minor refit

[Mr.Ice]

Something I suggested to Giliath a while back was to remove the text boxes from the tool and just have the buttons.

When you right-click (such as to label now), the dialog has two fields, the existing label field and a larger expression field.

i believe the 7 or 8 characters we can see in the existing field is meaningless except for truly trivial die expressions, and instead I'd like more room for the button labels.

harp in if you agree or disagree.

[RPTroll]

I think if a mouse over showed a tool tip with the formula this would be fine. On a side note, the dev version of dice tool is really slow on my puter. Looks like its using about 350 MB of memory.

[giliath]

The button creation is going to be pretty different. I will look at putting a tooltip that has the actual expression rolled.

Hmm... it shouldn't take that much memory... I will take a look at it.

[RPTroll]

While you're under the hood

Currently you have the vars at the bottom that can be used in the formulas. How much effort would it be to allow for a different set of vars for each tab?

Here's the scenario I was thinking of:
Each tab represents a character. In the vars you have things like ref, will, fort saves, init modifier, weapons + to hit and damage, etc. etc. If the vars had the same names across the different tabs, you could have a common set of formulas you applied to each tab.

I assume you'd want a global set of vars as well.

Next on the list of stuff I'd like to see is the ability to drag a dice button into one of the buttons on maptools chat window. Another value added is to simply drag the button onto the map window and have the results display in the chat window. Another way to do this would be to have a toggle in dice tool that looks for a running instance of maptool on the same machine, connect to it and ship the display of rolls to maptool's chat window.

[giliath]

I definitely plan on allowing variables in each tab or globally.
I will also allow custom javascript functions to be tab-centric or global.

The MapTool integration will take place after the UI rework, but I am definitely keeping it in mind. The most challenging part of the integration is making the rolls manipulation proof.

Right now, DiceTool is most powerful as a GM tool and I would love to see it be able to import a stat block and generate a tab that has that monsters abilities. It is possible that "DiceTool" itself isn't integrated directly into MapTool and instead we simply use the same expression engine (named: dicelib and parser in the codebase) in MapTool for verified rolls.

[RPTroll]

It is possible that "DiceTool" itself isn't integrated directly into MapTool and instead we simply use the same expression engine (named: dicelib and parser in the codebase) in MapTool for verified rolls.

You've slipped a little to far into Javaland for me to follow that last bit. How will that work? Is it something like a shared lib in C with a semaphore area or message queue?

[giliath]

Not anything that complicated. When I started working on the DiceTool rework I decided that the libraries that support expression parsing, dice parsing, javascript extensibility and result calculation should be turned into its own library so that other tools could use it and because it is a powerful and useful library that I could not find when I wrote DiceTool.

Basically the part of the code that takes an expression and does this transformation:
1) d20+10
2) roll(1, 20) + 10
3) 17 + 10
4) 27

This is the meat of DiceTool and these libraries are easily integratable into any java program including MapTool.