Sic Bo Alpha

Completed alpha at 15:15.

First step in building the alpha version is the easy part. Get the dice to roll. Three dice and a button that when clicked rolls the dice takes only a few minutes to get going. The key to this game, however, is getting the results of the roll. For this I have to build a back light that can be placed under each of the 50 bets. The lights are very simple. They are just colored blocks (for the moment at least) that will change their color based on the state they are set to. The initial states are off, dim, and on.

A copy of this back light is placed under each of the 50 bet areas. Each of these lights needs to have a name, which also leads to the eventual need of assigning each bet a numerical id. A series of 50 constants are created to hold the bet values for each possible bet. A light array is created that holds a reference to each of the 50 lights. The position within this array directly corresponds to the bet value.

At this point I have a board that can be lit up, but the roll results need to be analyzed in order to figure out which lights to light. An array of 50 elements is created to hold the bet results. Analyzing the results is then just a matter of clearing this array then filling the appropriate elements. Once this is done, a simple loop through the array is done dimming any light that is not a winner and lighting those that are winners.

The analyzing is actually not that difficult when you consider that while there are a lot of different bets, the bets can be logically grouped together so having a nicely structured bet table allows us to very easily calculate the appropriate array element to update.

Single number bets are the easiest to handle. Combinations of two numbers are a bit trickier so that was broken into a separate routine that gets called three times (dice 1&2, 1&3, 2&3). This routine throws away pairs and simply determines the array element based on the low dice and the difference between the low die and the high die. Totals are almost as easy as single number bets. Doubles and triples likewise are very straightforward. Small and Big bets take advantage of the triple and total results to update either the big or small bet if no triple has occurred.

That was a lot of work, but now the core of the game is functioning. The only thing left to have a complete game is the betting system, which is the next thing that I am going to work on. I am hoping that this is only an hour or two's work, but we will see.