The 2024 Roadmap

Now also available in fancy video form, with visual previews and editing and stuff!

Quick textual summary: The 4 month intervals worked out even with a lot of other stuff going on, so we’re sticking with that. That means the following schedule:

  • April 2024: “Unity Evolved” (Nuva/Kal Kaita)
  • August? 2024: “The Rahi Update” – may be multiple releases in the second half of the year, we’ll see how long it takes
  • After that (maybe still 2024?): “Time of Trouble” (final BPEV lore batch)

As tantalizing as it is to maybe have the BPEV expansion done with the next year, I really can’t allow myself to put the Rahi stuff off any longer. So if that isn’t done within one gigantic release (which I wouldn’t expect unless things go really, really well), that sweet taste of completion will have to wait for a bit.

Also, if you watched the video, you may have seen some “optional side quests” at the end. Those are things that might be happening in the background along the way to improve my and/or the users’ experience. To repeat them here and elaborate a bit:

  • EDOPro repositiories – Apparently those can be used to have custom expansions that automatically update after installing them once, so that would tremendously simplify the releases for everyone.
  • YGO Omega – There’s another popular client flying around, maybe I can get my scripts set up so they work in both (without having to maintain them separately).
  • mse2cdb Windows build – I’m currently running my beautiful tool in the Linux subsystem because I haven’t been able to make a Windows executable for years now. Should probably fix that, but all attempts so far have been foiled by CMake being CMake.
  • Master Duel modding – The holy grail of custom card creation at this time. I’ve seen exactly one video claiming to have pulled this off in any capacity and it was never followed up on, so if it’s possible at all, it might only be in a very limited fashion. But no way to know until I’ve at least given it a try myself.

No guarantee any of these will actually happen, it’s just a general outline of what might come up. And outside of that, there’s also the usual stuff like deck ideas and April Fools’.

Happy new year!

They banned Isolde

Those bastards.

Anyway, “ban list reaction” is a new genre of post here, but I thought I’d make one just this once since that card has been a key component of most of our Warrior-centric, Kanohi-equipping decks through BCOT and BPEV. Long story short, Kanohi builds are dead until further notice because Equip Spells suck too much to be worth using in significant quantities without that bandaid. I was hoping it’d continue dodging the list, considering it wasn’t really dominating the meta because – again – Equip Spells suck, but I guess the amount of combo nonsense it technically enables finally got on people’s nerves enough. I get it.

One side task for 2024 is now going to be re-updating the Koro, Toa, etc decks to work in a different way without Isolde, and I’m honestly kind of looking forward to that. Having to build everything around that one card was getting a bit annoying, especially since it being a LIGHT Warrior screwed up the entire Koro Attribute theming. Now that it’s officially gone, the combo crafters’ cabal of the TCG might come up with some new ideas to make Warriors work smoothly, and maybe those can be integrated. We’ll see.

For what it’s worth, the currently in-development Toa Nuva are probably not that impacted by this change, as they can still trigger their Kanohi GY effects with the discards of their own searches (the way it’s actually meant to happen). I even have a build on the back burner that’s meant to run without any Warrior combos, will be showing that one off at some point.

The 2023 Roadmap

The good news: Regular updates will continue in this coming year. The bad news: I’m extending the standard interval from 2 months to 4. While last year’s schedule mostly worked out, it also kept me pretty damn busy, so between IRL commitments and the desire for some general technical updates on stuff like the site or my development tools, I feel a need to dial it back a bit and leave more time for other things.

With that, here’s the plan:

  • April 2023: Bohrok-Kal (1st Wave)
  • August 2023: Toa Nuva (2nd Wave)
  • December 2023: Bohrok-Kal (2nd Wave)

In other words, by the time the year is over, the cast of the Nuva vs Kal conflict should be fully gathered, and all that will be left for 2024 is the fabled Rahi update and the obligatory lore cards.

Happy new year!

BCOT Final Release Delay

The finalized release of the BCOT overhaul, with nicely cleaned up scripts and card texts, was meant for release this month, but unfortunately it’s not gonna work out. I seem to have underestimated how much time it would take to apply all the refactoring steps I had lined up to a grand total of 66 cards, and when I was finally through with all of them, I found it was already the last week of June. Making the posts and showcase video I’d like to have as part of this release that quickly just isn’t realistic between other, more urgent obligations, and so I’ve decided to make use of the privilege that separates a true hobby from work: I simply gave up on finishing it within schedule.

Now if you read between the lines, you’ll notice I do have the expansion itself done, and indeed the finalized version 3.21.6 can be found at the top of the Downloads page already. It’s just the promotional material, release notes, etc that will take a bit more time. Might be as soon as next week, might take until the end of July, who knows. I’m hoping the delay at least won’t be any longer than that so I can still stick to the roadmap overall.

The 2022 Roadmap

Did you know that it’s possible to plan development work ahead of time and then proceed along a fixed schedule, thus spotting potential problems well in advance? Sounds like witchcraft, but let’s try it. Just keep in mind that anything “planned” here is still subject to change for literally any reason whatsoever.

Pushing out an update every two months has proven to be a functional and sustainable pace, so using that as the basis:

  • February 2022: The Matoran Update – Polishing and extending the Koro strategies a bit more by taking another look at the Matoran cards in BCOT, BCOR, and BBTS … plus maybe also adding some new ones?
  • April 2022: Tale of the Toa – Final wave of Toa Mata support, and also final wave of reworked BCOT cards.
  • June 2022: Big refactoring run for BCOT scripts (and maybe the other expansions while I’m at it), first look at the Protodermic Evolution archetypes (Version 4.0 !).
  • August 2022: Energized Protodermis (1st Wave) First look at the Protodermic Evolution archetypes (Version 4.0 !)
  • October 2022: Toa Nuva (1st Wave) Energized Protodermis (1st Wave)
  • December 2022: Bohrok-Kal (1st Wave) Toa Nuva (1st Wave)

June August is an important milestone to watch out for, because the results of testing the first cards of BPEV will influence what their further support is like, which may change how much of it I have to make and in what order. So the plan for the second half of the year is more of an educated guess at this point, and the “(1st Wave)” notes don’t necessarily mean all of these things will get another wave next year.

(Updated 2022-04-28: Version 4.0 pushed back to August, following releases shifted accordingly)

A new way to display cards?

The main reason I decided to make my own site for the Bionicle YGOPro Expansion was that imgur, which I had previously been using for release posts, just felt way too limited. All I could make there was a long, long scroll of card images with a textual description below each, where both the transcribed card text (for readability) and any design notes lived. Anything that didn’t belong to one particular card, like an introduction of an archetype, had to be finagled in in some unfitting way or another. And then their anti-spam features eventually started making it even harder by just destroying any links in the text, which made it impossible to download the actual expansion pack with a single click coming from the imgur album. I think that was about the point I realized I would eventually need to find a different solution, and after looking around a bit it became clear the only way to really improve things would be a dedicated website. And so I made one, consolidating the project description, expansion list, download links, release posts and more into one nice package, and everyone lived happily ever after.

But wait, is this really all that much of an improvement? Sure, the format of the releases and theme guides is now much more free than it ever was on imgur and I can ramble about high-level details all I want in addition to introducing individual cards, but at the end of the day it’s still just some boring text and images I put together manually. You can click on the pics to get a little overlay that includes a transcription of the card text, which is nice, but surely we can do better on a site that can be customized down to the source code level, right?

Right! The potential of displaying cards in some fancy manner of my own crafting was actually a major reason I opted to make a WordPress site from scratch instead of just quickly putting something up on wordpress.com or Blogger. And I’m proud to now announce the first steps towards that have successfully been taken.

Behold: The fruit of this site’s very own plugin, the BYE Cardviewer Block!

Toa Mata Kopaka

Effect MonsterLevel 6 | WATER Warrior | ATK 2000 / DEF 2500

To Tribute Summon this card face-up, you can Tribute 1 WATER or “Toa Mata” monster in your hand, except “Toa Mata Kopaka”. If this card attacks, it is changed to Defense Position at the end of the Battle Phase. If this card is in face-up Defense Position, your opponent’s monsters cannot target monsters for attacks, except “Toa Mata Kopaka”. Once per turn, if another card(s) you control leaves the field because of an opponent’s card effect: You can banish 1 card your opponent controls.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.16.6)

Yes, yes, I know, it’s still just text and images. But all I have to do to get it into the post is specifying which card and version I want, and everything else gets fetched straight from the database and formatted in a standardized manner. It’s pretty, it’s cohesive, it’s reusable, and if you click on the card image it still opens the sweet little overlay just as before. Even comes with a separate layout for mobile (or otherwise horizontally challenged) devices!

As any good way of displaying Yu-Gi-Oh cards should, the block accounts for the different types of stats found across different types of monsters:

Turaga Nuju

Link Effect MonsterLink-2 [◀ ▶] | WATER Spellcaster | ATK 1100

2 monsters, including a WATER Warrior monster
If this card is Special Summoned: You can target 1 face-up Spell/Trap you control; until the end of the next turn, while you control a WATER monster, that target cannot be destroyed by card effects (even if this card leaves the field). Once per turn: You can target 1 card your opponent controls; change 1 monster you control to face-down Defense Position, and if you do, return that target to the hand.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.16.6)

And for the simpler Spells/Traps that are free of such cumbersome details, it just leaves out that line entirely:

Ko-Koro, Village of Ice

Field Spell

While all face-up monsters you control (min. 1) are WATER, apply these effects.
●If you did not declare an attack during your last turn, monsters your opponent controls cannot attack the turn they are Summoned.
●If none of your opponent’s cards where destroyed or banished by your card effects since your last Standby Phase, monsters you control cannot be destroyed by your opponent’s card effects, also your opponent cannot target them with card effects.
●If you did not activate any monster effects this turn, negate the effects of face-up monsters that were Special Summoned this turn while your opponent controls them.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.16.6)

If you’re browsing on mobile, you’ll see these blocks as a single-column layout with all the info listed beneath the card image, but on desktop it just shows image and info next to each other. However, we also have the option to force the mobile layout on wider screens which can be used to do things like comparing two versions of the same card side-by-side:

C.C. Matoran Maku

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | WATER Warrior | ATK 500 / DEF 200

(Quick Effect): You can send this card from your hand to the GY, then target 1 face-up card you control; for the rest of this Chain after this effect resolves, or until the end of this turn if it is a “Matoran” monster, it is unaffected by other card effects, except its own. When your opponent activates a card or effect on the field (Quick Effect): You can Special Summon this card from the GY to your Main Monster Zone in the same column as that card, and if you do, change 1 face-up monster on the field to Defense Position. You can only use each effect of “C.C. Matoran Maku” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.12.10)

C.C. Matoran Maku

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | WATER Warrior | ATK 500 / DEF 200

When your opponent activates a card or effect on the field (Quick Effect): You can Special Summon this card from your hand or GY to your Main Monster Zone in the same column as that card, and if you do, change 1 face-up monster on the field to Defense Position. (Quick Effect): You can target 1 other face-up card you control; for the rest of this Chain after this effect resolves, or until the end of this turn if it is a “Matoran” monster, it is unaffected by other card effects, except its own. You can only use each effect of “C.C. Matoran Maku” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.16.6)

For readers cursed with particularly narrow screens, these two might still look like they’re just underneath each other, but I swear they line up if there’s enough space available. Most importantly, either version is perfectly readable, and all the information you could want about a card is right there.

For the time being, this post here will be the only part of the site using the new layout, because to be quite honest it’s still very much a prototype. The frontend looks fairly presentable already, but hidden in the backend is a plain HTML form where I have to manually enter every single card’s information to get it into the database. Similarly, configuring the blocks is done by typing the identifiers of the desired card into haphazardly placed text fields. So before I really start using it, I still need to put some work into improving those portions, ideally with an option to directly upload a .cdb file and proper configuration UI featuring some idiot-proof dropdowns. Frontend may receive some updates along the way, too, but the nice thing about custom blocks is that the copies I’ve already used here will udpate without any extra work needed!

As a last note, if you happen to be seeing this and thinking “Hey, I could use that too!”, good news: The source code is all available on GitHub. It’s obviously tuned and tested for my specific needs, so make adjustments as needed.

EDIT 2021-10-12: Upon further consideration, maybe tabs would be the better way to do comparisons? Then nothing has to get squished.

Old

C.C. Matoran Maku

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | WATER Warrior | ATK 500 / DEF 200

(Quick Effect): You can send this card from your hand to the GY, then target 1 face-up card you control; for the rest of this Chain after this effect resolves, or until the end of this turn if it is a “Matoran” monster, it is unaffected by other card effects, except its own. When your opponent activates a card or effect on the field (Quick Effect): You can Special Summon this card from the GY to your Main Monster Zone in the same column as that card, and if you do, change 1 face-up monster on the field to Defense Position. You can only use each effect of “C.C. Matoran Maku” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.12.10)
New

C.C. Matoran Maku

Effect MonsterLevel 2 | WATER Warrior | ATK 500 / DEF 200

When your opponent activates a card or effect on the field (Quick Effect): You can Special Summon this card from your hand or GY to your Main Monster Zone in the same column as that card, and if you do, change 1 face-up monster on the field to Defense Position. (Quick Effect): You can target 1 other face-up card you control; for the rest of this Chain after this effect resolves, or until the end of this turn if it is a “Matoran” monster, it is unaffected by other card effects, except its own. You can only use each effect of “C.C. Matoran Maku” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.16.6)

The bye-project.xyz Spam Gallery – Vol II

It is always nice to see the content I upload getting some comments. It’s not so nice to see that literally 100% of them (at least on this site) have been obvious spam, now clocking in at another nice round mark of 30. Maybe I should do something about that after all. Anyway, for now, let’s take another fun trip into The Spam Zone.


(General Disclaimer: Don’t go to any links you see in the following images, they’re probably evil scam pages that will mine Bitcoins in your browser and eat your cat)

First up we have a very subtle advertisement of a certain type of content (with wrong tags, once again), and an equally subtle call for help.

If these short and to-the-point comments aren’t enough entertainment for you, then no need to worry, for two members of the Scato collective have once more shown themselves to ramble about …something.

Somehow only Vanessa can into URLs.

Other highlights include this person(?) who just went “hey, oil” without any fanfare:

This one who knows how to get rich (obviously legit):

And this one who thinks I already am rich enough to be interested in renting a private jet:

Finally, we have a special feature of this particular spam gallery, and that is that there’s actual a common source to a large part of it. All comments from there are compiled in the gallery below, so we don’t have to make this post even more longer than it deserves to be.


And that’s all for Vol II of the spam gallery! I honestly don’t really want to make another one of these, so for now I’ve enabled the Friendly Captcha plugin, because it’s the one Captcha I could find that doesn’t need cookies (and thus I don’t even technically need to bother with a cookie notice). If it works as intended, you shouldn’t notice it’s there unless you’re a spambot (lmao nevermind I just forgot to turn it on), so please do consider leaving a legitimate comment somewhere! One of the reasons I even bother publishing my stuff is so I can get feedback and criticism from the public, but somehow the public seems hesitant to provide that. Odd.

The bye-project.xyz Spam Gallery – Vol I

I may have mentioned this before, but one of the main reasons I publicly upload the stuff I make for this fun little project is to get feedback and criticism that helps me catch mistakes I wouldn’t otherwise (with questionable success). So one of my priorities when making this site was including an easy way to leave this kind of feedback, which is of course the comment section at the bottom of each post. And since I personally much, much prefer staying anonymous (as opposed to pseudonymous) when talking about stuff on the internet, I decided to make the name and email fields optional.

Pretty much every WordPress tutorial blog out there will tell you this is a bad idea and invites spam, especially when used without protective measures like Captcha. Incidentally, as you may have noticed, I don’t have any Captcha here, because all those nice quick plugins would technically require me to put up some privacy notices and I’ve already put a nonzero amount of effort specifically into not needing those. So, a few months after launch, I’m happy to report that I haven’t been spammed to any unmanageable degree despite this setup. Maybe just because I haven’t been advertising this page like you would an actual business site that needs to make money and shit, but anyway.

We have in fact reached the magical mark of 10 spam comments, so I figured why not derive some entertainment from them by putting together a little showcase. There’s some funny stuff in there, after all.


(General Disclaimer: Don’t go to any links you see in the following images, they’re probably evil scam pages that will mine Bitcoins in your browser and eat your cat)

The first comment on display arrived only a few days after I launched the site, on the post about the Nokama’s Secret Village deck, which was the most recent at the time. From the moment I read “The pattern time I byword”, my attention was captured, because I’m pretty fucking sure that isn’t a correct arrangement of words in the English language.

Being young and naïve, I did actually for a moment believe this was a genuine comment because I misread “Gail” as “Gali” at first glance, but closer inspection reveals it’s just some kind of word salad about porn, complete with links to matching sites. And Terry screwed up the URL code at the bottom there, how dare he.


Much easier to identify as spam were the following short low-effort comments that rolled in at various points, all clearly trying to advertise a questionable link of some sort and not really contributing anything else.


On the other end of the length spectrum, we have Eric, who sent in entire newsletters trying to sell me his product.

Wow, capturing the name, email, AND phone number of any visitor who even so much as looks at the site, so I can send them unsolicited offers at any time? That sounds great, certainly not terrifying and dystopian at all! I sure would love if a website did that to me!

Sarcasm aside: Eric, my dude, did you seriously think someone who went out of his way to provide an anonymous comment form would be interested in this kind of data gathering bullshit? I mean, this probably isn’t a legit company seeing how the URLs in the body text randomly changed between comments, but still. Eric might actually be a real person based on the fact that the Jahnok post wasn’t even at the top when he commented, which would be kind of sad.


After that, there were some more brief comments trying to push links, this time using only the URL field for spam and instead filling the text with nice, empty words.

Thanks I guess, but you’re still getting deleted. Try to do the same thing with constructive criticism and maybe I’ll let you stay.


After these last incidents, I finally realized I should just disable the URL field, because there’s no legitimate reason to use that anyway. Once I did that, the spam died down, at least until this morning, when I was greeted by this beautiful message.

What the shit, Davvid.


And that’s all for today. By the way, in the few months it took for these 10 spam comments to come in, I received exactly 0 legitimate ones. So if you’re reading this and have something actually on-topic to say about any of the posts here, feel free to skew that ratio away from the spam a bit. Commenting is free, and you don’t even have to leave behind any of your data!