I will point out that it is open-source, so anyone who wants "purty graffics" can add them in as desired…

~J

That would require me to have actual knowledge of what I was doing. Seeing as I have the Computer Illiterate Flaw (Quality?!), that isn't too likely.

Well, I have Incompetence (Graphic Design), and from Dashifen's stance I'm guessing he's in a similar boat, so…

~J

I'm confused as to the status of the two dice rollers that have been talked about in this thread, and I intended to post them to ShadowrunRPG.com along with Gurth's dice-roller widget, until that mean and nasty Rob scooped me on the story!

Could someone involved with each project give me a three line status report on the dice rollers, including what OSes they run on, whether they're standalone or require a scripting language installed, etc?

Blurb for my software, download link is in the first post.

Mac OS X comes with Python preinstalled, as do most Linux distributions I know of short of the really pared-down ones (Damn Small Linux, anything designed to fit on a floppy or small USB key). I don't remember whether or not any of the BSDs ship with Python. I'll do a self-contained OS X package when I've tracked down a few small bugs.

~J

Sometime you'll have to show me how to do the OSX packages. I have a mac, but it refuses to do it. It'll run the program but it won't make a package.

So, workin on version 2.0 (including advanced mode and extended tests) and I'm making the interface for extended tests and I realized that there's a problem when it comes to edge. It's an interesting gordian knot of programming.

Edge can be declared before any sub-test of a roll. Further, I would extrapolate from this that you could throw edge after a sub-test or re-roll misses after a sub-test as well. To provide all of these options, I could pop message boxes allowing the user to click yes/no buttons and enter edge amounts during the trials (but only once) thus letting a person tailor their extended test as closely as possible, but that seems like it would be a reall pain in the but to use all the time.

Anyone have any better ideas?

I can't think of anything I would want to add to my program. Unless someone comes across a bug, I think it's done.

Program blurb:

This is a program that generates random numbers using the rules for
fourth edition Shadowrun. It allows the use of edge and keeps track
of the rule of six, hits, and glitches. It requires the Java Runtime
Envroment 1.4 or higher. OS X and most linux distros include it, and
it can be installed for Windows from http://www.java.com. This
software has been tested on on Windows XP, SuSe Linux 9.2, and OS X
10.3.

It can be downloaded from http://warder.freeshell.org/SR4Dice.zip

Hey Dashifen, one small thing.

Add a version number somewhere. I wasn't sure I had the latest, so I just re-downloaded and installed. Minor I know, but a version number somewhere shouldn't be difficult.

Hey Dashifen,
How's working coming on the additional features for your dice roller?

Just wanted to mention another feature that would be nice to have. An option to have the rolls displayed unsorted.

In my forum game, I'm finding many of the players like to roll before I have confirmed what all the modifiers are. If they could show the rolls unsorted then I could have them just knock off the extra dice rather than having them make a whole new roll.

No hurry though, I know RL can be troublesome sometimes.

BaronKen - Slacker: I can do those. I've been working on a character generator for a while rather than the dice roller but I can spend some time on it this week and see what I can do. Everything but extended tests were working last time I played with it but that's really almost the last thing I want to do other than the GM's pre-rolling tool which shouldn't be hard at all.

Version 1.9

Version 1.9 is out. The only reason this isn't 2.0 is that you can't use edge on extended tests yet. This version adds an advanced mode which splits attribute and skill and edge and an extended test mode which lets you enter the skill and attribute ratings as well as the threshold test and rolls intervals until the hits are greater than the threshold quickly tabulating the results of such a test.

Like I said, there's no edge on the extended tests, yet, since it's actually quite complicated. There's also no version number yet nor is there an unsorted option. I'll do those next and then get back to edge during extended tests.

Just wanted to say it looks good Dashifen.
One more thing might be nice in the advanced mode, which is already pretty much for people who can't do simple math. Show the number of dice actually rolled (possibly next to the word Roll: just above where the rolls are displayed).
This would make it easy to confirm how many dice were rolled, since the sixth die of each line is still appearring behind the scrollbar.

Crap! forgot about that problem. I'll actually just make sure that nothing gets caught behind the scrollbar. I'd rather fix the problem rather than work around it . I had all this work done already and lost the code when my computer got eaten by some form of trojan. Oh well. One more thing to add to the list

That would be even better.

Just noticed something on the Extended test. Is it possible to have it automatically go to the end of the text box displaying the rolls?

That way if it takes more than 2 tries you would be able to see the statement of Success or Failure that you add to the end of it immediately.

Yes, even an idiot would be able to compare the Threshold to the Total Hits. But if you are going to have the Success or Failure display in the text box, you might as well have it so that it shows, without requiring the user to scroll down.

Also, a statement at the begining of each set of rolls saying which attempt it is might be nice. Not all that necessary, but if you have the time after everything else, why not add it?

edit: Yet another thing on the Extended test is if you enter an attribute rating and no skill rating, it should probably pop-up with the same message as you're using in the Advanced mode. Currently, it is not conisidering such a roll to be defaulting and thus not subtracting -1.......
I just thought of something in the Advanced mode, the pop-up for defaulting should be questioning whether or not the defaulting modifier needs to be applied in addition to whatever modifiers were entered in the Modifiers textbox, because some people may just enter the defaulting modifier before clicking to roll the dice.

I've been messing around with the extended test some more and noticed several issues.
First, every roll seems to be using both the rushing and the interval limit, even when the checkboxes are unchecked.
Second, and a hard one to notice, it seems to be checking to see if rolling a glitch would reduce your hits to 0 before it checks for a critical glitch. So if you roll a critical glitch, it first sees you rolled a glitch, then subtracts 1d6 hits from your total, if that would bring you to 0 or less hits a message saying "A roll has resulted in a Glitch which reduced....blah, blah, blah" comes up. Either way, you failed, but it should really be checking for the critical glitch first so that it can pop-up the correct message and skip the reduction of hits via the rule for regular glitches.
Thirdly, and a very hard thing to notice, if the extended test is ended because of a glitch reducing your total hits to 0, that interval is not counted (i.e. on the first test you roll a glitch that reduces your successes to -2; it will show your hits as -2 and your interval as 0).

good suggestions. long weekend coming up, so i'll have time to get into the extended test mode. Thanks Slacker!

Okay, I think I've got everything ready, but for some reason I'm not no longer able to combine all the code into a .exe on my laptop. It works on other machines (almost) but not on my laptop. Thus, until I can figure that out, I can't easily release new versions. The source code, for those who have Python installed on their machines, however, can be downloaded from my shadowrun website.

I'm going to write my own dialog class at some point that doesn't make the system alarm noise happen. During extended tests with Edge, this gets really annoying. During testing I just muted my speakers. FYI.

Yeah, I know you have been busy work work lately, but I thought I would just check and see if you were still working on this at all.

Also, last night I noticed another minor issue. When you add Edge to the initial roll (maybe anytime you add Edge, not sure about that), it checks for glitch/critical glitch prior to rerolling 6s.
Example: I rolled 1 die for the skill +attribute (had a lot of negative modifiers to it) and 1 die for Edge, it rolled 1, 3, 6, 6, 6 and called it a Glitch. So my guess is that it initially rolled 1, 6 and detected the Glitch, then it rerolled the 6 and got 6, and rerolled again and got 6 again, and rerolled and got a 3.

I had worked on it a while, but I can't seem to get it to make an executable out of the python files anymore, and no one can tell me why. I'll probably work some more on it one day and try to make it bettre so feel free to keep posting suggestions.

Finally got a script online together that rolls a specified dice pool (with or without edge) a specified number of times. So if you want, for example, 8 dice rolled 100 times, it'll happily do that. Also, the results are downloadable as a rich text file or a PDF document for your convenience during gaming. A tool mostly for GMs who want to develop sheets of pre-rolls prior to gaming. I'm probably going to re-do most of the functionality of the more complete python die roller that this thread was originally focused either online or I may have to try and start over from the beginning as about ten hours this weekend didn't turn up and gold for me on that strange "compilation" bug.

Slight alteration to the tool I described, but foolishly didn't link, in the previous post. Re-posting to bring interested party's eyes towards the new linkification of said tool and also the change: the die rolls made are now no longer sorted. This means you could make say 100 rolls of a dice pool with 20 dice, print out the resulting table and just cross of dice as you use them and still keep some degree of randomness involved.

And now, without further ado, the link.