Quick Survey

[ddavison]

I'm looking into the possibility and interest in creating an export or linkage from Fantasy Grounds to Obsidian Portal. Would people be interested in having some form of auto-export/update to Obsidian Portal at the conclusion of each gaming session? What sort of things would you want exported?

Please feel free to add additional thoughts below. If you already do some of these things manually, I'd love to see a link back to your campaign to get a feel for what it looks like when finished.

[Trenloe]

This could be very useful.

Things that might be handy to export from FG to OP:

1. Player notes.
2. Abbreviated chat log to the adventure log section.
3. Possibly some story entries tagged as public/shared with all.
4. Certain maps?
5. PCs?

Items 1-4 would be generic, while item 5 would be very ruleset specific - might be a nice to have... Personally, we don't use the Characters section of OP for detailed statistics, we use it for background info so this, for me, wouldn't be a big requirement.

[Griogre]

I just use a Yahoo or Google group for each online campaign I run. They are typically low maintenance which is important to me since I am usually running more than one campaign at once. If there was an easy update, I would probably look at it, though.

[Myrddin]

I'd love it if there could be something to help export the chat log. I (or one of my players) currently edit the chat log in word, but it's a vefry time-consuming process. That for me would be the number one priority in terms of any integration with OP.

Looking at Trenloe's suggestions, I think it could be useful to allow player notes to be exported too. A nice-to-have would be character sheet export...since we play in FG we don't really need the full char sheet detail in OP.

[jshauber]

What Trenloe said...

I use it for the campaign I run in FG and I am on a couple other OP groups for games I play in, both FG and face-to-face (finally getting the group to use FG for the combat tracker at least to speed things up).

[Trenloe]

I'd love it if there could be something to help export the chat log. I (or one of my players) currently edit the chat log in word, but it's a vefry time-consuming process.

Does the chat log scrubber help any? https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ubber-released

[Blacky]

I'm using a dedicated website for my campaign settings, usually a Dokuwiki install (it's a wiki so nothing is ever lost, Dokuwiki doesn't need a database so it's easy to set up and maintain, and Doku has a nice integrated access right management so I can create GM or player only areas). Something like that for example.

I'm not fond of hosted services in general. Such services can change from day to day with no warnings, price increase, disappearing, technical issues, and so on. No matter the notoriety of said service the data hosted there are always in danger (look at Microsoft's music several years back). You almost always (Wordpress.com being one exception) have no access to the raw data, and no true knowledge about the backup policies and processes of said service. On top of that, most of these websites have the ad service as a client, you and I aren't client of those website we are the free workers that make it interesting for the ads.

But I have almost no issue with throw away services, for example I use Doodle to set up the game date, once it's set you can throw it away no problem. But for campaign data, I want them safe and secure for a long time especially since I prefer to play long campaigns (as in 2 or 3 years being a short one).

And on top of that, last time I looked Obsidian Portal was English only. I don't personally care, but almost all my players do.

That being said, having an export (and if possible an import) would be nice, although to me it doesn't rank above most voted features on the wishlist (such as map layers, tocken stacking, tocken limited visibility, map user ping, map text labels, and so on) and not by a long shot. Even if it's dedicated to a service (like Obsidian Portal), I'm guessing ultimately that's an XML export, meaning people could write something to change its format for other softwares or websites.

[damned]

Another thought that may have some merit...
It might be easier to launch your own campaign management service expressly for fantasy grounds users - that way you have control of the format that the website/database wants to receive data in too...
Obviously many people already use an existing service so you wouldnt do this if you didnt have sufficient interest...

[Dakadin]

Like Blacky, I use Dokuwiki's to track information I need. I like them because they store things as text documents so I can copy files around to use in different places.

[Blacky]

Another thought that may have some merit...
It might be easier to launch your own campaign management service expressly for fantasy grounds users - that way you have control of the format that the website/database wants to receive data in too...

I suggested this on these forums several years ago. Not because I need it (I don't and probably won't, and it's still a hosted service) but for non-geek it could be a way for SmiteWorks to make more money. With an online backup service, it's something that could be sold on a monthly (or yearly) basis, generating more income.

Find a young (but good) coder to do this on the side, give him a %, and take the rest. Or invest slightly, I think it using the right tools (any decent software that handle farm work, Dokuwiki does, I know Pun/FluxBB can be adapted too for the forum side, just 2 examples on the top of my head) and the right coder it can be done in a month (maybe a little more if you want it real pretty). The hosting costs are almost negligible, and if done right the maintenance cost too and the client service costs not that high.

For example, a few bucks a month to have your campaign automatically (and with history/revision) backed up online on SW servers, and you get maybe a dedicated wiki and forums, both public and private as you want, to host your campaign data and offline (as in out of FG) talks and such.

And if done honestly, have a tool to dump (xml dump, or even sql dump) all the data in one downloadable archive, so people aren't locked in.