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Pick a ticket, any ticket.
A random ticket picking tool. Put your name in hat, shake it up, pull a random winner. That’s the concept anyways.
The Picket project was initially a very simple app that could randomly pick a name from a list. It had a picture of a top hat that shook around while picking. It was a simple, yet useful, tool that I created for guild drawings in my Guild Wars 2 days.
I decided to rewrite my old application with this newer one. I separated out the picture and animation from the core application so that I could create more, unique, variations. These variations can be dropped in and used as plugins that anyone can create or modify. I’ve only created two plugins so far.
Random Pick
Clicking the ‘Random Pick’ button will activate the plugin animation. While the interface between the plugins are the same, each plugin is fundamentally different.
Plugins
More in-depth details on how each plugin works can be found on each of the plugin download pages.
The MagicWheel Plugin
- The wheel can be loaded with names and randomly sorted.
- The wheel will spin according to the strength it starts with.
- It will then slowly stop and pick a random ticket.
The MagicHat Plugin.
- The hat can be filled with names.
- The hat will shake and mix up the list.
- It will then stop and pick a random ticket.
Ticket Pool
The Ticket Pool holds all tickets. This list is actually separate from the plugin’s internal list and is coded to update along-side it.
- Click “Add” to enter a new ticket.
- Set a name, color, and ticket count before adding.
- Double click an entry to edit.
- You can change the color, or Add/Subtract ticket the count.
- Subtract the ticket count below 1 to remove the entry.
- Updating will reset the entry to your current setting.
Options
The Options menu contains two special features besides the Advanced option.
Move Winning Ticket from Pool
- This option will move individual tickets from the Ticket Pool to the Winning Pot.
- Move them back by selecting them, then clicking ‘Move Back’.
- No tickets are deleted from Picket using this option.
Remove Winner from Pool
- This option will remove all of the person’s tickets if he is selected as a winner.
- Ensure no-one wins more than once.
- Tickets are deleted from Picket using this option.
Advanced
Advanced option will expand the GUI to show more on-screen options.
The Automatic Pic option will allow multiple Winners to be selected automatically.
- All will continuously pick until the Ticket Pool is empty.
- Count will continuously pick until the counter reaches 0.
The pick strength slider allows you to control how long the picking process will take.
- Weak, Average, or Strong will be a short to longer picking time.
- Super will be a long picking time.
- Random will choose a random setting between Weak and Super.
- Infinite will allow the picking process to continue until it is manually stopped.
- Stopping the pick on Infinite will still choose a random ticket and will not immediately stop.
The Speed option will adjust the animation speed.
- Default is 0.080
- Animation processor based since they are drawn by the CPU.
- Newer CPU’s will draw the animation quicker and you may need to lower the speed.
The Boost option allows for better dynamic speeds.
- As of this note; Boost is only available for the MagicWheel plugin.
- It will slightly boost the initial speed of the animation until it is 40% complete.
- Helps the wheel animation to be slightly more random as if being spun by a person.
- Turn off to have a basic steady speed reduction of the animation.
The Shuffle button will manually mix up the list so that tickets are not clumped together.
- The internal plugin list will first be shuffled.
- The GUI list will be updated accordingly.
- If shuffled, the internal list will be randomized.
Sessions
You can save and restore sessions anytime through the file menu.
- Session Save As – save your session as a pkt file (picket file).
- Session Restore From – restore your pkt file session.
- Auto Save/Restore – set an auto save/restore session.
- The auto save file is ‘session.pkt’ in the current directory.
Reflection training
I wrote this application using Reflection so that the dll plugins can be dropped in without needing to recompile the application. It was also a nice training experience utilizing processes that I normally don’t use.
Please feel free to view the source code over at GitHub. Completely available. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. And please share with your friends!