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Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died

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Re: Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died

#51

Post by gus_massa »

pyrale wrote: post #44
gus_massa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing 2d10 of different colors is equivalent of trowing 1d100. It's nice they have different colors to avoid discussions, but you can throw them in two different bins or one at a time or something. Remember to sum them as (x-1) * 10 + (y-1) + 1, that is a clear indication of why zero-based indexing is better. (Does someone sell "decade" dice, which faces say: 10, 20, 300, ..., 90 and 100?)

> (x-1) * 10 + (y-1) + 1 Is that not equivalent to: > (x-1) * 10 + y or: > x * 10 + y - 10

I agree, but I'm just now porting a program from fortran to python. They read and write files that use their own convention about indexing and values [1]

And some changes may have to been backported, and it has a lot of tricks with index of arrays of different dimensions, so I'm wrapping the formulas with +1 and -1 and hopping the best.

IIRC the python compiler does not optimize them (perhaps with numba?), but later steps in other programs are slow, so N [1] If the file says "1 2 7.0 \r 1 2 8.0 \r" should I keep the sum (15.0), the first (I never seen that) or the last? (Raising an error, nah.)

Re: Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died

#52

Post by TacticalCoder »

estimator7292 wrote: post #36
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Zocchihedron" is a single die with 100 sides, but most games that use a d100 simulate it with two d10s instead (reading the ones on one d10 and the tens on the other). So the truth is that Zocchi's die is more a novelty and less influential than it might appear at first if you take the title as written.

Yeah, a real d100 is just too impractical for actual gameplay. Super neat, but two d10s is far more usable.

> Yeah, a real d100 is just too impractical for actual gameplay. Super neat, but two d10s is far more usable.

We had one for our AD&D sessions and we'd definitely be using it. AFAIR it didn't necessarily roll for very long but it was a bit hard to make sure what numbers was really the one at the top. Still: it had a cool factor.

Re: Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died

#53

Post by gus_massa »

bombcar wrote: post #43
1313ed01 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Martin Gardner wrote an article on platonic solids in Scientific American, December 1958, and mentioned this in passing: "All five Platonic solids have been used as dice. Next to the cube the octahedron seems to have been the most popular". I have no idea what games using 8-sided dice were somewhat popular (or existed at all) in 1958 or earlier? I wondered about that since I first read that article some decade ago. I…

I've seen some octahedrons but they pale in comparison to the six siders - I suspect partially because it's hard to see an octahedron and assume it's fair. It looks like a parallelogram. Besides gambling games most dice in antiquity were used in rituals or soothsaying.

Slightly related: In a stone shop nearby my home they sell a nice set of Platonic Solids made of semitransparent stones, but the octahedron is an irregular one :((( It's very similar to the ser in this photo https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/solidos-platonicos-geometria... It's a nice present for a friend that is a mathematician too, but there is high chance that they will notice.

Re: Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died

#54

Post by Daegalus »

gus_massa wrote: post #23
klez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joking aside, is throwing 2d10 and using one for tens and one for units different from throwing 1d100?

Throwing 2d10 of different colors is equivalent of trowing 1d100. It's nice they have different colors to avoid discussions, but you can throw them in two different bins or one at a time or something. Remember to sum them as (x-1) * 10 + (y-1) + 1, that is a clear indication of why zero-based indexing is better. (Does someone sell "decade" dice, which faces say: 10, 20, 300, ..., 90 and 100?)

Yes, decade dice is fairly standard these days.

Usually you buy 1 D10 and 1 decade dice, and role both of them and add them. Most purchaseable dice sets come this way.

This is just the first result with a picture, but they are really common, all my dice sets have one: https://www.dicegamedepot.com/10-sided-tens-opaque-dice-red/

Re: Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died

#55

Post by PunchyHamster »

Karliss wrote: post #21
PunchyHamster wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but that means there is no 0% on the scale

The point of percentile dice isn't to generate a string between "0%" and "100%", it is to test if action with chance of x% success gets done or not. For every o value of x, there are x out of 100 values which are strictly less than x, or if you count 0 as 100 then there are x out of 100 values which are less than or equal to x. Either way you get x% percent chance for event to happen. If the dice had 101 sides, the p…

I know, I wrote that in other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47845231#47846765 ;)
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