Another Question

[madman]

I was wondering if anyone has been able to make the notes page of a character sheet into formatted text, for better use. i have made many attempts at this and have been unsuccessful.

Thanks

Chris

[drahkar]

Any formatting would have to be coded. Currently the system doesn't support any text formatting outside of the rulesets/extensions.

[madman]

what i was tring to say is, has anyone changed the poor notes page of the character sheet into something like a story page where formatting can be applied. as the notes page is almost useless after you input enogh info to fill the visible area and have to scroll. i have tried to get it to work with no success.

Thank You

Chris

[Foen]

The question of scrolling is separate from the one about formatted text (you can have a scrolling subwindow containing standard text).

The idea of formatted text is very neat, but the FG engine doesn't expose a setValue() or getValue() method for it, so it means it is less use to me: my rulesets generally allow you to drag an NPC and drop it onto the PC list for automatic conversion, and I use the Notes field for things that don't easily convert. I couldn't do that with a formatted text field.

Just my 2c

Foen

[Bidmaron]

Foen, your converting an NPC to a PC is a much-requested feature of the 3.5 ruleset, and I didn't know anyone had implemented it. Can you recommend which of your rulesets I might get/buy to study your code and implement it elsewhere (always easier than starting from scratch, for me at least)?

[Foen]

It is very dependent on the ruleset, so you might not find my code that helpful, but it is in the charactersheetlist.lua file in the Call of Cthulhu ruleset and the Base Ruleset. The latter only has placeholder code. I will also include it in the Classic Traveller ruleset, which I hope to release as a community (free) ruleset in the next few weeks.

Copying most data across from an NPC to a PC is fine, but lists tend to be a problem (like lists of attacks, skills and spells). This is because NPC sheets tend to have abbreviated information, and PC sheet need more complete information, which cannot easily be created from the NPC data. Either I try to make reasonable asumptions about the missing data, or I copy the NPC info into the PC Notes section so at least the player can see what the NPC stats said.

That's why I use a stringfield for PC notes ;)

Stuart

[Bidmaron]

What we really need is a setvalue and getvalue for formatted text and for graphic fields. Why is that so hard? We have requested it over and over again. It has to be one of the most requested program changes.

[drahkar]

Because its not something that is even remotely easy to implement as the program itself doesn't support even displaying things that way right now. It would be a nice feature, but it would require significant coding to implement. One has to chosse what is more important to develop sometimes.

[Bidmaron]

Drahkar, you misunderstood me. I was complaining that we can't get the ability in lua code to use getvalue and setvalue on formatted text data fields or on graphics fields. The coding to do this would seem to be to be almost trivial. Since nothing is ever as easy as it seems, implementing this is probably just easy rather than trivial. Anyway, those of us who code have been requesting this ability almost as long as FG2 (vice FG1) has been around. It would enable so many cool things (like having web-style links in the middle of a line of text rather than only at the start or through the boxes we currently have - although this is still not that easy to do from a code standpoint, but at least it would be possible).