Sophie’s Dice v1.6 – Dizzying Update!
Posted: November 6, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dice Leave a comment »This update has some important fixes and features, but the biggest part of it is all the new dice shapes so lets get into it!
Spinners
I think most people my age and older used to make spinners when they didn’t have dice on hand. Just cut out a cardboard disc, write some numbers around it, stick a pencil through the middle. tbh it’s fun and I recommend doing it, but NOW YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
Teetotums
Of course, historically, people have put more effort than that into their spinning dice. Teetotums are a fascinating topic that I recommend checking out if you are a dice nerd. I’ve included two types in the app, what I consider the ‘standard’ teetotum, and a ‘fall-flat’ teetotum (which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever seen a dreidel – apologies to all the Hanukkah-celebrating dice fans that it took me so long to include this shape!)
Weighted-Void Spheres
Okay so these are COOL. On the outside, it’s just a ball with numbers on it, but when you roll it you’ll see it come to rest exactly on one number. And it’s fair! In real life, these work by having an empty void in the middle of the sphere, and a weight that rolls around within. The shape of the void has just the right number of points for the weight to rest in for the number die you want. I’ve only ever seen d6 sphere dice IRL (which have an octahedron void inside), but theoretically a bunch more fair sphere shapes are possible, so I included them!
Prisms
Okay so now we’re REALLY getting into the weeds… Many people have tackled the problem of fair prism/cylinder dice (which is simply summarised like this: if a tall shape is more likely to land on a side, and a flat shape is more likely to land on its top or bottom, what is the in-between point where it is equally likely to land on any side?). I had always been convinced that such things can never be ideally fair dice… but for a while this year I became uncertain! I spent a lot of time looking into it and doing a bunch of tests to get a better grasp of the problem and the conclusion I have come to is that they are not fair after all… but they are also not-not fair! This category of shape has a fairness type that I’m calling “conditionally fair” – that is, they are fair but only under very specific circumstances. If you change the circumstances, these dice stop being fair. Realistically, there are no circumstances where you can expect one of these dice to be completely fair (the same is true for ALL physical dice, but the unfairness is much more pronounced with prisms/cylinders)
Anyway, sorry if you read all that. It was a lot to say, I couldn’t find completely fair prism shapes so I just eyeballed it and then added them to the app. They will roll fair here so long as you don’t enable the “realistic bias” option (and even then, most aren’t so bad)
Other Shapes
Okay so I find most of these interesting but if you’ve gotten this far you’ve already endured enough of an info dump, here’s the rest of the dice that were added in 1.6:
New Features
There are a couple of features worth pointing out, both have been some of the largest requests I’ve gotten since launching the app. One is being able to spawn multiple dice to your hand before you roll any of them. Whenever you are dragging dice, you can now add more dice the the pool by right-clicking them on the hotbar or pressing the hotkeys for those dice (reminder: You can set hotkeys for your dice when you edit them!)
The other remarkable feature is being able to copy your roll results in text. I know this is small consolation for people that want online-multiplayer for this app (sorry, I’m no closer on that front!) but it can be used to quickly get the roll result into your group chat with proper formatting. To copy the result you can press a shortcut or right-click the result in the roll history. You can change the copy formatting by going to Settings>Results if it doesn’t suit your group chat.
A minor feature that was only ever requested once, but I added because it was easy to do and I thought it was cool: go to Settings>Dice and change the Time Rate. You’ll be able to roll lots of dice much quicker (if you’re looking to save time) or roll dice in slow motion (if you want to increase the tension!)
Other Stuff
This update also has a few new face image options (including tally marks from 1-10), and some fixes to issues that have bothered me and a few of you until now, in particular the issue with testing the stats of newly made dice is gone. No need to restart the app whenever you’re evaluating probabilities for your game’s custom dice!
That’s pretty much it for now! I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last update, I have very little control where I put what little focus I have, so finishing any single project can be really tricky. I’m super happy to get this one to you though, hopefully you enjoy it!
Thanks for the support, I love you, and I wish you happy rolling!
Don’t have Sophie’s Dice yet? Go get it!
(note: The iOS version is still at v1.5 and does not have the above features yet)
