Tutorials? Searched and found none

[lokiare]

I'm looking for basic tutorials on how to modify the coreRPG or 4E rulesets with extensions. Are there any around? I did a forum search but it brought up a lot of older information that is probably out of date as I saw a thread petitioning for a modern tutorial for FG 3.x.

Once I learn how to do this I plan on making a 4E zone extension and after that I might try my hand at a line of sight mask clearing/token hiding and unhiding extension

[Moon Wizard]

There are very few tutorials on making rulesets and extensions. They are typically learned by using the existing examples and the ruleset reference guide. There are a couple documents in our Library to get started, but they don't go deep into how it works.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/library/

My suggestion is to start by unzipping a theme extension (3.5E or 4E) to get an idea of what a simple extension looks like.

Regards,
JPG

[Heilemann]

Are you guys planning on opening it up a bit more to newbies? It's an exceptionally frustrating piece of software to mod.

[lokiare]

Are you guys planning on opening it up a bit more to newbies? It's an exceptionally frustrating piece of software to mod.

I plan on writing an extended tutorial when I get my mod done.

[AstaSyneri]

I plan on writing an extended tutorial when I get my mod done.

Is that anywhere to be found? Does it exist yet?

[ddavison]

While it is a bit older, the "Anatomy of a Ruleset" document still has very useful information for new developers and modders.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Developer_Guides

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/filelibrary/community/Anatomy_of_a_Ruleset.pdf

[Trenloe]

And for people who might have missed it (or don't look at sticky threads) this gives some good pointers: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?20651-Modifying-the-CoreRPG-ruleset

[AstaSyneri]

Well... I worked my way through the PDF and looked at the other items. I have to say: This has nothing to do with user-friendly documentation, I am afraid.

What would help is a tutorial that shows how to generate elements for a simple character sheet from scratch and explains how the different XML-Tags interact. I will eventually get it, just like I understand the modules now, but the way there feels very thorny. And I am not even scripting yet ;-).

[damned]

AstaSyneri Im doing this at the moment and, well, its hard if you are not a programmer.
I dont think its really possible to write a tutorial on this stuff.
You really have to learn how to program -or- ask lots of dumb(!) questions and make lots of frustrating mistakes.

Tips - open up an existing ruleset and use notepadd++ and use the "find in files" feature to search on particular keywords/elements and try to follow how they all link to each other.
Some of its a little... convoluted.

And the threads that Trenoe mentions - many of them are him trying to make me understand something!

[Trenloe]

What would help is a tutorial that shows how to generate elements for a simple character sheet from scratch and explains how the different XML-Tags interact. I will eventually get it, just like I understand the modules now, but the way there feels very thorny. And I am not even scripting yet ;-).
When you eventually get it would you mind creating such a tutorial from a beginners point of view? The problem we have is that the majority of the people who could write such a tutorial already have a very, very long list of higher priority FG technical tasks to do, so any documentation/tutorials naturally come pretty far down that list.

Perhaps you could be the tutorial champion?

[AstaSyneri]

No promises. I was actually entertaining the idea to summarize what I _think_ I understood so far and throw it at your collective feet ;-).

As for being a programmer - it's not my main profession, but I have done quite a bit (and am updating my skills in the OOP section now). It's rarely the programming that's baffling, it's the finding where's what. I am coming to a new appreciation of well document source code ;-).

I'll be back on it tomorrow - today I am too frustrated.

[damned]

AstaSyneri - PM me your email address.
I am not a programmer but I have added a bunch of comments in my character sheets in Maelstrom ruleset which I will send to you.
Ill upload it here very soon either way.
Maybe it might help.


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[AstaSyneri]

A bunch of gnomes (aka people under 4 feet tall) effectively stole all my available time yesterday - and the weekend doesn't look much better due to my wife having an unexpected 24-hour shift on Saturday (don't you hate when other people get ill?).

It's likely going to be a week until I can make any substantial progress here.

I did manage to finally watch Doug's CoreRPG character sheet video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG9ovku3T48). Stuff like that is extremely valuable for those players who are new to Fantasy Grounds and are not inclined to look at the code. We need more videos from the GM's view, *sigh*.

Edit: I was looking at possibly collecting my ruleset experience as a "sort-of-tutorial" in the blog section of this forum, but I can't find a way to write a blog entry. Do I need an admin to enable that for me?

[Trenloe]

Edit: I was looking at possibly collecting my ruleset experience as a "sort-of-tutorial" in the blog section of this forum, but I can't find a way to write a blog entry. Do I need an admin to enable that for me?
Click on "My Profile" in the top right of this page, then "View Blog Entries" in the left sidebar, then "Create new post" in the top right.

[AstaSyneri]

Unless I have turned entirely blind, the button you describe is not there:

9130

[Trenloe]

Unless I have turned entirely blind, the button you describe is not there:
Looks like you need to be part of the "bloggers" user group - I can't set that up for you, Doug or JPG would have to do that.