I just pushed the 1000th commit in Fireplace.

I started the project almost a year ago. The initial commit had support for creating Game, Player and Deck objects and would get you as far as Game.start(). It was a glorified card shuffler and was based on the data from HearthstoneJSON.com.

It has been almost a year since I started the project. Fireplace now supports most cards and mechanics in the game, although some of the more elaborate bits are still missing.

The HearthSim community is flourishing. Patashu, one of our members, has been publishing “Hearthstone Science” videos which have grown quite popular. The 4/11 Twilight Drake setup is my personal favourite, due to how elaborate it is, and after coming up with it late at night, unable to sleep.

I’m also very happy to see that Team 5 continues to be so open and forward with its community. Hearthstone still feels like an indie game in many ways. I hope this continues, because I have recently started work on Stove, a Pegasus-compatible server in Go that will run Fireplace as its simulation server. Early days and little time to work on it though, full-blown Fireplace games on the official client are still a long way off.

Very recently, Blizzard released Tavern Brawl, a new Player vs. Player game mode featuring unique cards and decks. Some of the mechanics and interactions featured in Tavern Brawl are unique, making it a fantastic testbed for Fireplace.

I have gleaned as much as I could from it, and even started implementing it. While working on Wild Magic, I got distracted by an outstanding cleanup in card actions. Getting a random card from within an action was fairly nasty before.

Take Webspinner for example:

class FP1_011:
	def deathrattle(self):
		choice = randomCollectible(type=CardType.MINION, race=Race.BEAST)
		return [Give(CONTROLLER, choice)]

The card couldn’t be fully declarative, as the randomCollectible helper was evaluated during the action itself. This is no longer the case. 48f46fd implements a RandomCardGenerator which is used by the Give and Summon actions to find random cards by various criteria. Like before, those criteria can be any CardXML attribute - so if you wanted to find a random legendary minion, you would now do: RandomCardGenerator(type=CardType.MINION, rarity=Rarity.LEGENDARY, collectible=True).

To make it easier, we also have RandomCard, RandomCollectible, RandomMinion etc. This is the new Webspinner:

class FP1_011:
	def deathrattle(self):
		deathrattle = [Give(CONTROLLER, RandomMinion(race=Race.BEAST))]

How concise.

Incidentally, I adopted the same system for Spare Parts. From the information in the game files, it looks like Blizzard uses the Entourage mechanism to conjure Spare Parts from various cards. Unnecessary duplication of effort.

I used to have a GiveSparePart action to work around the non-declarative nastiness mentioned above. This is now gone as well, as it’s now possible to do Give(CONTROLLER, RandomSparePart()).

I hope to finish Tavern Brawls soon. There’s still quite a bit to test and, unfortunately, there is no way to continue testing specific scenarios after they have closed. I don’t know what’s in store for the next weeks, but I’m looking forward to it.

72 files changed, 10637 insertions(+), 131 deletions(-)

Jerome