On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Devyn Collier Johnson <devyncjohn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Would a Python3 game module be more useful? I plan to make a function that > rolls a die and prints the output (You got a 5) and other similar random > games.
Taking someone else's module and learning to use it has a cost. Plus there's licensing and other issues (if you release your library GPL3, you force anyone who uses it to do the same - though I'm not 100% sure how that goes with Python modules, since they're not 'linked' the way others are), not to mention the time spent finding out that your module even exists. For a module to be useful, all those costs combined have to be lower than the cost of just writing the code yourself when you need it. On the other hand, it's VERY common for a programmer to have his own *personal* utilities module. Stuff stuff in there whenever you think it'll be useful, import it into your applications, et voila. The bar is way lower for that. Your dice-roller is perhaps useful to yourself, without being worth the effort for someone else to learn. Plus, you get to decide exactly how much flexibility you need. Do you only ever need to roll a single six-sider at a time? Then don't bother implementing stuff like I did for Minstrel Hall, where we play Dungeons and Dragons: [ROLL] Rosuav (Gaston crit dmg) rolls 4d8: 7, 3, 6, 1, totalling 17. [ROLL] Rosuav (Gaston crit dmg) rolls d6: 1 (elec) [ROLL] Rosuav (Gaston crit dmg) rolls d10: 6 (burst) [ROLL] Rosuav (Gaston crit dmg) rolls d8: 8 (thunder) [ROLL] For 4d8+12 STR+10 ench+4 specialization+d6 elec+d10 burst+d8 thunder+20 PA, Rosuav (Gaston crit dmg) totals: 78 Okay, that's a somewhat extreme example, but it's common to roll damage as, say, 2d6+13, which means two six-sided dice plus a constant 13. (This will result in damage between 15 and 25, with 20 being significantly more likely than either of the extremes.) And even that is probably a lot more complicated than you'll need for your purposes... yet for a D&D system, a dice roller that can only do a single d6 at a time is utterly useless. There's actually a dice roller module on PyPI already [1]; and it's probably of no use to you, because it's as complicated as I described above. I personally wouldn't use it, though, because I can't see a license - which comes back to the issues I listed above. Again, not an issue for your own code; if it's your copyright, you can do with it as you wish. [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/diceroll ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
