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Forum Index > AIM/ICQ Discussion

AIM Dice Roller

Posted on: 02-07 3:44 am
metaphysician	[Quote] Is there any plan to implement the dice roller in the future?

Posted on: 02-07 4:31 am
Wildman Beta Tester	[Quote] whats a dice roller Hououin - your friendly neighborhood AIM server operator

tonyshowoff

Beta Tester

[Quote]

That was an aspect of the AOL Chat system that only really worked in AIM because of how AIM's chat system piggy backed on AOL's. In the very earliest versions of AIM with chat it didn't display because OnlineHost was stripped out totally. A bit later AOL decided to finally show OnlineHost to AIM users instead of just a line of bold text when someone arrived or departed. It's a bit more complex than that but the point is that //roll originally just never showed anything in AIM though the text would not display.

It was a command originally created for some game very early on but the other games began using it especially text based roll playing games or even playing DnD or whatever. Essentailly it allowed you to "roll" X number of dice with Y number of sides and display the results.

Syntax: //roll-diceX-sidesY
Example: //roll-dice5-sides10

The output would be:
OnlineHost: tonyshowoff rolled 5 10-sided dice: 3 5 7 9 1

Simply putting //roll is the same as putting //roll-dice1-sides6.

The syntax of //roll diceX-sidesY is also allowed.

The limitations are:
The amount of dice can be any unsigned integer between 1 - 15 (default: 1)
The amount of dice can be any unsigned integer between 1 - 999 (default: 6)

The command was never sent to chat.

There are actually two different methods for entering commands, they are // and =q. There were a decent amount of them, mostly bizarre things, but when the command was unknown, OnlineHost would say to just the person who was attempting it:

OnlineHost: Unknown =q Command.
OnlineHost: Unknown // Command.

You can learn more about =q from this community leader tutorial that somehow is still online:

http://www.angelfire.com/un/aol/Aol1.txt

Posted on: 02-10 12:28 am
Wildman Beta Tester	[Quote] //roll implemented. the feature will not become live until the next server update. command format will be //roll dice ? sides ?. simply issuing //roll will roll 1d4 Hououin - your friendly neighborhood AIM server operator

Posted on: 02-10 2:50 pm
metaphysician Beta Tester	[Quote] Very cool. Thanks! As a little context, I've been in an online RPG group for about 20 years, and AIM was always the absolute best chat client for our purposes. Everything else we ever tried either lacked a dice roller, lacked good or any ability to save transcripts, or else had an interface that was an atrocity. When AOL shut down support for AIM Classic, it was terrible.

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