Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

Hi

Can anyone tell me how to prevent certain decks giving reversals.

I have Oracle decks that I do not want to have reversing but they keep doing it.

I've messed around with the Deck Options and it does'nt seem to work.

Cheers

Mark

Hi Mark, I don't know of any way to do that on a deck by deck case. I just change the setting for all decks when I want to change how I'm working. You might want to put this in for a wish list item .-)

Shari

I was wrong... I thought there was a way to do this but couldn't find it..

Options>Change Setting on the Deck
The check box is in the bottom left on the deck tab.

Shari

Haha, you wish it you have it...it is already there!

You can do it on the Settings for such-and-such deck page on the options form. It works the same way as the other preferences like background etc: if there is no deck-specific preference, the general one is used.

Some reasons why you might not have found it worked straight away:

You have to check the Apply a percentage of reversals checkbox and then set the spinner to zero. Just the fact that the spinner is on zero does not establish the preference if the box is not checked.

Then remember that reversals are applied at shuffling - gathering and re-dealing will not get rid of your reversed cards. You have to sort the deck to do that.

A reshuffle will not get rid of reversed cards either, even if you have set the reversals to zero since originally dealing the cards (or especially in that case, in fact). This is because the inverted cards will not get inverted back to the upright position. It won't happen until you do a sort.

It brings up an interesting point. Whatever percentage you set, if it is greater than zero, the tendency will always go towards 50/50. It is like the diffusion of a gas or liquid across a semi-permeable membrane: no matter what the original distribution the law of average will always leave you with a uniform mix. You might need to shuffle a deck (real or virtual) a thousand times, but allowing for a 1 reversal rate (in the case of a real deck due to dropped cards that are put back the wrong way round), you will eventually get to a state where there are about 50 reversed cards in the deck.

Anyway, just remember that a sort ascending or descending will always get rid of them, and if you have specified zero reversals they won't come back

Aha!

That makes perfect sense ... and works too.

Ok next question.

I am working on an Oracle deck of 20 cards. Based on the classic 8-Ball Formula

Now the process for the 8-Ball was you had 20 potential answers and you although statitically impossible ask 20 questions and get the same answer 20 times as each shake of the ball is theoretically a reshuffle.

Now the quickest fudge for this would be to take the 20 cards, duplicate them, renumber them and so on. Do this a few times so maybe you had 99 cards and a back in the deck which would have 5 chances of drawing each card.

Is that making sense so far?

Now from what I gather that would be fine except increase the overhead of the deck size.

So what I was wondering was ( and this is not a suggestion for the wish list in anyway )

Is it possible through deck options only to force a deck to gather and resuffle everytime a single card is drawn by clicking on the arrow at the top of the deck.

I know that some decks can enforce a gather cards now kind of message.

The reason I ask is it would be nice to automate this in the deck I am working on before I release it into the wild.

But at the end of the day if it cant be done the user will have to do it manually :)

Hi Mark,

I am afraid it is not possible to automate it. The gather cards now message appears when changing decks, so there is a trigger for that, but what you would ideally like is some kind of timed event - you ask the question, deal the card, it is there for five or ten seconds, and then it automatically gets reabsorbed and the deck reshuffled. This would be something new for the program.

My suggestion would be to distribute the 20 card deck with an explanation of how to use it in the packinfo.xml file. You could remind people of the two keyboard shortcuts to gather and shuffle the cards (Ctrl-G and Ctrl-S respectively) and to deal the top card (spacebar). In fact you can encourage the user to set a preference to always shuffle after gathering, so that brings it down to one simple operation: Ctrl-G and then spacebar, which becomes the equivalent of picking up the 8-ball and giving it a good shake. You can even tell them that Ctrl-G stands for Go, Baby!. Unfortunately the always shuffle after gathering is a program level option, so they will have to remember to reset it afterward, or it will apply to all decks.

Cheers,
Richard

Re the 8-ball thing....you can use more than one deck at a time in Orphalese, so I was just wondering whether you could copy the entire deck and select one card from each deck. Don't know that you can have five decks going at the one time though.

Richard???