The way ahead...

[Oberoten]

Recently, things have been to say the least interesting with backwards compatibility for any non D&D ruleset.

Not wanting to be a downer here, but I am wondering how much of FG's previouos focus of being friendly to develop your own rulesets is suffering from this. Now, I certainly don't wish to spit in anyone's eye or anything, but I have heard quite a bit of concern over this. Including some people waiting to even start development of new rulesets because of how much of a flux things seem to be in.

One way to fix this a bit might be a second wiki, for the documentation (which was really all my FG-wiki was supposed to be for in the first place. A place to dump code-snippets and resources. I don't MIND it being a list of rulesets and all but ... well it hardly is as useful as "it Used to Be" tm as it gets hit by over 300 new spamwielding member whenever I open it for new registered members. )

All things told though, I think we need to see together what we can come up with to help FG go forward and not just leave it all on JPG's and Doug's shoulders.

I see wonderful things doable and done with FG, but we see scant few new coders showing of their rulesets like it used to be and that is a shame. The question then becomes how to help new ruleset developers feel comfortable.

* A Wiki with code-snippets etc is a good start.

* The chat could be set up to have two channels again as we did at the very first.

* Perhaps some simpler example sets could be set up for people to play with and see changes directly?

... of course the holy grail would be a drag and drop version of a character-sheet generator. Spitting out the poisitioning data of elements visavi the edges of a frame so you could then put it into a ruleset all that much easier. Combat-trackers and auto-everything can wait, FG is after all focused around the character-sheet.

- Obe

[unerwünscht]

I have some ideas, and JPG and I were going to talk them over at GenCon. IF... and it is a big if.... I can get him on the same page that I am on (and then we can get Doug on-board), I think things will become a lot easier for everyone. I think for the last year Fantasy Grounds has made some awesome leaps forward in features, unfortunately I think the way things are implemented has taken some giant steps backwards. I also think all of this can be fixed with very little work. Then we will all be free to move forward with gaming, and help push Fantasy Grounds back to the top of everyone's list for best VTT.

With just a little bit of cooperation between Smite Works and 'We the Community' I think we can collectively make FGIII an application that smashes all others out there.

[phantomwhale]

Excellent topic.

Afraid I don't do much on the wiki as I find it quite lengthy to navigate and add stuff, also to search. More the wiki software's fault (or my impatience) than anything, but often this forum ends up being easier.

I also find myself burning most of my time into ruleset improvements (plus I'm working on SWEX, which is commercial, so I can't share the whole thing) and keeping up with new sutff JPG puts in. Not a problem, but whilst there is no shared base between Smiteworks and community developers (and I'm not saying that's the answer necessarily, but it is the state of things) I'm going to be constantly reverse-engineering the latest core features out of 4E and into SWEX.

If I had more time, the plan was to do the same to Foundations Core. But as I'm not actually USING it, I don't know if this would be adding value, or just breaking other people's extensions. Unless people are not writing extensions against it, but just forking off a copy and adding there own stuff in, in which case any updates would be lost to them unless they wanted to go through the same reverse engineering / merging exercise I go through.

My "glimmer of hope" on this is I intend to organise SWEX like 4E is (into moduler folders). This might highlight parts of non-commercial code that can be offered as self-contained chunks (e.g. tab managers, dropdowns and the like) for people to just grab and integrate into their ruleset.

As always, I'll watch this and similar topics with interest. But time is usually the enemy for me on this one.

[Moon Wizard]

One of my plans in the next big release is to create a "layered" approach to building rulesets that will provide a more modular system for including features. In that way, we should be able to bring older rulesets up to the level of newer rulesets more quickly, since it will be easier to drop in feature subsets.

However, this requires some changes to the way FG handles pretty much everything to do with rulesets (modules, extensions, scripts, classes, etc.). Once I start this effort, I will be depending on the community to help me define how to break down the feature subsets, as well as verify that the implementations work for all the rulesets out there.

One of the challenges of adding new features is that I constantly have to keep an eye on compatibility for older rulesets. I'm not sure how the community took the original move from FG1 to FG2, since it seems that every ruleset was broken by that update; but I would prefer to avoid a wholesale change like that. However, perhaps that is the best method to add modularity for the long term?

Regards,
JPG

[unerwünscht]

One of my plans in the next big release is to create a "layered" approach to building rulesets that will provide a more modular system for including features. In that way, we should be able to bring older rulesets up to the level of newer rulesets more quickly, since it will be easier to drop in feature subsets.

However, this requires some changes to the way FG handles pretty much everything to do with rulesets (modules, extensions, scripts, classes, etc.). Once I start this effort, I will be depending on the community to help me define how to break down the feature subsets, as well as verify that the implementations work for all the rulesets out there.

Regards,
JPG

Awesome, we are now halfway done with our conversation we were going to have at GenCon. I am pretty sure I can make things very easy on you for the change over. Here is to the future of Fantasy Grounds, and making FG3 the best it can be. :)

[Griogre]

The move from FG1 to FG2 was easy because the rulesets had almost zero automation (loose coupling between parts) and virtually every ruleset was still a close cousin to the d20 ruleset. The changes that had to be made were small, local to just a few files, and were virtually identical to all rulesets at the time.

In answer to Obe's post, I think development has suffered on third party rulesets. Expectations are very high because of the features in the flagship rulesets and I do think that turns off new would be developers unless they already *are* a developer. I really think the biggest reason there aren't more rulesets developed, though, is the time commitment. Currently making a ruleset is a huge time sink and definitely a labor of love.

I personally believe that the only way to shrink the time commitment is productivity tools/utilities. There is no way there would be the variety of 4E modules made by so many different people without the 4E parser tool. As I said in the Kickstarter thread I really think if you want more rulesets you need to make them easy to build and not take a year and a half of your spare time.

Increasing modularity will certainly help but the number of active developers is very small and I don't see that growing unless you do something to make it much easier to develop rulesets, in less time, that have at least the minimum bells and whistles the community expects now.

Edit: Amazing how those typos creep in.... :p

[Zeus]

Using the current FGII 2.9.x API I think it may be possible to write an embedded set of tools as part of a custom development ruleset environment to aid in the development of ruleset windowclasses.

I'm thinking a base ruleset which exposes several tools which can be used during runtime to create/edit windowclass objects e.g. a tool to allow creation of basic windows with controls like text fields, buttons etc. etc. In fact I am pretty sure Joshua did something like this a while back as a PoC.

With the addition of some API changes to FGII, once defined it would then be possible to then export the dynamically created windowclasses into FGII compatible XML files for persistence. The approach I am thinking about would not be a silver bullet to the creation of rulesets but as an active FGII developer, any method of tweaking classes during runtime (without the need to re-start the ruleset) would be a tremendous time saver, speeding up frame definition and control placement validation along with graphics alignment issues would be a fantastic start.

Over time it may even be possible to develop a light weight 'in-FGII' editor.

[Roncorps]

I'm not a smart IT/coder (but I'm smart in everything else .... ;)), eh I teach college level geography science. But, but, I like what I read/hear here.

My post don't add much, but I think that what I have to say is "Yes ! Support for us, low puny peasant of the mighty codex C# or whatever else". I think, and I said it in the kickstarter thread, that FG need to be more user friendly for ruleset and etc. I think there a lot of people out there that want to build something into FG but hit a wall when they see what they need to do and how much time they need to put into it. I'm currently only doing a theme and changing little little things in the character sheet and I see how much work it need and how much time I've put into it, only to rig a ruleset already done. I can't imagine how much work a completely new ruleset need. I just see the Shadowrun 4th ruleset and WOW, graphics + code it's huge.

What I see is a VTT (FG) that say "Welcome, here we have everything and if you don't find what you need, don't panic, it's easy to do it". 1 DM = many players. I don't know how many people use Maptools and D20 or else, but FG need to grasp them and make itself the #1, because it got the potential.

[Blackdove]

I agree with the statements above. I'm an interested party who would be more than glad to assist and contribute to the community. I would very much enjoy working on a much needed Star Wars rulesets and look forward to the opportunity to utilize tools to do just that.

In summary, I believe you have the support and the potential weekend warriors who are willing to stand behind this idea and beta test it to success (patience included).

There are many other great features I would like the core developers to work on while we get the rulesets in order that we all use on a daily basis.