Okay. Since I've migrated over to XenForo (XF), I've been on the lookout for a dice roller extension. Simple Machines Forum (SMF) had a decent one that was highly functional, although the developer pretty much said outright that he wasn't willing to support it any longer, and I literally begged him to make it compatible with the 2.1.x version of SMF.
When I first got XF, I found two dice rollers. The first was a paid extension. It looked decent, but I had higher priorities to purchase for.
So I settled on a second dice roller that was free. Unfortunately, there was a massive bug with this extension, in that if you edited a post, your dice would vanish, never to be seen from ever again. The results were still stored in the database, somewhere, but we simply couldn't access that data. I reached out to the developer, and he said he knew what the problem was, but he was on vacation. Okay. So I waited. Months passed. He finally updated it a couple months ago. I finally got around to testing it today. There's a big problem. You can only roll once per message. That's a problem if you're writing a massively long role play and have multiple skill checks to accomplish, and sure, we could just break these posts into separate smaller events, but that could get distracting, as well as break the rhythm of an author who's crafting an elaborate scene, and then by accident another player posts in the meantime. -- This could be messy.
So, I broke down today and spent the money to purchase the first Dice Roller. And it looks pretty nice. It has BBcode support, it can be skinned and has user group permissions. It does not have a setting for each board though. The free roller did, and was more customizable with rules and had modifier support (I believe). But this paid roller has a few problems of its own. It has not modifier support. To access it, you must EDIT your post. Okay, that's not really a big deal. But again, the biggest flaw here is that you can only roll once per post.
I've searched around the XF developer forums for any other possible solutions. I don't see any. I would sit down to develop my own extension, because really, how hard can it be? I mean, hell, I could probably have AI create the code for basic one with the features that I need/want. But the problem is that I don't know XF's architecture well enough to implement it.
So what features do I want?
I would ideally like an easy to use interface. Click a button at the bottom of the post box and a dialog comes up with the range of dice options -- in fact, let me just show you a picture, based on PUMC:
So here, you'll see the basic dice. You can click on each dice type to increment up to nine dice. Right-click to subtract a dice in the pool. Over to the right, there's a scroll wheel that can act as a modifier from -9 to +9. Obviously, this design may need to be tweaked slightly, because I've played Pathfinder, and it's possible to have modifiers greater than +10.
Storing the results in a hack-proof database is essential. It's not that I don't trust people, well, okay, I don't trust people. Also, if somebody's editing a message, we don't need the dice results to accidentally get lost.
I want a BBcode utility as well. Maybe I don't need to use the User Interface, because this is just going to be a simple roll, like 2d6+5 and I can type that faster.
Finally, labels. These are a must. I want to know what I just rolled! Color coding would be optional.
I think that's it. Did I forget anything? At any rate, I highly doubt that this will ever become a reality, because let's face it, Forum usage has dwindled in the age of Social Media. Besides, there's a ton of other ways people can roll dice. I mean, I have a collection sitting on my desk. I could always use PUMC's integrated dice roller, or Discord has a Bot for that. Heck, I could probably program my TI-89 to be a dice roller... that I can use on my phone...if I had the time to do so. Ah well.
When I first got XF, I found two dice rollers. The first was a paid extension. It looked decent, but I had higher priorities to purchase for.
So I settled on a second dice roller that was free. Unfortunately, there was a massive bug with this extension, in that if you edited a post, your dice would vanish, never to be seen from ever again. The results were still stored in the database, somewhere, but we simply couldn't access that data. I reached out to the developer, and he said he knew what the problem was, but he was on vacation. Okay. So I waited. Months passed. He finally updated it a couple months ago. I finally got around to testing it today. There's a big problem. You can only roll once per message. That's a problem if you're writing a massively long role play and have multiple skill checks to accomplish, and sure, we could just break these posts into separate smaller events, but that could get distracting, as well as break the rhythm of an author who's crafting an elaborate scene, and then by accident another player posts in the meantime. -- This could be messy.
So, I broke down today and spent the money to purchase the first Dice Roller. And it looks pretty nice. It has BBcode support, it can be skinned and has user group permissions. It does not have a setting for each board though. The free roller did, and was more customizable with rules and had modifier support (I believe). But this paid roller has a few problems of its own. It has not modifier support. To access it, you must EDIT your post. Okay, that's not really a big deal. But again, the biggest flaw here is that you can only roll once per post.
I've searched around the XF developer forums for any other possible solutions. I don't see any. I would sit down to develop my own extension, because really, how hard can it be? I mean, hell, I could probably have AI create the code for basic one with the features that I need/want. But the problem is that I don't know XF's architecture well enough to implement it.
So what features do I want?
I would ideally like an easy to use interface. Click a button at the bottom of the post box and a dialog comes up with the range of dice options -- in fact, let me just show you a picture, based on PUMC:
So here, you'll see the basic dice. You can click on each dice type to increment up to nine dice. Right-click to subtract a dice in the pool. Over to the right, there's a scroll wheel that can act as a modifier from -9 to +9. Obviously, this design may need to be tweaked slightly, because I've played Pathfinder, and it's possible to have modifiers greater than +10.
Storing the results in a hack-proof database is essential. It's not that I don't trust people, well, okay, I don't trust people. Also, if somebody's editing a message, we don't need the dice results to accidentally get lost.
I want a BBcode utility as well. Maybe I don't need to use the User Interface, because this is just going to be a simple roll, like 2d6+5 and I can type that faster.
Finally, labels. These are a must. I want to know what I just rolled! Color coding would be optional.
I think that's it. Did I forget anything? At any rate, I highly doubt that this will ever become a reality, because let's face it, Forum usage has dwindled in the age of Social Media. Besides, there's a ton of other ways people can roll dice. I mean, I have a collection sitting on my desk. I could always use PUMC's integrated dice roller, or Discord has a Bot for that. Heck, I could probably program my TI-89 to be a dice roller... that I can use on my phone...if I had the time to do so. Ah well.
