Custom Dice?

[Moon Wizard]

The current architecture for the dice does not support swapping textures, and the die decals are currently textures.

The dice subsystem needs to be rebuilt from scratch to add support for fully customizable dice. Zeph and I have been discussing this on the side.

Regards,
JPG

[Zeus]

So I sort of missed this while reading the response earlier: could someone in the know mind clarifying what this "overall bitmap for the decals" exactly is? It sounds an awful lot like a UV map.

Okay, so you might not be able to do flecked / wood grain / marble dice, but you might change the symbols?

The dice use two material shaders as far as I can tell. One to support the base color of the dice and the other to apply a UV texture map for the dice numbers that can also be colored. As JPG has said the challenge is that the current FG DirectX architecture does not allow for the die meshes to be re-textured dynamically at run time - consider them pre-baked for all intent and purposes. JPG and I have been talking about it at some length and to modify the existing code would require and considerable effort to overhaul the existing engine.

To demonstrate the kind of functionality I would like to see in the future for FG and to test as to what might be possible, I started working on a 3D dice proof of concept exercise using the Unity game engine - as a vehicle for discussion with Doug and John. I posted up a small demo app to my web site a while back which I am continuing to adapt and update. You can see latest work in progress version here:

https://www.drzeuss.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/3D%20Dice.html

The current versions supports 3 materials/shaders per die, all customisable at run-time. At present you can re-color the base die material (shiny/matte), apply a pattern texture material (alpha/shiny/matte) as well as re-color the text material. In a not to distant version you will also be able to:

- register new dice (based upon an existing d4,d6,d8,d10 or d20 die mesh) with a new UV texture map for the text/symbols of the die.
- register your own pattern UV texture maps
- change the specular color of the base, pattern and text layers

You can see that by applying a base color (shiny/matte doesn't matter) and then applying a pattern texture at say 50% alpha transparency you get, hey presto, patterned die! My favourite combo is: light forest green + camo pattern (50%) + black text, stealth die! Ruddish brown + camo pattern (65%) + white text is quite nice too!

[Seosaidh]

So I looked at the Star Wars ruleset, and I was able to successfully modify Valarian's TOR ruleset to show TOR dice icons. However, the white numbers from the original dice are still present. They are not too obvious (except for the number 4), but they are still irritating. The Star Wars ruleset does not have this problem. I was wondering if anyone could figure (or already knew) how the Star Wars ruleset dealt with this problem. I looked at the methods used to build and deliver the message, but I couldn't find a difference that explained the difference. Changing the font also did not solve the problem. If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

[Valarian]

Trenloe would be the man to talk to. As far as I know, the display methods for Star Wars have been overriddencompletely and the dice results displayed as graphics. The actual results are cleared so they dont display at all.

[damned]

yeah.
the normal dice roll - but then the result is shown as the custom dice.

[damned]

Hey Zeus - i like how you not only kept the spinning dice but extended it... i did note as well though that a lot of spinning dice spin off the screen whereas i didnt notice that so much with rolled dice.

[Zeus]

Hey Zeus - i like how you not only kept the spinning dice but extended it... i did note as well though that a lot of spinning dice spin off the screen whereas i didnt notice that so much with rolled dice.

Yeah, I wrote the Dice PoC code as a mock up of FG's die handling under Unity BEFORE I joined Smiteworks and got access to under the hood I was working somewhat blind and therefore the PoC only represents an approximation of FG's dice handling. The PoC code was set up to use real physics to simulate the dice rolling, as per real life occasionally dice roll off the table

Jokes aside, the UltraSpin function needs tuning as the velocity of the spin is probably too high, causing the dice to occasionally hit one of the invisible colliders I created around the scene to keep the dice contained. As the velocity is so high its causing the die to hit the boundaries, jumping up and over and escaping the scene. Pesky dice.

[damned]

make the boundaries... higher.

[Zeus]

make the boundaries... higher.

Yes, that would be another approach.

[antaskidayo]

You can't change the graphics of the actual 3D dice that roll. But, you can then map those results to specific custom values. See the Warhammer FRP 3 ruleset: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/library/WFRP_3E.xcp or the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire ruleset: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-Empire-FG-3-0

These use the <die> object to change the result displayed after the roll to a graphic icon: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/refdoc/die.xcp

For example, for changing the result graphic of the d6:

<icon name="d6icon" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.png" />
<icon name="d6icon.1" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.1.png" />
<icon name="d6icon.2" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.2.png" />
<icon name="d6icon.3" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.3.png" />
<icon name="d6icon.4" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.4.png" />
<icon name="d6icon.5" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.5.png" />
<icon name="d6icon.6" file="graphics/dice/d6/d6.6.png" />

is there a step by step process for a newbie like me?