An idea?
Many players who tile say they do so because the prefer the tables to be in the same position from hand to hand allowing them to get some "spatial" sense of what is going on at tables as far as "history" goes.
I really like this concept of stack and tile. Even in the early stages of using it I was able to play 6 tables as easily as I usd to play 4 and when I tried 8 it was usually fine as well. This progam is definitely +EV. TY for developing the idea.
However, would a useful addition be the introduction of some logic as where to place tables in the grid?
At present, it just puts it into the 1st available slot. How about keeping a "preferred slot" record for each table?
When a table is about to be tiled for the 1st time. S&T could look at how many tables are allocated to each slot as the preferred slot and choose a preferred slot for this first-timer.
e.g if we have 8 tables with ID 0x1,0x2,to 0x8 for simplicity
and 4 slots there would be an array TableInPlay%i% (indexed 1 to 8 and holding the table ID) and PreferredSlot%i% which holds a number from 1 to 4. Counts for how many tables are allocated to each slot could be kept PSCount%k% where k would be from 1 to 4 (number of slots) in our case with PSCount holding how many tables have this as their preferred slot.
So we could have for the 8 tables currently in use PSCounts of 3,2,2,1 respectively meaning that slot 4 is underused at present. If we add a 9th table with ID 0x9 say then, on it's 1st use, we could allocate its preferred slot to be slot 4. we then have TableinPlay9 holding 0x9;PreferredSlot9 holding 4 and PSCount4 increases to 2
Each time through, S&T could add a new table to its TableInPlay list if required.
Once that is done we are at the same position we would be if the table had already been in the list before this run through.
If S&T has a most_urgent table to move AND there is at least one slot free then S&T would move the table to its preferred slot IF POSSIBLE. If not, S&T simply uses the 1st available slot as it does now.
I think for players who are not playing a very large number of tables this would work quite well. Even playing 8 tables I frequently had a situation where NO slots were in use so we would often (but not always) get the table re-loacted to its preferred slot.
In my gui I show the number of tables (preferred) allocated to each slot. I have not coded it yet but I shall be adding a hotkey to rebalance the slots in case they get out of kilter.
Cheers
T