Raphael Rigaud is a math teacher by day, but since 2003 he has also been webmaster for Kingyugi, a French community devoted to Yu-Gi-Oh. For those who’ve managed to avoid it, Yu-Gi-Oh is a trading card game similar to Magic: The Gathering, but targeted at younger people. While there are many online communities devoted to the game, Rigaud found it “stupid” that they all had their own databases, which they all had to maintain. “I wanted to create a very complete database, with an open license, that could power every website and software that would want to use it.” That’s what he has accomplished with the release of yLife.
Rigaud says yLife aims to be all-in-one software for Yu-Gi-Oh players and card collecters. It includes severals modules, including a card explorer; a deck builder, which can export decklists for tournaments, or print proxies – that is, training cards not allowed in official dates; and Yu-Gi-Oh Card Database, an open database with management software that lets users add and modify cards in the database.
Rigaud began coding the application in PHP, but soon moved to XUL using the Mozilla XULRunner platform, which, he says, has several things going for it:
– It’s multiplatform (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
– It’s multilingual.
– It’s multi-skin (but totally integrated by defaut with GTK or Win32).
– It lets you take advantage of the power of Firefox addons.
The last point is key. “yLife is totally ’empty,'” Rigaud says – “two lines of code now. It’s powered by add-ons: ylifecore, xmpp4moz, ycd. With add-ons, every platform can update yLife because the Firefox profile is placed into ‘/home,’ so there’s no need to use apt, yum, or pacman.” Right now, Rigaud is coding an add-on to play Yu-Gi-Oh through XMPP/Jabber, using the xmpp4moz add-on. The idea is to let any user with a Jabber ID talk and play with anyone else – no server dependence, no centralization. “I hope that will help the MSN Generation discover Jabber.”
The software also features a cool template system to export decks to printers, forums (BBCode), and wikis, along with a very reactive realtime filter (no need to press Enter).
Once he had the software, Rigaud looked for a free forge where young users could easily download files, and which was easy enough to use that “young Yu-Gi-Oh developers could help me if they found the project interesting.” He chose Sourceforge.net in part because it “was famous and provided a mini website. I liked that.” He then began promoting the software on the Kingyugi website.
Rigaud says he welcomes help from other developers. “When I launched the project, I was thinking that a year later, some developers would have joined the project so I could give the baby to another person to maintain. But it’s hard to find developers in the French Yu-Gi-Oh community.” Some tasks he could use help with include verifying the database, adding cards, finding card pictures, posting bugs “… and if they can help me with code, they’re welcome ;-)”