Played my first couple games on Jinteki.net the other night. didn’t feel like waiting for my brother who is relatively new to the game to set-up OCTGN, the main issue being finding album art as he is not familiar with the cards and I think it’d be difficult for a new player to only have the text templates.
my thoughts:
I was impressed with the GUI. It was relatively clean and all the card art looked great.
The client itself leads to much slower games as far as I can tell, for two reasons. One, the lack of automation forces many manual interactions which take much longer than OCTGN automations. Even simple things like Kate’s ability requires you to edit your credits. The worst I had to deal with was Shipment from Kaguya, but I can’t imagine playing Jinteki and having to use Mushin No Shin. The second thing slowing down Jinteki.net is how runs are structured. While it may be closer to how the real game works, requiring several clicks by both players bogs down the experience.
It may not be the most fair critique, given only 2 games, but I’d say that the only advantage of Jinteki.net is the lack of set-up time. OCTGN is faster and easier, once you invest a few games to learn the buttons. I would argue that Skype is even more necessary for playing over Jinteki.net than it is for playing via OCTGN. The only players I’d recommend Jinteki.net to are those who aren’t going to play online that often. For those who are, it seems like you would ultimately save a lot of time by using OCTGN. I’d say games between advanced players could be finished at least 20% faster on OCTGN than Jinteki.net. The limiting factor to play speed on OCTGN are the players, whereas with Jinteki.net the client itself limits play speed.
Lastly, am I dumb or is there no way to expose cards? My brother played Infiltration and the only way I could figure to expose it was to rez it, then derez and reset my credits. I guess one could just type it in chat or tell them over Skype.
Agree with all this. And afaict there isn’t a way to expose. IMO there are several problems that are way bigger than little tedious things like kate credits and run structure:
No way to spectate
No way to rejoin/resume a game if you lose your browser window (I couldn’t possibly imagine why anybody would lose their browser window!!)
Dragging cards from zone to zone occasionally makes your browser leave the game and go to the jpg url for the card (and then the game is lost). (This was in firefox on linux, fwiw. On chrome I couldn’t even drag cards to begin with.)
Credits must be edited in increments of one. Playing blue sun is a nightmare. And on OCTGN, experienced players often shortcut runs by just subtracting however many credits the run costs in total. (Likewise, you can’t add/remove virus/power counters manually.)
I think that, while it’s obviously not as good as OCTGN right now, it has a lot of room to grow and could definitely supplant OCTGN once more automation, ease-of-use, and spectator functionality is added. The fact that it looks nicer and is easy to set up is a big fucking deal.
We may not care about these things very much, but I think that the best way to grow the game is to have something readily available to newer players that’s easy to get going with and nice to look at.
For me the most exciting thing about this platform is making possible features that OCTGN core just won’t support.
How great for the game would a playable online tutorial be? Just to walk someone through what all these crazy terms mean, how to make a run, how the different card types work in an interactive format is absurdly useful. I don’t hate training noobs but it gets tedious after a while and this would cover the basics nicely.
How great for the game would a basic, dumb as nails AI be that would play some pre-constructed deck and give new players a punching bag to practice against? A lot of people don’t get out to play as often as they’d like, but they could test out their ridiculous garbage deck in a web browser and figure out how to make it suck less.
We’re a lot of expert players here but the noobs outnumber us at least 10 to 1 and they need this site more than we do.
Is AI achievable with Jinteki.net? I’m no coder or scripter so I have no idea what’s going on there.
I meant to mention this. It is certainly painstaking.
Like I said, I would currently only recommend Jinteki.net to new / casual players.
I’m a huge noob but I learned OCTGN pretty quickly. Your points are valid but I think the main disadvantage of OCTGN is the set-up. Once you’re set up, it’s relatively easy to learn.
OCTGN is too unreliable. I’ve basically given up on the Stimhack league because of how many games I’ve had to abandon due to a disconnect in the middle of a script.
I’ve also read and understand the code (I implemented psi games for myself before mtgred wound doing it himself) and I’d be happy to help complete some of the outstanding tasks. If someone could provide hosting, I wouldn’t even mind deploying and maintaining a fork of the code (from which mtgred would of course be free to take any changes).
There’s nothing stopping it. The code has sort of been built with the assumption of two people playing, but I think changing this assumption is doable (as is adding spectators).
Writing an AI for Netrunner would be a lot of work, though.
For me, I just want something that I can play on my Mac without worrying about it crashing.
I think once the rest of the cards are implemented, it’ll be just as easy to use, and a lot more friendly for newcomers. I’d second @higgs_bozo’s offer: I’d love to help with some of the implementation load. (Does @mtgred read this thread?)
I started working on the game engine 4 months ago and I have a full time job so jinteki.net development happens only during evenings and weekends when I have free time. So yeah Jinteki.net is still very alpha and has rough edges.
At the moment about 400 cards out the 635 in the pool up to Order and Chaos are automated. For the cards that aren’t yet like Kate or Blue Sun, it can be tedious to resolve their ability manually. You just have be patient, they will be automated eventually. Features such as spectating, game reconnection or player/game statistics are also foreseen and will be added eventually but the development focus at the moment is on the game engine.
If you are proficient with Clojure or Node.js and would like to help, install it on your machine and have a look at the source code. If you feel you can help, we can get in touch to talk about how things work and what features you could develop.
Just tried this out for the first time - it’s amazingly professional-looking, and I can mange most things without too much to-do. Exile’s ability seems like it should be easy to manually automate (just ‘draw a card’ whenever clone chip is used, retrieval run fires, scavenge is used, pawn is used, or test run is used from heap). It’s nice that most cards are automatic, though.
There are fundamental problems with jinteki.net that need to be addressed before it will ever be used by the community with any sort of consistency.
One quick example: it shouldn’t take a full second lag when you try to Add or Subtract a credit manually. If you need to take back a move and minus 4 credits it simply takes too long. If this isn’t addressed jinteki.net will never catch on. It’s a small thing, but fundamental to a decent experience playing the game.
I agree that example needs to be fixed, but OCTGN has its problems too, and for people who can’t run OCTGN this is much better than nothing. There are already quite a few people there regularly.
I have a friend that I introduced to the game IRL a few weeks ago and he really liked it and wondered if there was a digital version that we could play (he lives in another country). We both use macs so OCTGN is a no (and really not that netrunner-newbie friendly). I thought I might try jinteki.net with him. I’m thinking I should put together some decks that use the automated card pool and would be fun and balanced for us to play. Anyone wanna help? I really don’t understand the compatibility list.
I want to give huge props to @mtgred for creating jinteki.net & making it open source. This has real potential to be a OCTGN alternative. I’m a Mac user and really dislike Windows; while you can run a free VM, OCTGN is slow and buggy on it plus it takes a ton of disk space. OCTGN also doesn’t seem equipped to handle a lot of ANR dynamics; the lack of true location/remote server/ice order knowledge leads to hacky work-arounds.
A web app is just perfect for Netrunner and the architecture choices (Node and web sockets) were smart, too. Yes, it needs work, but it starts from a solid framework. I played a great game last night and the unscripted cards were easy to work around. I hope the community can keep working on this project to make it viable, I intend to contribute as much as I’m able to (got a pull request accepted yesterday!).
I’ll help put together deck lists that work on the site.
What is it that you don’t understand about the compatibility list? The thing to look for when considering a card is a “Done” in the second column. The cards that haven’t been scripted tend to do something special or tricky. If your friend is new, they may not want to play with the more complex cards right away anyways.
