Writing Extensions

There are two major types of extensions you can write for this program, extra dice types and extra rollers.

Dice Types

In order to make a dice type that is fully compliant with this program, your class has have these properties: value, max, min, avg, rolls

and one method, roll, which is called by the roller class.

Defaults for everything except value are included in the DiceBase class in base.py.

If you write a new dice type, make sure to add it to the default roller so that it can be used.

Properties

The required properties for a dice type are described below.

• value: a randomly determined result for a roll of this type, integer
• max: the highest possible roll value, integer
• min: the lowest possible roll value, integer
• avg: the average value of a roll (or hopefully close to it), real number
• rolls: raw rolls from this dice, tuple of integers

All of these are expected by the roller classes, and must return a result of the type listed.

Currently implemented dice classes have these as methods with an @property decorator. This is the suggested pattern for dice types.

Methods

The only required method, roll, is intended used to generate random results and assign them to a private variable for the later use of the object that rolled the results. This is not done in a class's __init__ method so accessing a constant value (such as the maximum possible value of many dice) can happen constant time.

Additional Properties and Methods

Besides those listed above, properties and methods exist on a case-by-case basis. Additional methods and classes can be made to help the implementation of your dice type, but will not be accessed by any roller.

One possible exception to this is the get_spec method. Only DiceBase has an implementation right now, and it is only used in the __str__ method for that class. It is designed to recreate the dice specification string used to create the dice. Not having it should not crash the program or raise an error.

Rollers

Rollers parse dice specifications and summarize results.

A roller has the following methods:

• parse_spec: Takes a string and and creates groups of dice based on its contents.
• __init__: Create the object, roll dice groups here, if appropriate.
• result: Calculate and output the result of the rolls. Create with a @property decorator.
• details: Get the lists of all rolled values. Create with a @property decorator.
• roll_details_string: Get the string representation of all rolls.