see, and auto resizeable in relation to the main window size and almost all of the game will be automated, so you wont have to click to K.O. your characters, move your own mission cards, view your draw pile to discard top 5 cards, etc. Should be able to drag cards to play, discard, or place them as well. I also want to put in a feature that will temporarily remove custom cards and Marvels cards when you and your opponent agree not to use them. These are big goals for me, but I think it would help get more people into the game and work a lot smoother and easier making for a more fun experience overall. Input is welcome on what features you guys want implmented also.

[Jack]

Hi,

I used to know the names of the two people who worked on OPO back in the day. I have an old version of the source available and it is coded in VB6. This source is not reflective of the current 2.5.3 version.
http://files.overpower.ca/source/OPO_source.zip

As for using the name, there is no restriction on calling your program OPO 3.0. I am currently the domain owner for OverPowerOnline.com as well as an assortment of other related domains.

I, too, am a programmer and I am the lead (only?) developer of the OverPower site. I also have ambitious goals to recreate OPO but my goals for the game would keep it on a browser instead of having native applications which, as the current OPO has shown, may become obsolete due to newer technologies.

What languages do you program in? I'm primarily a PHP/MySQL/Javascript developer which would explain my preference to develop the game within a browser. There's another thread about this somewhere that further explains my goals and the only thing preventing me from working on the project is time. I am in my last year of school and there isn't much time I can devote to development.

[DarKBladE09]

I think the browser is a good idea. Especially if I can't figure out how to make a server work. your source file should help me give it a shot tho. I may even be able to more quickly just update the current version to be resizable with larger, better resolution cards, which I think is the biggest problem so far and why I started this project.

I'm mostly python/java/C++. I'm using Visual studio to create it for now. It's like visual basic but much newer and so far it seems, in some respects, to be a more user friendly c++ and java way of doing things without me having to create the visual elements myself. I'm about half way done with my schooling.  I've made a website before but I used webpage creating software to do it visually. So I probably wouldn't be of much help unless you used a lot of Java, which wouldn't be hard to move over and clean up, I think.

Any idea which version the source is? I'm currently playing with 2.0 which is the version I'd like to edit.

[Jack]

I think the source is version 1.x or so, it was the only source I have in my archive. I believe I had the source for 2.5.0 at one time but I cannot find it. The 1.5 version is extremely old and it should be only used to copy logic/queries out of and not built-upon.

The current game uses a direct connection model, which works fine until you stick a NAT firewall between computers. It requires using a VPN to use without breaching firewalls or opening of ports to a raw socket, which is a huge security problems. It will also fail when IPv6 comes around since it only knows how to speak v4.

You're free to use my card scans, my only terms of use is that you don't claim them as your own and that you link back to the main site in some capacity.

The current database, Overpower.mdb, is slightly outdated and is bloated with BLOBs of the images. I am willing to take some time to export a sqlite version of my current database which has correct spelling mistakes as well as better logic for determining if a special is usable with a character -- without hard-coding value.

Battery is low, I'll add more later.

EDIT:

The creators of OPO are CBader & JCTango. I "recently" came across JCTango while doing a witch hunt for OP people: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/jctango/overpower-ccg/30-84359/

Java might be useful if there's an Android application to develop, I'm out of touch with my Java programming (3/4+ years I believe since I last typed public static void main). I really haven't developed any applications for desktops in a while either, the C/C++ coding I code is mostly systems programming for my classes.

My scans are available in either 300x420 or 500x700 and I have links to zipsets on my site.

[gameplan.exe]

you guys make me excited about things that are way over my head! 

[DarKBladE09]

I'll definitely want to use the database and will edit it accordingly... what resolution are the blobs in your latest database? If you had one with your high res images or even the other ones you have on your site, that would be of great help so i don't have to move the high res ones into the DB. I'm just gonna use the DB to store values and such for cards and use the program to do most of the logic

[Jack]

I prefer not to store the images as BLOBs in a database, they provide for an extremely inefficient way of updating databases -- it also puts a lot of load for the database engine to retrieve such tuples. I keep them as regular images, PNG to be specific. To contrast the size, the JPGs in the original database were about 53MB, my PNGs are about 700MB in 300x420 resolution. The 500x700 resolution pack is over 2GB.

My suite of apps are all web based so it's only natural to keep them as files. If you are working on an application, please reconsider your decision to store them in BLOBs. There's no inherent benefit of doing so except to keep everything as "one" file -- being the database. If you wish to store the cards in "one" file, consider using a zip and cache them as-used on run-time. At least it would make "patching" any card updates to the file easier. The filenames for the cards are stored as an entry in the database, they used to reflect the primary key of each card (relative to each table) but over time that has changed slightly.

[DarKBladE09]

okay, so i can just remove the current PNGs that you have stored and replace them with the JPEGS? or should i just use the database to pull data from and not images?

[Jack]

Clarification is needed.

Overpower.mdb is the stuff that comes with OPO. That is not mine. That has JPGs and images stored in BLOBs in an Access database.

I extracted the database from Overpower.mdb, removed all the BLOBs and replaced them with VARCHARs with file paths to where the cards can be found. I also restructured the database so there's less redundancy with the data and did some fixes with the texts (spelling, missing, etc.). Recently, I added the backs of all the cards if there is any need for such a thing (namely Mission cards). The database is currently in MySQL and there are two master copies.

I can offer up a SQLite version of the database. There's no 1:1 conversion from MySQL to SQLite that's guaranteed to work so this will take time for me to fudge out. If you want another type of SQL, you'll have to give me more time.

If you want to use JPGs, go for it.

[DarKBladE09]

I'm not very good with databases, but do have some familiarity with MS Access. I've never used SQL for anything. Is there any advantage to using what you have, which I'm guessing is a database on a server. Is MySQL or SQLLite exportable to Access? From the quick search I did online, it would seem so.

[Jack]

Most database languages are transportable to another, but it takes work. It's mostly the database schema (tables) that needs to be tooled, the actual data can be inserted easily.

I'm not sure what you mean by "advantage". SQL is used to ask a database for information. I'm not familiar with Access, but I figure that it could use other forms of information retrieval. It's a much better solution than storing all the information you need in arrays/structs because you'll need n² run-time to find data for a simple check for a character's Strength stat in the worst case (Zealot if you sorted things in alphabetical order).

[Jesse]

you guys make me excited about things that are way over my head! 

I second this notion!

[DarKBladE09]

k, just PM me a link to download your database or you can email it to me at clanier9@att.net. Thanks Jack!

[Jack]

I'll have it up by the end of the week, the "database" isn't something I can just copy out and send like Access' databases. The database is stored in nodes on the server and the only practical way to send it would be to give you SQL statements that would rebuild it.

Since you haven't really worked with SQL, I'm not sure how useful it would be to you at this current point in time. The queries are quite complex, especially with my optimized version. It takes a lot of relations to find a homebase's characters and specials. I am not sharing the queries at this current point in time.

The database will have a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Let me know, explicitly, if you agree with the terms of the licence.

[DarKBladE09]

I'll give it a try and I'll look over the terms of service sometime this week. If all else fails, I can take the existing 2.0 Access Database and just rework it. I probably don't need the realtionships, so no worries there. It would just be great to get something to pull data from that has all the existing cards with images and text already put in...