A Few Limitations?

Thoughts, Help, Feature Requests

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VgnFrnd
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A Few Limitations?

Post by VgnFrnd »

Hiya. I've been trying to use dice tool along with init tool to manage a play by post game that I run. After several sessions, I gave up on dice tool (although I am still using init tool). But before I forget about it entirely, I thought I would mention two of the difficulties I experienced here. Maybe I did something wrong, and dice tool really can do what I need it to. Here are two issues I had:

1) Dice tool does not display the macro labels in the results window. This made looking up past results too difficult, especially when I've had lots of lots of enemies firing at the PCs.

2) I could never load more than two saved macro tabs at a time. I could create as many tabs as I liked during a session, and I could save them all individually. But when I reopened dice tool, only the first two tabs would reload on startup, and attempting to load the additional tabs didn't work. I would go through the load macro file dialog, and then nothing would happen.

Just in case anyone is curious, I spent about 90 minutes scouring the web for an alternative. What I finally found (from a link on Murgh Bpurn's site!) was a vtt called "game table." The last release was Jan 2006, and it has a ton of functionality that I don't touch, but the dice roller is the best I've seen as a "stand-alone" app (if you can call it that, considering that it is nested in a vtt).

http://gametable.galactanet.com/

Of course, I understand that all five of the RPTools (including char tool) are under constant development. I look forward to watching whatever direction the rp team chooses to take dice tool. I am sure it will be awesome. But for now, because of the reasons stated, I'll be sticking with game table.

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RPMiller
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Post by RPMiller »

I don't get it. I don't see anything special about its dice that MT can't do. In fact, it looks a lot more limited than MT in that regard.

Have you looked at all the new dice mechanics that have come out for MT recently?

Thank you for the link though, there are a bunch of great tokens in it!
You're just jealous 'cause the voices only talk to me.

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VgnFrnd
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Post by VgnFrnd »

Yeah, the tokens bundled with it are a real treasure.

Currently, Game Table is doing two things for me that Dice Tool isn't:

1) It is saving and loading my saved dice macros correctly.

2) It is displaying the name of each die macro along with its roll in the display window.

Regarding MT's built in dice roller, I have only blundered through it about three times now as a player. It seems to work great within MapTool; I especially appreciate how die macros can be coded into tokens.

But for play by post, all I need is the roller, and GT is doing a better job of that for me, especially when I adjust window bars so that pretty much only the die roller is visible.

VgnFrnd
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Joined: Mon Sep 17, 2007 12:32 am

Post by VgnFrnd »

I should emphasize that my application here is a dice roller to support play by post games. For that application, game table is serving my needs better.

As a virtual table top, game table can't hold a candle to map tool.

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RPMiller
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Post by RPMiller »

I see. Thanks for the clarification. I'm still not sure why you couldn't use the macro buttons though, but obviously you know the features so I'll just shut up now. :D
You're just jealous 'cause the voices only talk to me.

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VgnFrnd
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Post by VgnFrnd »

I couldn't figure out why dice tool wasn't loading my macro tabs correctly, either. That problem seemed like a bug, or at least a buggish limitation. I also couldn't find any switch to tell dice tool to display the macro labels in the results window. That problem seemed like a design limitation; but then again, so is my IQ, so I might be missing something. :roll:

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giliath
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Post by giliath »

Hmm... I use DiceTool every week during my game, and I have probably around 10 tabs. I will look into it further to see if I can replicate the "not more than 2 tabs save" problem.

You are right, the macro labels are not shown in the results window. At the time that wasn't needed, but I can see why you might be helpful. The biggest problem is screen space. Without expanding the size of the window, there is no room for additional information per roll line.

I would like to spend more time coding new features into DiceTool, but right now RL is conflicting with most of my side projects. I will definitely add your request to the feature list though so when I do get more time I can look at it.

Thanks
~Giliath

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