General Notes

We're pleased to announce the newest official release: Cockatrice 3.1.0: Reality Check

Cockatrice 3.1 continues the modernization effort started in 3.0 with a wave of gameplay polish, quality-of-life improvements, and under-the-hood work that makes the client faster and more resilient. Highlights include real invites with a searchable user picker and one-click links that open the client straight into the right game, deck share links and public decks for handing a deck over in one click, playmats for a personalized table, an onboarding wizard to get new players started, custom deck zones (including a maybeboard), animated arrows and life counter changes, cards that speak your language down to names, rules text, and art (searchable in that language too, for the first time), a card search autocomplete that follows you into chat, and a reporting / moderation queue for server operators.

Also new: custom card art overrides to pin your own image to any printing, and a theme overhaul with two new built-in themes, light and dark asset variants, curated image-theme palettes, and a brand new palette editor that builds a whole color scheme from a single accent color. Underneath all of it, a major binary card database cache slashes startup from seconds to milliseconds, the Oracle importer needs a fraction of its former memory while actually showing progress as it works, and there's a CSPRNG upgrade for security alongside broad build-system modernization including precompiled headers and ccache, with the game layer split away from its graphics so the two can evolve independently.

This release contains 285 pull requests, spread across usability, performance and maintainability.