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Summary: I do see how Unicode could be useful for compactly representing graphics for full-sized cards. I was imagining its use for playing Kilodeck games in . . .
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> I do see how Unicode could be useful for compactly representing graphics for full-sized cards. I was imagining its use for playing Kilodeck games in a character-based terminal or browser. One could still do that with a user-defined 1024-character chunk, though.
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> **[[http://ron.ludism.org|RonHaleEvans]].** 2020-02-03 07:59 UTC.
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Just for fun I've brainstormed some alternate 2^10 deck schemes (not sure if I should properly call them a "Kilodeck" but they do have a 2^10 structure).
With the right Unicode font (like an ideal Piecepack diagram font this may not exist yet) each "card" can be represented by a single character in software platforms (i.e. most terminals, word processors, web browsers) that support foreground/background colors.
Eight French Suits:
1. Filled or Not-Filled (in Unicode "Black" or "White")
2. Pointy-Bottom or Flat-Bottom (traditionally also "Light" versus "Dark")
3. Peach-Shaped or Not-Peach-Shaped (in Mandarin Spades and Hearts are literally "black peach" and "red peach")
Eight Combining Diacritics:
4. One or Two
5. Dots or Accents
6. Above or Beneath (the suit)
Four Combining Enclosing characters (Square, Diamond, Circle, Triangle)
7. Pointy-Top or No-Pointy-Top
8. Flat-Bottom or No-Flat-Bottom
Four Color schemes
9. Black or Red
10. Normal or Inverted
Variants: Use the wide variety of arrows (different shapes and orientations) instead of French suits. Instead of color schemes use even more combining glyphs (in particular wide variety of horizontal, diagonal, vertical lines) to overlay the character to reach 2^10 combinations.
Each "card" is a portrait of a fantasy-themed character. Converting Kilodeck cards into concrete characters may help in Kilodeck memory competitions and Kilodeck card counting. Also could be an RPG game aid (i.e. character generator and/or portraits).
i.e. Male Old Pointy-Ears Tall No-Shield Armor Ranged Bladed Mundane Rural character could be an example of an Elven ranger (in light armor armed with a longbow).
Other potential variant binary portrait choices (some maybe difficult to capture in a picture):
Of course could be fun to do a 2^10 binary scheme for Sci-Fi/Western/Mundane characters or perhaps Animals.
As a thought exercise what would be best way to map a Kilodeck onto piecepackr for making game diagrams? Perhaps 16 different background/border "configurations" corresponding to each of your 16 different 64-card subdecks? Then 8 "suits" for each combination of the three "suit" characteristics". This leaves 8 "ranks" for the remaining three characteristics. Or perhaps go with the extreme of just one configuration, one rank, and 2^10 suits (convert back and forth from binary integer representations). Of course "pmap_piece" allows one to use a "trans" function to first manipulate the spreadsheet input before passing to "grid.piece" so one could structure the game diagram info spreadsheet in other ways other than the internal piecepackr representation (i.e. use a whopping 10 binary columns for each characteristic).
TrevorLDavis. 2020-01-23 19:31 UTC.
What an awesome comment. Thanks again for writing, Trevor. For your information, the Kilodeck is now part of my work in progress Parallel Pastimes as well as being described on this wiki and in Mindhacker. Some responses and questions:
I would categorize most of your proposed 2^10 decks as Kilodeck variants. The important thing is that they have 10 features each with 2 values, which are ordered in a bigendian way, so each card can be written as a 10-bit binary number or "kyte". Each of your proposed decks contains 1024 cards and can be mapped in a consistent way onto the canonical Kilodeck. This is also critical.
I consider it aesthetically important that the graphics on a Kilodeck or variant cards be relatively unified and unitary. For example, each card in the canonical Kilodeck has one suit (a shape, either a circle or a triangle). This suit is in one of two colors, and either has a face or not. The card also has a number, one or two, which means the suit shape occurs either once or twice on the card. Thus, with essentially one graphic, a Kilodeck card represents four bits of information. Another friend was noodling around with Kilodeck cards, but his idea was to have 10 shapes on a card, each of which could represent one bit of information. This is too easy. Your Fantasy Character Kilodeck (see below) is far closer to the spirit I intended, even though it is far less abstract than my sample Kilodeck.
I like your Plaintext Kilodeck because it has the kind of integrity I'm thinking of, and because the Unicode characters have a built-in ordering. But can you really represent background colors in (some version or other) of Unicode? Please tell me; I'm too lazy to look it up right now. Smiley emoji goes here.
As for the piecepackr encoding section, I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about. The Curse of Knowledge strikes again!
In the original draft of the Kilodeck chapter in Parallel Pastimes, I mention that on planet Counter, "Since anyone can do what they want with it [it's 'commonsrighted'], people have been taking the structure and running with it -- monster-themed Kilodecks, Revolutionary War decks (rebels versus redcoats), pony decks for little girls and Bronies. I guess being able to break it into smaller pieces and customize it that way helps a lot too." I later decided the pony deck was derivative and decided to make it a a naked mole rat fancier deck (the Counterrans raise these "tunnelbunnies" as pets).
The Revolutionary War deck would come closest to your Fantasy Character Kilodeck. I had similar features in mind. I also remember thinking about a modern military Kilodeck with the two suits being something like tanks and aircraft. These could be used to play "various abstract deck-building games for the Kilodeck, such as QuarterMaster, DecKit, and Kilodeck the Halls, where the values of certain attributes determine what your card can do in a combat situation". The idea is that any Kilodeck variant that's isomorphic to the canonical deck can be used to play any standard Kilodeck game, just as you can play a bloodthirsty Texas Hold'em championship in Vegas with a childrens' Scooby Doo deck in real life, however incongruous it might seem.
Even though I've been thinking about the Kilodeck for a while, and have created the graphics for a couple, I've never printed a deck in real life, much less played a game with one, which is why I still consider it an imaginary game system for the purposes of Parallel Pastimes. However, I'd love to see what kind of Kilodecks you can generate with piecepackr, and if you can manage to wrangle decks through the print-on-demand process at someplace like The Game Crafter or DriveThruCards, I'll be the second to buy one.
RonHaleEvans. 2020-02-01 23:29 UTC.
To clarify, I'm not demanding that you bend your time, effort, and talents toward doing Kilodeck stuff with piecepackr, but I would certainly be interested to see the results if something like that happened! 😃
RonHaleEvans. 2020-02-02 00:26 UTC.
> But can you really represent background colors in (some version or other) of Unicode?
Unicode itself doesn't usually allow one to specify color (with a few exceptions for a few mainly Emoji characters). However most text-based platforms that use Unicode such as terminals, webpages, word processors, pdf, etc can support a different background color and foreground color for each character. For example my plaintext Unicode piecepack diagram generator will add color to piecepack diagrams when output to a terminal with color support. As mentioned there are more combining characters that Unicode supports that one could add if one didn't want to rely on color for those last binary options (in particular there are three different horizontal lines, two different vertical lines, and two different diagonal lines one could add).
> As for the piecepackr encoding section, I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about.
In piecepackr you can customize a unique piece by piece type plus side (i.e. "tile_face"), suit, rank, and configuration (i.e. "dominoes_blue"). It wasn't obvious to me which would be the best way to map the Kilodeck's 2^10 system onto piecepackr. For examples for dominoes (represented by customized piecepackr "tiles") I decided it would be easiest for each color to have its own configuration and have "suit" represent the "bottom" pips and rank the "top" pips (in playing cards the rank is above the suit). An alternative "mapping" would be a single dominoes configuration where each of the 28 domino pip combinations has its own rank (perhaps using the linear ordering used in Unicode) and then use suit to control color.
> Even though I've been thinking about the Kilodeck for a while, and have created the graphics for a couple, I've never printed a deck in real life, much less played a game with one, which is why I still consider it an imaginary game system for the purposes of Parallel Pastimes. However, I'd love to see what kind of Kilodecks you can generate with piecepackr, and if you can manage to wrangle decks through the print-on-demand process at someplace like The Game Crafter or DriveThruCards, I'll be the second to buy one.
I was mainly doing those thought exercises as a fun challenge.
I think for real life a 2^6 deck of 64 cards would be a bit more practical (i.e. the 8 suits times 8 diacritics easily expressed in Unicode would work). If you were to save each of your Kilodeck cards as a separate image with a regular naming pattern (i.e. 1001000100.png) I could pretty easily generate a piecepackr configuration that uses those images (like I did for the JCD piecepack). One could also write a custom grob function to generate various Kilodeck's but I'm probably not going to write one myself. Given a piecepackr configuration it wouldn't be hard to generate TheGameCrafter images using piecepackr (this was precisely the original purpose for piecepackr) but unless you pay for a premium service you may have to manually upload a bunch of images.
TrevorLDavis. 2020-02-02 22:40 UTC.
Sorry, I just saw your post about an hour ago, and it's approaching bedtime on a Sunday night. I'll have to be brief.
Unicode itself doesn't usually allow one to specify color (with a few exceptions for a few mainly Emoji characters). However most text-based platforms that use Unicode such as terminals, webpages, word processors, pdf, etc can support a different background color and foreground color for each character.
I know; that was kind of my point. (I once had a job that mainly consisted of explaining Unicode to Harvard students.) To explain my explanation, representing a Kilodeck card by a single Unicode character would be really cool. Representing a Kilodeck card by a conglomeration of a Unicode character, several RGB or CMYK strings, and potentially a few combining characters is less impressive.
I would like to see how far one could get by representing cards with Tengwar, though.
RonHaleEvans. 2020-02-03 07:02 UTC.
I do see how Unicode could be useful for compactly representing graphics for full-sized cards. I was imagining its use for playing Kilodeck games in a character-based terminal or browser. One could still do that with a user-defined 1024-character chunk, though.
RonHaleEvans. 2020-02-03 07:59 UTC.