Parsing Reference Material

[jnroden]

I was noticing the difference between the Compendium mode and the Parser mode. How does one go about getting the data files for stuff in the reference tree (i.e. Conditions, Tables, Effects)

:confused:

[Griogre]

If it is not in the compendium then you either OCR a book or type it in yourself.

Remember that its very much one thing to do this for yourself with materials you own. It's illegal to distribute this to others though.

[jnroden]

Oh I've got the books, I'm just lazy :) If I do end up just doing it the old fashioned way, are there any good references for creating a library mod from scratch?

[drahkar]

Some of the best tutorials for 4E are made by Xorn, here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8769

[Griogre]

There aren't really any good library module tutorials because library modules correct structure are all ruleset dependent. That said, almost all current rulesets have the d20 ruleset as their ancestor. The easiest way to see how to build a library module is to open one from the ruleset you are interested in and look at it. The xml files are all human readable. To see the contents of library module first change the .mod file extension to .zip and unzip the file. Several files should upzip and maybe a thumbnail. The larger file is either a db.xml or client.xml, open that file and look at it's structure this is the heart of the library mod file. The definition.xml file determines what ruleset the module works with and the name must match the name element *exactly* in the library element in the db or client xml file. XML is case sensitive.

You can also see the information structure of a campaign db.xml file but this is not as reliable as there are sometimes differences between the library and campaign modules. Campaign modules tend to be less powerful than library modules, so if you can get it to work in a campaign module most of the time you can also get it to work in a library module.