Recently I've been focused on marketing and small bug fixes. I think the core feature set is compelling enough, now I want to draw more players and start building a community. Been doing some social media stuff, designing an icon (this is HARD for me, I'm not very creative), and looking to print out a bunch of Cardcast-branded Magic cards that I can hand out at my local TCGs.

If you play MTG, I'm looking for more people to come give me feedback and contribute. Feels like something others can benefit from!

Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically scan on a set interval.

I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.

If you play MTG, I'm looking for more people to come give me feedback and contribute. Feels like something others can benefit from!

In the last month or so I added a few nifty features:

- Auto-scan functionality: Instead of having to click on cards to discover what they are, I can now do whole-frame detection on an interval (configurable), so players can mouse over the webcam stream of another player and automatically see what the actual card is. Super helpful for deciding who to attack and makes turns quicker!

- Card view is now grouped by player, since auto-detection will populate a lot of cards during the course of a game.

- Switch the video stream to Livekit from my homebrew version. Players were having video trouble and I hope Livekit is good enough so solve that problem.

Next up: I really want to build a community around this, and I'm struggling on getting the word out to people / having them try it out. I've done some SEO and word of mouth advertising, but haven't had much luck. I feel like I need to switch directions a bit. I'm a developer by trade, so this is wholly new to me.

Come check it out: https://cardcast.gg

If you ever want to follow along or play a game, feel free to hop on Discord (link on site)!

My only pause behind rolling this out further is the performance isn't as fast as I'd like (1.5s~ latencies), and the widely varying support for WebGPU / WASM across browsers and OS pairs.

Still testing it out (and learning about ViT performance on various hardware), so hopefully more news on that front soon!

Today, players have to double click on a card in a webcam stream to identify the specific card, but I'm working on doing full-frame detection on some cadence throughout the course of a match (think 1 scan every 5s so you always have an up-to-date board state, remembering past scans).

What would be super-helpful is to have a few frames from the camera or a video from your intended setup so I could test how well this scenario works. The detection is pretty good overall via webcam, it would probably work even better with 12MP.

I think this would be a really cool application. If you ever want to chat about this, I'd love to talk! Feel free to hop on discord (https://discord.gg/axRtvbsfAU) or DM me! (same username on both)

I got back into MTG back during the pandemic after a long hiatus and Spelltable is what brought me back. My playgroup lamented more features and something tailored to our needs, so curiosity got the better of me and here we are. :)

I've never worked with computer vision before, but I went through a whole journey that started with the classical computer vision techniques and ended with recently migrating to the transformer-based models. Been a really cool adventure!

My playgroup has been consistently preferring it over Spelltable and have been wanting more and more features. I would love for people to try it out and start building a community around it! Discord is on the site.

https://cardcast.gg

The main technical difference is detection. Spelltable uses perceptual hashing; cardcast uses modern ViT backbones so it's much faster and more accurate. If you import a decklist from Moxfield, Archidekt, or MTGGoldfish, the search narrows to that deck's card pool, greatly reducing false-positives.

What I have so far:

- Feature-parity with Spelltable. - No signup. Create a game, share the link, play (< 30s to get going). - Life totals, monarch tracking, initiative, turn timer, card info on hover. - Runs in-browser, WebRTC for video/audio, detection happens server-side per request.

Where I want to go with it:

- Push the inference to the client-side (WebGPU / Web Workers). - (provided above works well) Constantly detect cards in an AR-like overlay. - Build more-card intelligence into the product to avoid having to google things mid-game. (main cause of slowness in our pod)

Why I'm posting: the core works and my pod uses it weekly, but I'd like to find a few more enthusiastic users who want to contribute or help shape the roadmap — whether that's code (Python/FastAPI + React/TS), CV work, or just playing regularly and telling me what's broken.

Try it: https://cardcast.gg Discord: https://discord.gg/axRtvbsfAU

Happy to dig into the detection pipeline, hosting economics (Oracle free tier has been super awesome for this!), or anything else in the comments. It's been super fun and educational building this project, now I'm hoping you share it with you all. :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47889550

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

I got back into MTG back during the pandemic after a long hiatus and Spelltable is what brought me back. My playgroup lamented more features and something tailored to our needs, so curiosity got the better of me and here we are. :)

I've never worked with computer vision before, but I went through a whole journey that started with the classical computer vision techniques and ended with recently migrating to the transformer-based models. Been a really cool adventure!

My playgroup has been loving it so far, and I would love for people to try it and tell me what breaks! Discord is on the site.

https://cardcast.gg

I think I got all of the important bits in place, now just working on improving the quality of life experience and bug hunting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841852

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Per your testing point, so what? Doesn't everyone strive for 100% code coverage anyway? One of the big advantages of dynamic languages is that more functionality can be implemented in less code which in turn makes it easier to hit that 100% coverage.

Check it out: http://mithril.js.org