Future features

[frankieali]

Idea list for future features

• die animation effects such as fade out, dissolve, burn away, explode, glow, and pulse
• additional event callbacks such as beforeRoll, afterRollComplete, beforeResult
• seeing how instance buffers might be leveraged within BabylonJS
• dynamically load PBR material or standard material. PBR materials are about 3x - 5x heavier so would want to make this an opt-in feature
• make lighting an importable scene. Set up your lighting in Blender and bring it into the dice roller
• make various material textures optional such as bump map and specular map
• when dice explode, set the explode point to be over the die instead of a new toss in from the edge (as an optional param)
• add configurable performance options
• camera focal point and motion blur effects (aka post-processing effects)
• additional dice such as d2, d14 and d30 used in other systems
• detect collisions and trigger sound effects, possible onCollision callback event

[fromi]

Hi @frankieali,
I founded Game Park (https://game-park.com/) to offer online board games adaptations.
I would love to use this library, however the result of any dice throw is provided by the server (to prevent any cheating of course). I think that's not compatible with the library actually, but I would love to see a feature to animate dices with a predictable result!
Bravo for the great work anyway 👍

[frankieali]

Hi @fromi. You are not the first to request this. Also here #29. Currently, I just start the dice rolling and let the physics resolve themselves. I don't even know how I would approach this problem. I don't believe AmmoJS, used for physics, is a deterministic engine. This link offers me a clue though https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/bq6c5d/deterministic_physics_dice_rolls_in_a_non/

[fromi]

Yes, I already studied that: http://a.teall.info/dice/
And I came to the conclusion it would be quite a challenge to produce a deterministic output, given the extensive use of random values at every bouncing. The solution you are pointing at was also my conclusion, but I cannot spend the time on it unfortunately :/

[frankieali]

Ok, I took a deep dive into this yesterday. It's not impossible. I added it as an enhancement #47. It'll take some time though.

Overall, I think this is a very valuable feature to have and a core requirement for many people who would want to use this library. It'll also open up options for dice parsers. I've always liked the features offered by RPG Dice Roller.

[marvink]

The sound effects would be awesome and adds a lot to the flavour.

[MaritFischer]

Would love a way to interact with the dice, for example click on a dice and 'lock' that dice, then re-roll all other dice except for the locked once. So some sort of onClick event listener.

[frankieali]

@MaritFischer Clicking on dice involves importing all the ray tracing capabilities of the 3D library. I chose to leave these features out of the package in order to keep the package size small. It's a lot of overhead. The dice all become static at the end of a roll. Dice can be removed and added individually. I would suggest presenting a UI component that allows the user to lock dice. Then you know what to re-roll.

I may come back around to adding raytracing click events in the future. It seems including more features is outweighing package size.