Modifying the Adventure Deck extension

[spoofer]

Hello fellow Savage World gamers,

I am not a professional programmer, but I learned a few things in my time. So I thought I would put my skills to good use and create a bunch of homebrew cards for my Deadlands Reloaded game. After much hair pulling, here is what I have learned.... the hard way. I want to share this on the off chance that someone else might stumble upon this and avoid the same frusteration.

1. Converting the .ext file to a zip, unzipping and then zipping back up again does not work. Instead, use a zip program to view the internal workings of the ext file, and drag and drop your modded xml files directly inside the ext file.

2. The .lua files must be saved as ANSI. OK, I do not know if that is excatly true. I used a freeware program called XML Copy Editor to edit the xml code. I used it for the .lua files as well. The program saves the .lua files as UTF-8. Using these files creates error messages. After coding, I used Notepad to convert back to ANSI before dropping them into the ext file. That worked.

I really struggled for a long time with both of these bugs. Argh. But it all works now. Thanks to the community for telling me how to beat the first one. You guys are awesome. :):):)

Kevin

[Trenloe]

To be honest, I don't have any issues with the first one - I unzip an extension into a folder, work on the extension code in the unzipped folder and then zip the extension back up from within the folder, not outside the folder (this is he key gotcha) then rename the .zip back to .ext. I do this all of the time - with extensions, rulesets and modules.

One thing that is good about doing it this way is that you can work on your code within the extension folder and just use /reload within FG to try out your new code. FG reads the folder and it's files as an extension, so while developing their is no need to keep zipping/renaming. This works for rulesets too, but not modules. Just remember to tidy up your development folders after. FG will load code from an extension directory first, ignoring a .ext file of the same name.