Project: Par5e

[epithet]

Who said, we stopped talking to Wizards Patience my young Padawan. All good things take time to make come true, as well as come to those who wait I will say no more ...

I hope that means that I'm justified in putting off the daunting prospect of scanning, OCR processing, clean text prepping, and parsing all the 5e content, because an actual licensed product will become available.

Take my money, please.

[spoofer]

Spoofer: Try closing out PAR5E, and deleting everything inside the Temp folder you're using, then re-parsing. I have the same issue from time to time. But yes, I've done through Beholders and have tokens for each of them.

Oooohhh that worked!!! Thanks soo much.

[Xorn]

Okay folks, I'm getting frustrated here. Is there a reason that #zl;npc;<Whatever> isn't working in "referencemanual.txt"?

When I made my PHB I just did a list for the creatures (#zl;npclist;Creatures) in the appendix. I never actually tried to link to NPCs I guess (in a referencemanual.txt)

My basic structure is:

#@;D&D Monster Manual
#!;Introduction
##;Introduction
This bestiary is for storytelle...

##;How to Use This Book
The best thing a....

##;What Is a Monster
A monster is defi....
#h;Where Do Monsters Dwell?
If you are n.....
#bp;Dungeons
When most p...
#ls;
#li;A ruined ...
#li;A pharaoh’s...
...
...
#le;
...
...

#!;A
##;Aarakocra
Aarakocra range the Howling Gyre, an endless ...
On the Material Plane, aarakocra create a...
#bs;Search for the Seven Shards. The...
Five aarakocra within 30 feet of eac...
#zl;npc;Aarakocra

##;Aboleth
...
...

When I use #zl;npc;Aarakocra I get a blank NPC popout.
If I use #zl;referencenpc;Aboleth then I get: https://puu.sh/cx6wI/8c4495577c.jpg

The NPC is built; I can just go to NPCs and it's there. If I just make an NPC List is shows up fine, as well. I can even reference it from a story entry.

Hmmm. I parsed npcs.txt as campaign data and now #zl;npc;Aarakocra works. So I'm sure I need to use #zl;referencenpc;Aarakocra, but it's not seeing that. What am I doing wrong?

(I don't want to parse npc.txt as campaign data, because I'm making a library module.)

[Xorn]

Okay so I just got to Demons. There's no way all that text is going into the Other tab. Even if I skipped all the demon lord stuff, there' still a HUGE section. Do I just put what's immediately under the demons name? I realize that it's up to me, but this is seemingly entirely too cumbersome--what did everyone else do? For that matter, how many people are even doing this? :P

[Griogre]

Personally, I'm a minimalist. I usually use monster background, fluff, etc, when I build the encounter during prep or when I'm creating an adventure. When I actually run the monster I only want the combat stuff. I personally think doing a reference section that exactly duplicates what's in my Monster Manual already is unnecessary.

[Irondrake]

Agreed, get what you need to run the monster. There is way too much text for it all.

[Xorn]

Pre-PAR5E Xorn completely agrees with you! Post-PAR5E Xorn thinks it's so quick and easy now, that I don't mind adding in the description text. I'm just trying to decide HOW MUCH of that text I want to include... for angels, demons, devils, dragons, etc, I'm really struggling to decide. If I could get my referencemanual.txt links to work it would be less of a debate for me, but since that is messing up I'm not sure.

Maybe I should only include Lair/Regional stuff in the description and that's it.

[Griogre]

ONE Parse to RULE THEM ALL and IN the DA..... Oops.

Isn't that reference link thing, because Zeus said there's currently no cross module support? If so then you could just include the module files for your Reference and MM into one module manually and the links should work.

[Zeus]

Pre-PAR5E Xorn completely agrees with you! Post-PAR5E Xorn thinks it's so quick and easy now, that I don't mind adding in the description text. I'm just trying to decide HOW MUCH of that text I want to include... for angels, demons, devils, dragons, etc, I'm really struggling to decide. If I could get my referencemanual.txt links to work it would be less of a debate for me, but since that is messing up I'm not sure.

Maybe I should only include Lair/Regional stuff in the description and that's it.

For the record, the MM I have produced for Smiteworks contains 100% of the rulebook content. Each monster has a full stat block, token and supporting image (where one was provided) as well as all the relevant descriptive text. Took me a few evenings to parse everything but that was with the official source PDF, it will probably take a little longer using the published PDFs with all the corrections that will need to be made.

As for zl links for referencenpc, I'll have a look this weekend. I think we consolidated the referencenpc and npc windowclasses in one of the last 5E updates which I need to also change in PAR5E and the 5E library its using.

Griogre - Yes your right, zl linking will only work for content in the same module. Cross module linking is not supported. However in this case if Xorn is exporting NPCs to the reference library and attempting to link to them individually from the same module's reference manual text, the correct link class to link with is referencenpc.

[Xorn]

For the record, the MM I have produced for Smiteworks contains 100% of the rulebook content. Each monster has a full stat block, token and supporting image (where one was provided) as well as all the relevant descriptive text. Took me a few evenings to parse everything but that was with the official source PDF, it will probably take a little longer using the published PDFs with all the corrections that will need to be made.

As for zl links for referencenpc, I'll have a look this weekend. I think we consolidated the referencenpc and npc windowclasses in one of the last 5E updates which I need to also change in PAR5E and the 5E library its using.

Griogre - Yes your right, zl linking will only work for content in the same module. Cross module linking is not supported. However in this case if Xorn is exporting NPCs to the reference library and attempting to link to them individually from the same module's reference manual text, the correct link class to link with is referencenpc.

You haven't seen my MM PDF Zeus... it's pretty stinkin' good. :P I spent a LOT of time getting the OCR software (we have ABBYY at work) trained up to read the stat blocks correctly!

Anyway, Zeus has the correct assumption. I'm making a single library module, and I'm parsing npc.txt, with a token for each one. So it's just an issue with #zl;referencenpc I'm assuming. Looking forward to that update.

So if I want to make my MM like yours Zeus, I'm just asking what is on your Other tabs. Do you put all the fluff text just in the reference doc and then link to the statblock, or do you have all the text on the Other tab, also?