Dicelab

What is Dicelab?

Dicelab is a tool to calculate the probability distribution of dice rolling schemes, and to roll dice accoring to such schemes. This can be used to analyse or design games, but may be useful in other situations as well.

Using a formal language to specify the dice rolling schemes allows dicelab to handle many, if not most, real and imaginable dice rolling problems.

Example

Assuming a fictional table-top roleplaying game uses the following scheme to determine success or failure: the player rolls N dice (determined by her skill), and discards all the lowest N-2 dice. The remaining two dice are summed up and compared against a problem-specific threshold T. If e.g. a player with a skill of three would try to beat a threshold of 10, what would be his odds? dicelab allows calculating just that:

count >10 sum keep high 2 3#d6;

which would result in the following output:

0 0.800926 1 0.199074

Features

Can precisely calculate the distribution, roll the dice and estimate the distribution by rolling many times and summing up.

Interface allows usage in scripts.

Full-featured formal language that allows to specify most dice rolling schemes.

Internal optimiser that reduces the complexity of many rolls.

Documentation

Dicelab comes with a manual that tries to explain the usage and the formal language. This manual can also be viewed online: dicelab_manual.pdf.

If you want to check whether the current version contains any changed relevant to you, please refer to the ChangeLog.

Download

The basic dicelab distribution contains the sources and has to be compiled manually to be usable. For Windows users, who often have problems compiling programs themselves, a separate file containing pre-compiled windows binaries is provided. Please note that dicelab may be provided through your distributions packaging system on some operating systems (e.g. Debian and Ubuntu).

Version Date Source Win32 Binaries 0.7 Nov 25, 2009 dicelab-0.7.tar.gz dicelab-win32-0.7.zip 0.6 Feb 22, 2008 dicelab-0.6.tar.gz dicelab-win32-0.6.zip 0.5 Dec 10, 2007 dicelab-0.5.tar.gz dicelab-win32-0.5.zip 0.4 Aug 14, 2007 dicelab-0.4.tar.gz dicelab-win32-0.4.zip 0.3 Jul 07, 2007 dicelab-0.3.tar.gz 0.2 Mar 22, 2007 dicelab-0.2.tar.gz 0.1 Feb 21, 2007 dicelab-0.1.tar.gz

License

Dicelab — evaluate the statistical distribution of dice rolls

Copyright © 2006–2009 Robert Lemmen <robertle@semistable.com>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Feedback

I'd love to hear about your experience with dicelab: bugs, performance problems, documentation issues, problems understanding the language, use cases and all the rest: Robert Lemmen <robertle@semistable.com>.