What's the relationship with Lone Wolf like?

[ianmward]

Hi guys,

I was wondering what the relationship is like between SmiteWorks and Lone Wolf Developments lately. I know that there has been collaboration in the past and that there is a tool for exporting dnd 3.5 characters from HeroLab for import into Fantasy Grounds, and to be honest this was one of the pulls for me to finally get Fantasy Grounds. However this export/import only exists for Pathfinder/3.5e and not for other game systems, especially Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu. I have recently done some work writing an exporter for converting Savage Worlds characters and am working on one for Shadowrun but this will never be an official supported tool and will be limited by what LoneWolf make available to me.

I am a user of Hero Lab as well as the more recent Realm Works and would dearly like to see more integration between the tools, I think that they are tremendously synergistic and the collaboration would benefit all parties.

The final spark for this question is that in the latest news letter from Lone Wolf they are actively promoting a Kickstarter from d20Pro a direct competitor https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magehand/d20pro-unlimited-virtual-tabletop?&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=KS%20Link%201&utm_campaign=2014-gencon

Does this mean they are working more closely with Mesa Mundi or are they just supporting all of the players in this niche market?

I would love to understand (and encourage) a closer relationship between SmiteWorks and LoneWolf.

Thanks

Ian

[ddavison]

Our relationship with Lone Wolf has always been very friendly. They have a longer history with D20 Pro and you will normally see them sharing a booth at Gen Con with Lone Wolf. I expect that Lone Wolf wouldn't have an issue with us supporting any additional game systems beyond Pathfinder - we just haven't built any of those. The character converter itself was the result of us hiring an intern to develop it over one summer. If you are interested in doing anything extra in an official capacity, let me know at [email protected] and we can point you in the right direction. Moon_Wizard might be more up-to-date on the current status of the character converter than I am, but I believe it was written in C# and may have even been pushed out to a public SVN for others to use as they wish.

I will also say that the guys at Mesa Mundi and D20 Pro are pretty friendly as well. We've talked a number of times in the past at conventions and elsewhere. We wish them well in their Kickstarter.

[ianmward]

Thanks for the quick reply,

I am happy that's the case and would really look forward to a closer integration, especially on RealmWorks. I think it would be great for the campaigns from realm works to be converted into Story items for FG to play, then back again with updates after a session. They have said that they are talking to some VTT vendors about that type of integration, so hopefully something could be possible.
I'll shoot you an email about the converter as I'd be happy to dedicate some time to that.

[jshauber]

I spoke to the Lone Wolf guys at GenCon and asked about functionality in Realm Works that would be exportable to FG. They told me they have no problem doing so, but the FG community needs to post to their forums about what we would like to see and the format we want it in.

So basically, if enough of us can let them know what we want, they might develop something once they finish implementing all the features of Realm Works that are yet to be released.

[damned]

im also a realm works backer but Ive yet to download it - so little time!

[Bidmaron]

I am entering RotR into RW as we speak (as are enough others to populate a small Caribbean island). IMO, with their to-do list, it will be well over a year before they get to anything FG-related (there are a bunch of FG-haters over there, just read some of my recent posts and responses over there, and I'm even trying to be nice about it). They will have to get some basic export functionality working before they are ready to tackle any RW interoperability.

The problem is with FG, IMO. Until SW gives us a way to communicate with the outside world (in more than the primitive hand-shake fashion I have working in a stand-alone program), we won't be able to do what I think needs to be done. That is, we need to be able to select a word or phrase in FG, hit a "Look Up" button, and then FG sends a request to RW to get the information exported into a folder in FG2 for it to be imported into FG2 (similar to the way where when the user drops a graphic into the images folder, your lua code can have a handler execute to deal with the dropped graphic - this is the technique I am using in my own primitive handshake program, where the external program drops a message graphic, my lua code detects that and then imports a module file with the information I want to send to FG2 - primitive, but it works)