EXTREME Sized Decks

[MysticEast]

Hi, after a long absence due to cancer, I seem to be getting better and am back working on Decks.
I had left unfinished two projects,
1) "The Book of Fate" based on the original source materials "Discovered" by Napoleon in Egypt. It's in an advanced stage of development and I hope to resume work on that and complete it soon.
2) A complete update to my favourite Oracle the "Ling Qi Jing", removing the unbalanced and negative connotations given to "Yin". This is what I'm looking at at the moment.

I had a working Deck already created, with a totally equal balance for Yin and Yang. However I found that the Deck as a whole came out too negative. This was clearly not the intention and for a while (a long while) I could not get around it.

To allow for an equality of Yin and Yang and to allow for one other improvement to the original - spliting the "Human" into "Self" and "Others", It was necessary to increase the Ling Qi Jing's 125 "Verses"/Cards to a rather massive 625 "Verses"/Cards. The work in creating 625 Cards was simpler because I was using Vector Graphics and could simply copy elements as necessary. The work in creating "Readings" for each of those Cards was made easier by using an automated Excel file, where I could have "Master Cells" which were referenced as necessary by individual Card lines. The excel file not only generates the Individual Card "Meanings" but is capable of generating the whole Orphalese CardData.xml file without having to load all those meanings by hand! - ALL DONE a while back and IT WORKS!

Each Card "Note" has an appropriate pargraph from each of the four Influences, "Heaven", "Self", "Others" and "Earth", according to the level of Yin or Yang. I left a blank paragraph for a summary to tie those together, which I would have to do individually by hand. Each Card also had a "Probablity" assigned and shown, based on the "Spirit Tokens" method of choosing your Oracle, which is traditional with the Ling Qi Jing. I also refered the Questioner to the "next stage", showing the next Oracle Card that would become relevant according to authentic Yin-Yang Theory. I also generated and showed an approximate "Nice/Nasty" index, based on the four Influences in each card. It was this "Nice/Nasty" index which halted work on the Oracle! I simply averaged these "Nice/Nasty" indices and the result came out below zero. Regretably this also matched my intuition, based on some trial "Readings"...

Perhaps this Oracle has more Cards than any Oracle so far???

Anyway recently I have come upon a solution to the "Over Negative" balance of the Oracle as a whole. And one which seems authentic to the original "Ling Qi Jing" Oracle.

I had used a "Schema" as follows
0 - Unclear
1 - Positive Yang
2 - Positive Yin
3 - Too much / Negative Yang
4 - Too Much / Negative Yin

but with a new "Schema" of
0 - Unclear
1 - Fresh (more Fragile) Yang
2 - Fresh (more Fragile) Yin
3 - Strong Yang
4 - Strong Yin
5 - Too much / Negative Yang
6 - Too Much / Negative Yin

This I am confident WILL get me the balance that I need for the Oracle as a whole. This schema is ALSO more authentic to the original, which used the ideas of "Fresh" Yin or Yang and "Strong" Yin or Yang!

However as opposed to the:
5 to the power of three = 125 Cards of the Ling Qi Jing
and 5 to the power of FOUR = 625 Cards for my first Failure Attempt.
the new "Schema" requires 7 to the power of Four = 2401 Cards!

NOW 2401 Cards would be a MASSIVE venture! 625 had been very large but I managed to do it with the methods I described above. 2401 is very nearly four times larger!!!

I would greatly appreciate Richard's feedback on whether it is worth me starting this new stage of the project. Is this going to "Break" Orphelese"? - Or might it even "Break" Windows? I know that as Orphalese works, each Card is a seperate "Window" in Windows, so is this going to use too much of Windows resources? Could it be managed with more memory installed?? Would it be 64 bit Windows ONLY?? Perhaps I'd have to specify a minimum working amount of Memory???

As a reference, my existing "Oracle of The Mystic East" with 625 gif Cards of 30 kb each (426 x 596 pixels) works, but Orphalese is just a tad "slow" when it comes to sorting the cards. But yes it works! If the Oracle had been "Balanced" I would have slashed the size of the Cards a bit to get it more "Snappy". But is 2401 Cards going to grind to a halt?

I would greatly appreciate that feedback as if it were possible I would be prepared to do the work...

Regards MysticEast

[MysticEast]

Hi again!
Nobody had replied yet. Perhaps nobody knows???

I was thinking in the meantime, and being no stranger to very large Decks (my existing "Yarrow Stalk Odds" Decks for the I ching, come in three sizes of 279, 469 and 748 - in increasing accuracy of modelling the genuine "Yarrow Stalk" Odds). I KNEW that the 625 sized Deck would work even before creating it, since the 748 sized "Yarrow Stalk Odds" Deck had worked!

What I will do now, is to do my own trial on this and report back here...

The amount of work in creating the actual 2401 Card "Oracle of The Mystic East" would be MUCH TOO MUCH to be just a trial , so I'm thinking of taking one of those 748 sized "Yarrow Stalk Odds" Decks and simply copying the files till I get enough and then re-naming them for Orphalese with the "Bulk Rename Utility". The graphics I used there are very small, so it will keep the size of this "Trial Deck" to a minimum.

I will do this soon and report back here.

Regards MysticEast

[Programmer]

Hi Mystic East,

Glad to hear you are getting better, the forum has certainly been somewhat less lively without your input.

I don't think either Windows or the tarot program would force any significant limit. Every open window needs to have a unique identifier but I just googled what the limit on that would be and on a 64 bit machine it is 2 to the power of 24 or about 16 million. If it turns out there is something that breaks in the Orphalese Tarot program with that many cards in the deck I am sure it can be fixed.

Of course the limit really comes from your hardware, it is a practical limit not a theoretical one. A computer might not be able to handle even three windows simultaneously if they are all playing wide screen, ultra high definition video content. So it is more a question of how many cards you need to have out of the deck at any given time (because the cards that are left in the deck are basically just represented by a single window). Too many with too rich graphics and you will find your machine going slow. Also if you tried to load the whole deck into the Compare Cards tool that would almost certainly overload the system.

So anyway, in the interests of science please go ahead with the experiment and we'll all tune it here to see how it goes!

[MysticEast]

Hi Richard, thanks for your reply.
Well I've done that "Trial MASSIVE Deck" and the answer is Yes and No - and Yes and No - and Yes and No.....

The Deck loaded OK.
Orphalese counts the cards correctly and you can deal cards from the deck all no problem.
It seems to shuffle OK, although I remember from a previous investigation that there had been at one time a limit on the number of cards that got shuffled in a very large deck. I'm not sure if this still applies? That would be difficult to check up on because of something mentioned below...
When I sorted the cards A-Z it happened suspiciously fast (as if it hadn't done all those cards - I was certainly expecting a second or two).
Cards could be gathered after that, no problem.
So far so good...

However, the way that I was hoping that this Deck would be used - ie in a manner reflecting the traditional "Spirit Tokens" in a seperate Deck, and then choosing the Card that the Spirit Tokens had indicated by using the "Free Selection Mode".

This didn't work! In fact when I pressed F4 it seemed as if nothing happened at all. No error message. No "Working Gliff" for the mouse. No "Not Responding" on the Program header. So I looked into Task Manager and Resource Monitor and indeed nothing seemed to be happening!! Nothing but no "Error" or "Crash" as such.

F4 had worked with the earlier Deck of 625 cards, although with that number of cards it took about 2 seconds to display the fan and it was rather fiddly to select an individual card from there. Just the slightest hand jitter and the mouse had selected the one next door!

So the rub is that if F4 doesn't work with that many cards (and it wouldn't even be practical to use it if it did) then this 2401 sized Oracle isn't happening...

That's the bad news. However I could always try a slightly different direction...

The new Deck was primarily focused on getting rid of the latent (and not so latent) sexism in the application of the Yin Yang philosophy. This is central and CAN'T be ditched (images of ten thousand mules sying "No" - sorry I forgot mules can't speak)

The SECONDARY intention was to expand the "Human" Category into "Self" and "Others", which is an idea of my own, which I still rate as a "good" enhancement, but was the one primarily responsible for the Card number increase!!! So if I cut out this change and stick just with evening out the sexism of the original I will still have done somthing valuable. It would also be much more easy to use.

I will stil use my more recent Yin/Yang "schema" as indicated earlier.
0 - Unclear
1 - Fresh (more Fragile) Yang
2 - Fresh (more Fragile) Yin
3 - Strong Yang
4 - Strong Yin
5 - Too much / Negative Yang
6 - Too Much / Negative Yin
Which guarantees that Yin and Yang can both have positive and negative aspects/phases, reflecting the world around us.

but with just the original Three Categories of "Heaven", "Human Affairs" and "Earth" it will lead to:-

7 - to the power of 3 = 342 Cards,
which will be relatively manageable - and will certainly work in every respect!

So I WILL push ahead with that one and expect to have that ready in a month or so...

Then I'll progress onto the other major project of mine - "The Book of Fate".

Regards MysticEast

P.S.
Just for reference I'm using a ten year old Desktop I built myself, with 64 bit Win 10 and 8GB of Memory. A decent enough workhorse?
The 2401 card Deck was 1.65 MB in size with each card a gif of 72x355 pixels - on average 501bytes each.

[MysticEast]

Tiny Error in above post:-
7 x 7 x 7 = 343
not the 342 I quote above! (How did I do that?....)
MysticEast
- - -
Even Myst-ics make myst-akes

[Programmer]

Hi Mystic,

300 odd cards definitely sounds more manageable! Mind you, I am puzzled by the Free Selection not working. Are you sure the deck had the focus? If you want you can email it to me and I will see if there is anything causing it to go wrong.