I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written an update log, but now is the time. We are very close to coming out of Beta. In fact, we plan to be out of beta by December. A few more features remain to be added and some UI polishing. Automatic Swiss tournaments will begin soon for the first time in yugioh game history. Read below for the changes in this update:
Android
- Android is here! You can download the apk from the same place all the other downloads are. Just open your Android phone, click on Release Latest · duelists-unite/omega-releases · GitHub and find the apk. Then just install the apk. The game will auto update. You do not need discord installed on the phone. It will use the native web browser to authenticate through discord. The first time you open Omega, please be connected to wifi and do NOT use data. Also, please have at least 80% battery life (or connected to charger) otherwise the phone may do some weird battery saving things which will make Omega not work.
Fixes
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Tag duels and Relays are fixed. You can also now add AI bots to tag duels.
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Rush Duels work again. Just remember the preset shortcut for “R” at the bottom. You can even do Master Duel with Rush rules now if you wanted.
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Surrender bug: when the game got stuck and the timer kept counting down. This happened because clicking the surrender button exactly when another effect is about to activate, the game couldn’t show two pop-up yes/no prompts at the same time (one for the surrender and one for the effect). In games like ygopro, clicking on surrender instantly surrenders without a confirmation prompt. We’ve fixed this so that you can have more than 1 confirmation prompt.
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Raycaster bug: Since ever, the activate or attack button on the right Extra Monster Zone and some other various buttons would not work even when hovering over them with the mouse and clicking on them. We found the reason was due to a dead zone in the middle of the screen due to a Raycaster issue. This has been fixed. You can now hover over any button at any camera angle and it will work now regardless of your DPI!
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Hotkey bug: When your graveyard was empty and your opponent’s graveyard was non-empty, pressing the hotkey for graveyard “G” would not open the opponent’s graveyard. This has been fixed. I assure you that pressing “G” to open graveyard is much easier than clicking F1 to cycle between player’s graveyards. Even easier, is simply clicking on the zone that you wish to see. Your hand is already on the mouse and you’re already using the mouse to click and select cards. Hence, it is better to keep your eyes on the screen and just move the mouse to select the zones rather than have to search for hotkeys on the keyboard. You can play this entire game one-handed. This is also why in mobile, you don’t ever need an on-screen keyboard.
Features
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Delay chain: In the standard ygopro, you have the “Add delay when no response”. This is a feature that adds a fixed delay after every move so as to not give away that you don’t have a response to your opponent. It’s an alternate way without using All Chain since All Chain leads to you having to click “No” for almost everything. Fixed delay however is still not good enough because it is easy to distinguish between a human delay or a programmed delay. In Omega, delay chain adds a random delay between 0.5 and 2.5 seconds. This is an option. Not every player will use it (I won’t). I still recommend players learn to use Legal and right click when they don’t want to activate. Hold A to bluff (for when you don’t have Nibiru in hand), and hold S (when you do have Nibiru and want the opponent to over extend just before their negate).
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Extra Rules: The biggest change this update brings is Extra Rules. You may be familiar with them if you played EDOPro or Percy in the past. Extra Rules allows players to customize the duel any way they wish beyond just master rules. For example, I can host a duel without EMZ, with MR3 Pendulum Zones, Master Rule 5, with a 3 column zone and use both Skills and Action Cards. Lots of things are now customizable.
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Note the Extra Rules above allows also the skill card that creates pendulum zones to work!
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Cross-banlist is also now possible but the proper way to do Cross-banlist is not just have two duelists use two different banlists. If a player from 2005 (master rule 0) is dueling a player from 2011 (Master Rule 2), then which master rule you use depends on the Turn Player. We can’t automate this so the proper way to really do cross-banlist is using manual mode.
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When clicking the Test Room button, it will ask you now whether you want Shuffle off or on. This is good because sometimes you want to test a specific set of cards in hand. You can arrange your starting hand in the deck editor and then click test room.
UI/UX changes
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Showing xyz materials on top of Xyz monsters has been a UI/UX challenge. It would lead to misclicks when clicking on an Xyz monster and accidentally clicking the magnifying glass to view materials. We’ve removed this. Now a new xyz material icon is on top of the Rank icon. This way you can click on the card without clicking on the materials. The card counts for other zones like main deck, extra deck, gy, etc, have also been moved to the bottom right corner. We think this is better and cleaner.
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We added a “Save New” button in the deck editor. This means you can open a deck, edit it and save it as a new deck if you want to. When creating a deck in the deck manager, you can enter the deck editor immediately without having to enter a deck name. This is good because you don’t need to go back to the deck manager to create or clone a deck. You can create a deck simply by choosing a different name for the deck and clicking save new and then continue editing. This combines the convenience of ygopro deck editing but keeps the organization of the deck manager. Best of both worlds.
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When dragging a card from the main/side deck to the side/main deck and the destination is full, the card used to disappear. Now, instead of disappearing, the card will just swap with the destination card. This allows for easy swapping even while in the deck editor and both the side deck and main deck are full.
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Certain keywords in the card text are now bold like PSCT stuff (also, and if you do, and, then, etc.), destroy, banish, return, target, etc. This allows for easier reading.
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We know that reading yugioh cards is not yugioh players’ forte so we are trying to make reading as easy as possible. Some players are still used to reading all the card text inside a large text box. Some still don’t like reading card text on the zoomed version of the card. You can now go to the Settings and check the “Text Box” setting. This will show instead of a zoomed card, a large text box with only the text in it. So you can middle click or left click+hold on any card to pop-up this text box and read.
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More on reading cards - you can now scroll the card text on the large card pic! Before we clicked to go to the next page. This caused some discontinuity when reading sentences and required players to go back to the page because they forgot what they were reading. Now, you can simply scroll using mouse wheel and it will be continuous scrolling!
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The host screen now has only 4 options in the Duel Rules - Master Duel, Speed Duel, Rush Duel, and Manual. Everything else has been moved to Extra Rules. You will also see shortcut buttons like how radio stations work at the bottom. There are 5 buttons - TCG, OCG, DL, R, and Goat. Clicking on these buttons will automatically load the presets and you can host a duel right away in the host duel screen without having to spend time changing them.
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The Rush card layout has been modified a little bit. The atk/def boxes line up correctly now. The colors have also slightly altered as well as the attributes.
Upcoming in next update
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The AI bot has now been completely remade. We can use any programming language including python to make it. We will release documentation soon which will allow anyone to make an AI bot. We can make an AI_Custom that uses your deck or a Mirror bot even. There’s much more information about the game state available which means you can program a bot to do certain things for certain situations. We couldn’t do this before with the standard windbot. The goal is to make 5 strong AI bots that represent the meta based on decks and combos from pro players.
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Filtering cards by Date: The packs data is being revamped. Currently, you can filter cards by date by choosing the cards that were released between two time periods. However, the release date for cards changes between TCG and OCG. Furthermore, some pack abbreviations are not unique and some older packs released between 1999-2002 didn’t have pack abbreviations. We fixed this so that we store both the oldest release date for tcg and ocg. In the next update, when you pick TCG card pool, and choose your dates, it will filter correctly using the TCG release dates. This opens a TON of options. This means that you can play any format from any time period! People have been playing Goat, Reaper, Edison, and all these different formats. Downloading the banlists for these formats is the easy part, but filtering the card pool so that only cards released during those periods and having the pre-errata cards work exactly the way they should, is the hard part.
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Deck sync: This button does nothing yet in the deck manager. You will be able to sync all your decks to cloud on your profile. With the arrival of android, a lot of users will want to import all their decks. Even if you can import decks one by one, it’s nice to have all decks synced between devices. This also allows sharing of decks using a single url link like Dueling Book.
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Auto Deck has been a button in the deck editor that has not been functional for a while. This is because we’re working on a new algorithm that will auto-fill a deck with the optimal cards. You’ve seen already videos online where people used machine learning algorithms to look at 1 million replays from Dueling Book to find the optimal deck list. These types of strategies have been done before and the issue with them is that you will not always have lots of replays for a particular deck, so it only works when a deck is popular or meta. The idea is for a player to add cards into a deck and click a button to fill the deck with the remaining. We can do this because we also have replay data for every duel on the server and we can filter those duels by date so that only duels that are relevant for the current banlist season, will be chosen. We are also using the ygoprodeck api as a backup for decks that have no data. This allows for even casual decks to have deck recipes fast.
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Tournaments will be starting soon. The cool thing is now with the addition of Extra Rules, we can host any tournament using any rules with automatic Swiss rules that follow official Konami policy. A tournament is planned for this Halloween (October 30th) if the plan goes smoothly.
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The website’s links for leaderboard and profile now work. We’ll be adding statistics soon. The statistics will have a lot of the data you saw in discord which ranks decks according to win rate. Our ranking of meta decks by win rate has found to be similar to real life pie charts for tournaments, except this is from thousands of duels and players. A greater sample size means we can have even more accuracy and maybe discover some new meta decks or rogue decks.
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A new theme will be coming before release. Most themes have been designed by external artists and have been free. These themes mostly have changed the field and/or background. We are going to work on a new theme that will change the entire user interface like buttons, skin, etc. This will demonstrate the true potential of customization of Omega.
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MAC and iOS will come when we are ready and stable.
Next year plans
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Lots and lots of tournaments. Weekly tournaments with $$ prizes for every format. Each weekend, we’ll have 1 TCG, 1 OCG, and 1 DL tournament. The fourth tournament will be random alternate format tournament like Rush, Goat, etc. Prizes will be proportional to the number of players. Each tournament match win is equal to 1 TP. At the end of the year, the top 100 players with the highest TP will compete in the WOC (World Online Championship) with the World’s banlist. An “Event Pass” will be implemented which will be a monthly pass where players can enter any event for the month with the pass.
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Offline AI / LAN / Puzzle mode - all these things are tied to the same thing. Once we add the core locally, we get offline hand testing, LAN, puzzle mode, custom cards, etc.
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Custom card creator - you will be able to create custom cards within Omega’s own UI. Omega already assembles cards piece by piece like photoshop, so it is not difficult to add this. Custom cards would be saved to a local database and can be loaded at any time.
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Cross-Sim Dueling - As we are already swamped with the features for this year, we didn’t have time for this. It is however, possible for ygopro simulators like edopro, tdoane, nexus, etc. to all connect to the same server and duel. We plan to do this in the future where players can choose the Omega server from the dropdown and login with discord and duel. This way, players can stay on the sims they want but duel with each other on one server.
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Accessibility - Omega is the first yugioh simulator that supports over 12 different languages. Players that may not know English can now play on the same platform against other players, reading their cards and dueling other players. This would be somewhat impossible in a manual sim and even auto sims that use English databases. We want to improve accessibility to as many players as possible from all subpopulations. We want players who are visually impaired to be able to play Yugioh too. There ways to do this using Text to Speech (TTS). There are already text-based ygopro programs called MUD. It’s actually a fun challenge to see how we can communicate effectively what cards are in a players’ hand or any location and announce those cards to the player. The log is there too. Similar to Chess, blind players can just voice their moves through the zone locations like A2 to A4. Similarly, zones on yugioh are also numbered M1-M5, EMZ1-EMZ2, ST1-ST5, F1, G1, D1, ED1, P1H1-P1H5, P2H1-P2H5, etc.