I am working on making a card game in vb.net. It's not a playing card game; but that's poor wording... hmm, think more 'Magic: The Gathering', less poker cards. Anyway, I have physical cards, which have text on them that will need to be readable when I scan them in and add them to the game.
What I am hoping to find out is if anyone knows the best choice for the object type to use to hold these images. I am hoping to have a graphic for a table (the background) and then individual cards that may be re-sized and moved around during the course of the game. I want to make sure I can scale the cards and leave the text readable, and be sure I can do smooth transitions for card movement, etc.
I am currently only aware of system.drawing.image, and using a picture box in my form in order to display it all. Are there any better alternatives out there? Some assembly that you would recommend for use? I do plan to make custom buttons to display over the cards for the user to make gameplay choices, if that would change anything.
I did google around a good bit, but having the words 'card, game, and graphics' in a search tends to lead me around to the wrong kinds of results.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated, thanks!
Graphic Display for Card Game
Author
Found my answer, Installed XNA Game Studio (was unaware of it's existence) and brought my images in via the content pipeline.
For a game like Magic: The Gathering where rules are written on the cards, I suggest keeping the card text and art separate if at all possible. In my game, The Trouble With Robots, I decided to have the engine render text over the top of the card art image, with results like this:
This approach has been immensely useful in allowing me to tweak abilities and wording of cards quickly without having to reconstruct the card from scratch. Another approach would be to have two graphical layers so that you can at least replace the text without redoing the image. If you scan images in with text already on them you will not be able to do this.
- Geoffrey
This approach has been immensely useful in allowing me to tweak abilities and wording of cards quickly without having to reconstruct the card from scratch. Another approach would be to have two graphical layers so that you can at least replace the text without redoing the image. If you scan images in with text already on them you will not be able to do this.
- Geoffrey
Depending on the text, you might be able to use OCR 
But Geoffrey is right, you definitely want to have the text stored separately - this way you'll also be able to do things like searching for cards with effects, cards with a certain power rating, etc.
But Geoffrey is right, you definitely want to have the text stored separately - this way you'll also be able to do things like searching for cards with effects, cards with a certain power rating, etc.
Author
Hmm, thanks Geoffrey/ndssia, I will definitely do that. I can't think of a situation where I would need to actually adjust the card wording in my case, but you never know. The search function might be an eventual feature though... Hmm....
Depending on the text, you might be able to use OCR
But Geoffrey is right, you definitely want to have the text stored separately - this way you'll also be able to do things like searching for cards with effects, cards with a certain power rating, etc.
I agree, if you want to extract text from scanned image, ocr is the best choice.
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