Dice Tower functionality discussion

[Eric]

Hey dice nuts, it's time to get nuts! I want to hear your ideas about what needs to be added to the Baldr dice roller, either to make the functionality equivalent to/better than OGMW, or to the dice roller interface to make it as easy as possible to get your dice requests entered. To that end, I've created the following public Google Doc for capturing capabilities requests so I can start the process of evaluating how to make them all happen.

 

Baldr Dice Brainstorm

 

The document is set up to allow anonymous commenting, so use private browsing mode to make sure your personal Google account info isn't included. If you're really uncomfortable using Google Docs, you can post here, too--but if you post something that's already in the doc, I reserve the right to break out the Game of Thrones Shame gif.

[Neopopulas]

I'm stuck on my phone for awhile and instead of making a big mess of the google doc i'm just doing to post a few things here.

 

Currently to post dice with the tower looks like this;

• Make a post

• Click on dice rolls.

• Add values (Name, string, etc)

• Click Roll

• Wait for it to load

• Click Okay

 

Now we know that we're going to see multiple dice per post, hopefully soon, but there are still at least one thing you can do to streamline this a little. When you get to step 4, that should be the last step. Ideally when you hit 'roll' the popup box should disappear and the post should appear as needed. I understand this might not be possible as you have to wait for it to 'contact the tower' to prevent clicking away from the page and interrupting it however the last popup box is just a 'click okay' box to acknowledge that the dice have been added and seems unnecessary. Being able to get out of the popup box at step 4 would be ideal but 5 would do.

---

The dice tower doesn't currently show the dice themselves, so i'm hoping to see that. At the moment you can do a 1d10+1d6 roll but there is no way to see what the actual dice results are, adding a way to see what the dice results are that make up the total of the role would be important in a lot of situations and is visually very helpful.

---

Possibly make the popup box movable. I usually have a lot of information in a post, so when i'm putting in dice i have all the information i need, like attack or damage numbers. But sometimes, depending on how the page is positioned when open the dice tower its obscured by the popup box. Being able to move that around would mean i could easily position it so i could also see the information in my post at the same time.

---

I've also found a bug where if you have a + at the end of your roll (1d20+1d10+) for example, the entire dice tower collapses and you can't see any of the rolls until you go in and add ANOTHER roll without the + on the end, then all the dice come back. Its not a huge problem but if people accidentally add that + and don't realise they might be surprised that the whole thing disappears.

---

Its possible for GMs to add dice to a player's post. But there is not obvious distinction between the two, maybe there should be some sort of marker that indicates that the roll was made by the GM and not the player.

[PigLickJF]

14 hours ago, Neopopulas said:

The dice tower doesn't currently show the dice themselves, so i'm hoping to see that. At the moment you can do a 1d10+1d6 roll but there is no way to see what the actual dice results are, adding a way to see what the dice results are that make up the total of the role would be important in a lot of situations and is visually very helpful.

I actually discovered recently that, on desktop at least, if you hover over the "Roll" column in the dice tower, it does show the individual rolls. Since you can't hover on mobile it's not possible there though, so there will have to be a change to make that possible at least.

[Neopopulas]

8 hours ago, PigLickJF said:

I actually discovered recently that, on desktop at least, if you hover over the "Roll" column in the dice tower, it does show the individual rolls. Since you can't hover on mobile it's not possible there though, so there will have to be a change to make that possible at least.

Interesting. I would never have caught that. Good to know.

[bwatford]

It probably needs to be made "On Click" instead of hover so it works on phones.

[Ryfte]

Is there a reason the original dice code strings aren't simply brought over, at least from a back end code perspective? It is after all a straightforward string parse of the field value and translation to the number generation, right? I'm not suggesting its simple but rather that there's no hidden problem in there. The logic, for the most part, should be there already.

 

"<Integer>m" for example being the logic in the string that would trigger a set loop on the following dice being rolled. That being one of the very frequently used options (i.e. 2 or more identical attack, search, climb/athletics, etc. rolls). *shrug*

 

I know I'm not the one coding it or looking at the code, but I've been using the advanced dice options forever! It has been one of the things I've loved here on MW, the complexity I could get in the rolls with a not-so-simple single Roll (or dice) tag. I'm going to miss being able to do inline rolls with results text based on the roll but such is life. I guess not a lot of people used it so it wasn't a priority, which makes perfect sense.

 

That being said, it would be REALLY slick if you could attach one dice roll to another. I'm specifically thinking of a critical success / failure. It would most certainly be an advanced option but something that would allow a second roll to be tweaked based on the results of the first roll. Now that would be a complex bit of code, lol. A fun problem to solve though! It would have to be "smart" in the fact that it would have to allow for variable secondary options for the follow-up roll(s). It would be neat though. Not having to edit the post, adding a new damage roll or an additional damage roll due to a critical, lol. Hmm, if you attached one roll to another... and that secondary attached roll had tworoll sets, one for a normal roll and one for a critical... that would work, lol. The user would have to enter them initially of course but it would still eliminate the need for an edit / roll modification.

 

 

 

[Colin]

@Ryfte The OGMW roller uses a bastardized BBcode setup to operate, and Invision Community doesn’t support BBcode. Tacked onto that, OGMW BBcode is so hacky that large sections aren’t even properly compliant HTML4, and the only reason things work still is because browsers are flexible enough to interpret things. That’s why it’s not just being brought over, though a lot of the backend code is very similar. 🙂 

[Ryfte]

Hmm, what is the actual server side for BALDR? The new solution Dice Tower isn't 3rd party code hacks like the OGMW one is, is it?

[bwatford]

Baldr is pure html and json for the script language.

 

Invision allows plug-ins to be written outside of the core code and that is what the dice tower is.

 

Bbcode works nowhere on the site. Its a combo of the WYSWYG editor and using the source button to edit html directly for posting.

[Colin]

1 hour ago, Ryfte said:

Hmm, what is the actual server side for BALDR? The new solution Dice Tower isn't 3rd party code hacks like the OGMW one is, is it?

 

Nope, not at all! The Dice Tower is 100% developed internally, same as other newer additions like the Ishmael verification bot on the site Discord server.

[Eric]

On 7/21/2022 at 1:18 AM, Neopopulas said:

Currently to post dice with the tower looks like this;

 

We are not constrained to that approach; it was simply the fastest way to get the functionality in play (by copying an example plugin). Now that I'm a bit smarter, we will make sure the ultimate design is as streamlined as possible.

 

On 7/22/2022 at 11:39 AM, Ryfte said:

Is there a reason the original dice code strings aren't simply brought over, at least from a back end code perspective? It is after all a straightforward string parse of the field value and translation to the number generation, right? I'm not suggesting its simple but rather that there's no hidden problem in there. The logic, for the most part, should be there already.

 

The main reason we're ditching OGMW dice strings is the syntax is both difficult to understand and rigidly inflexible. Even assuming you have memorized the character codes (a barrier to entry for some), it is not possible to do multiple operations (e.g., reroll 1s, explode, sort, drop lowest) unless the requirements of the game system exactly match the order in which OGMW performs those operations. The new roller aims to fix this.

[Ryfte]

16 minutes ago, Eric said:

The main reason we're ditching OGMW dice strings is the syntax is both difficult to understand and rigidly inflexible. Even assuming you have memorized the character codes (a barrier to entry for some), it is not possible to do multiple operations (e.g., reroll 1s, explode, sort, drop lowest) unless the requirements of the game system exactly match the order in which OGMW performs those operations. The new roller aims to fix this.

That's ironic, to me at least, I thought the held pages and examples were quite clear on how to implement the rolls. Granted they were rigid but they allowed for some really complex rolls. It also made sense, the sequential order of the syntax. *shrug*

Of course if people aren't willing to 1. Read the help page. 2. Try out some samples themselves. then they're never going to understand the old system anyways.

One of my old managers had a saying, granted it wasn't very PC, but it was valid; "You can't fix stupid." Its not a very nice saying but at its core its true. No matter how easy and simply you make a system there will be people who simply do not understand it. I personally just refer to my special code for things like that; PEBKAC. That is to say, the Problem Exists Between the Keyboard And Chair. 😉

[Eric]

While I'm not one to defend those who fail to learn, the overall goal is to avoid situations where there's an "in club" of users with esoteric knowledge who have access to the full site capabilities, while newer/less experienced users flounder. We saw this often enough with BBcode on OGMW.

 

But really, my main reason for rearchitecting dice is to unlock more capability to support more systems. There are at least three requests that readily come to mind where users wanted to play a particular system on OGMW, but either couldn't make the rolls at all or had to use kludgey workarounds. We'll be able to fulfill those requests going forward.

[Ryfte]

I understand that completely. I feel that the help page was really excellent though. Even for newer players. The fact is, if a new user isn't willing to look at a help document they're going to never be able to get as much from the site as they could. I don't know if that can be "fixed," so to speak. With the BBcode it was a lot more complex in general. With the nesting and start / end tags and the way different things interact, that can definitely be a difficult learning curve for someone new to the site, especially if they don't have a coding background, lol. Still, to be fair, I've seen many new players, the ones that are truly interested in it, ask questions, "borrow" post formats, and learn because it was something they were interested in. Those people are the players that stay and become those more experienced users. 😉

 

I knew this was a reason and it makes perfect sense.

 

Personally, I really dislike some of the WYSIWYG aspects of BALDR unfortunately. I drop down into the source window more than half the time now. But I don't actually use the source code popup because, well, its awful, lol. Instead I copy the entire block into VS Code and build my posts there, copy it back into the source code popup, and post. I'm fine with that as a workaround but it actually makes me prefer the old site more, lol. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why BALDR is happening (the numerous reasons that are up front and on the back end / behind the scenes), as well as Dice Tower. For "hand coding" a post when I could just throw in a [b][/b] as I typed or a [i][/i] it was easy and simple to do. Even a [fieldset][/fieldset] or table was simple and it didn't interrupt my input flow as I wrote. With BALDR there are still associated keyboard shortcuts for things (as long as you don't have them mapped to something else of course) which you can use but you can't "code as you go" unless you're in the source code window and you have to pop out of that for the preview and then back in to continue. Its not the end of the world, just a change, and hopefully having the more advanced WYSIWYG will help people, particularly the newer ones to MW and PbP in general. Everyone else will adapt as needed, lol.

 

It would be awesome if activating the "source" mode simply switched the input window to a hybrid source / editor view. That would basically have an identical interface style as the old site but still allow people to just use the WYSIWYG tool by default. The source window is a fixed input size and you can't actually adjust it or alter any settings for it (its a fixed / faded gray, not the easiest to see / work with). 😉

 

I sort of got off track there from Dice Tower, apologies, lol. 😊

[Eric]

Tonight's dice updates covered here: https://test.myth-weavers.com/index.php?/topic/1295-dev-news-stream/#comment-9909

 

Let me know if you see any issues with keep/drop. I'm well aware that sort doesn't visually do anything, since the UI is still the same and therefore shows only the original rolls (not sorted or kept/dropped) and the sum value. UI improvements will be coming soon!