Apple App-Less Dice Roller

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Clever_Munkey
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Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2015 12:08 am
Location: Central California

Apple App-Less Dice Roller

Post by Clever_Munkey »

I made a quirky little die roller using Apple Shortcuts, on my phone. You can check it out here: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/efb09b ... 2e842115c3

When you run this shortcut it will prompt you to enter a die formula. Formulas must be in the form "X,Y,Z" which is equivalent to XdY+Z. The output is a string in the form [X]d[Y]+[Z] = [Results]

Note: You will need to "Allow Untrusted Shortcuts," in your security settings in order to get this because any shortcut outside of the gallery is considered untrusted. Before downloading the shortcut, you can check out the actual code, and you are free to modify any of it however you like. You can then dissallow untrusted shortcuts after downloading without affecting its performance.

By default, it does NOT need to access your contacts, or use any other peripheral applications or hardware, so if it asks to use those things, then let me know because something is wrong.

So why would you want to use this instead of just a normal nice dice rolling app? Well, you probably wouldn't, but there are a couple of niche benefits.

1. It's just a function of Apple Shortcuts, which means it is takes up basically no memory, and is less likely to become unusable due to an update.

2. You can modify it to do whatever you like. Recently I've been playing a few games over WhatsApp, and we like to send every die result, with a brief description, and the formula used, just to make sure everyone is on the same page with which random numbers are flying around correspond to what.
So instead of open the die roller -> enter the formula -> get the result -> reopen WhatsApp -> type a description -> type the formula and result -> send.
I just run my shortcut -> type a brief description-> enter 3 numbers -> select the chat -> send.

Now, the text parser is pretty quirky. First it separates the input by commas and assigns the string to a variable, but the number generator reads the value of the variable as only equal to the first string of text, not separated by spaces. So "1,20,3" would be parsed as 1d20+3, but "1,2 0,3" would be parsed as 1d2+3 but the output would show "1d2 0+3 = [result]."

The parser also only looks at the first three inputs, so anything after a third comma will be completely ignored.
Call me Joe. Mr. Munkey is my father.
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