5 Responses to ““Mach Dice” Now on the iTunes Store!”

1. Alan Says:
   August 21st, 2008 at 9:38 am

   A suggestion…
   when entering the dice formula, after pressing the D to select die sizes could the keyboard change to have 4,6,8,10,12,20 buttons rather than forcing you to type in 20 (or indeed confuse it by typing in 19)

   Otherwise – just soooo cool. Particularlythe motion sensitive perspective trick that is seriously cool.

2. John Powell Says:
   August 21st, 2008 at 3:26 pm

   Just tried out this program – wicked cool!

   Requests:

   1. Fudge Dice (6 sided with 2 sides blank, 2 sides with minus (-) signs and 2 sides with plus (+) signs.

   2. Ability to subtract dice from other dice. Some games call for d6-d6 rolls (range -5 to +5) for instance. Graphically you’d probably want to use black or red dice for ‘negative’ dice.

   3. The ability to drop x number of highest or lowest dice from roll.

   4. “Exploding” dice – i.e. when a die rolls its maximum value another die of the same type is also rolled.

   5. Ability to re-arrange dice on screen after rolling. Some games have a bidding mechanic where you want to line up the dice in different ways.

   Thanks again for making this fun product!

3. Mr. Zorg Says:
   August 21st, 2008 at 3:50 pm

   Very nice. I don’t game much any more, but the geek in me just had to get this. Three small “annoyances” that would be great if you could work on them:

   1) The perspective tilt is pretty cool, but seems just a tad unnatural. The height of square dice look a little too tall. And why does the table wiggle as I tilt? That just doesn’t seem right.

   2) It would look oh so much cooler if you could work on the anti-aliasing of both the dice edges and the table logo.

   3) Call me anal, but if I ask for 3d12+1d20, I want to see the 1. Don’t remove it. It should be optional, sure, but…

4. anaglyph Says:
   August 21st, 2008 at 8:10 pm

   Very cool, thanks. Purchased!

5. Mach Says:
   August 21st, 2008 at 9:29 pm

   Thank you all for your comments! Some comments on the comments:

   * I was actually thinking about changing the dice selection to be a series of buttons (d10, d20, etc.) instead of just typing the individual numbers. The drawback is that it’ll be a little more awkward to pick non-standard dice. I’ll have to think about that.
   * I plan to add subtraction, but the different dice color gets a bit tricky with all the dice customization I plan.
   * I’d like to add the ability to drop dice, but I just have to work out the interface.
   * Oddly enough, a number of people have requested exploding dice. I might just put it in.
   * I definitely plan to add the ability to move dice and it’ll be combined with the locking mechanism.
   * The tilting perspective is a bit tricky because it relies on making assumptions about distance between iPhone and your eyes. But the table wiggling was intentional. Originally, the virtual plane was locked to the physical plane of the iPhone screen. But it made the dice look “floaty”. So I recessed the plane slightly to give it a more dimensional look. Hmm, I should probably do a post on the whole 3D tilting effect.
   * I’d love to fix the anti-aliasing of the dice edges, but it’s a limitation of the OpenGL implementation. The table logo, on the other hand, can definitely be better. But right now, I do all my graphics on open source software so it’ll hopefully get better once I can afford Photoshop.
   * I’ll look into keeping the 1 when it’s explicitly typed.

   Thank you again for the comments! I’ll do my best to keep improving this app.