what is Unity?

[Cheezegr8r]

i've seen mention of it from several Devs. Is FG getting a rewrite or a Port?

[Dracones]

I would assume a rewrite. I think the existing FG app is pretty old. I'm sure it's evolved in ways they never expected and they probably want to do a lot of things with the app that would just be a PITA with the existing way the app is written.

Unity is a game engine: https://unity3d.com/

It's very popular with smaller and independent developers. I believe it's pretty easy to work with and it also supports compiling your application to Windows, Mac, Linux and tablets. It also supports scripting with lua for modding, so they'll probably be able to create the new app to work with existing FG rulesets. Or at least still use lua as the ruleset scripting language.

[damned]

Unity among other things has:

a better networking engine
a better graphics engine
supports multi-threading
supports multiple platforms - eg native Mac, Linux and even Tablet and Console platforms
supports 3d

that doesnt mean that FG will necessarily have any of these things (other than 1 and 2) at the time of launch - but it will give SmiteWorks much better options to build more features that are not currently possible/feasible.

[ZeroSigma]

Do they have a progress blog somewhere or any other information about the development or are they doing it without the communities input?

[Mask_of_winter]

They've shown a few screenshots on Facebook and Google+

https://plus.google.com/+Fantasygrounds/posts/Vrb34ob3xzo
https://plus.google.com/+Fantasygrounds/posts/L73bcHHstwB
https://plus.google.com/103619950996682740172/posts/iC4zPf5C839

[ZeroSigma]

Thanks, I hope it has better mod support for the actual application/UI as well not just the rules system.

[damned]

Thanks, I hope it has better mod support for the actual application/UI as well not just the rules system.

What is it you want to do?

[ZeroSigma]

I want to add custom commands to the "context command wheel" so that I can add custom html to stuff like "Story" entries so that I can have more than one type of heading and text block with pop-outs and also better formatted tables (CSS).

[damned]

I want to add custom commands to the "context command wheel" so that I can add custom html to stuff like "Story" entries so that I can have more than one type of heading and text block with pop-outs and also better formatted tables (CSS).

no one but you gets to see this info and this formatting.... it sounds to me you want to go to a lot of work to make more work for yourself :)

[leozelig]

I believe there is a website for feature requests, don't have it handy at the moment. It doesn't hurt to officially register your request there. Sometimes, it's already on the list, in which case you can add your vote. The developers are very responsive to popular requests, except when a huge investment of time is needed.

[Mellock]

https://fg2app.idea.informer.com/ is where you can add any of your feature requests, or vote for them :)

If you ever need it, it's in MoonWizard's signature :)

[ZeroSigma]

no one but you gets to see this info and this formatting.... it sounds to me you want to go to a lot of work to make more work for yourself :)

Good point :D
I just want a few more formatting options so that my modules/adventures/source material looks better and is better organized. If you look at the material (manuals etc) published by other companies there are nice looking side-text boxes and the tables have nice colours for better readability and seeing that the formatting is derived, I think, from html/css it would be trivial to add extra formatting options.

I like good looking source material, it makes me want to run better games for my players and seeing as this will be my first use of FG... ;)

[Trenloe]

seeing that the formatting is derived, I think, from html/css it would be trivial to add extra formatting options.
The current formattedtextcontrols are only very, very loosely based on certain markup tags (see the full list here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/refdoc/formattedtextcontrol.xcp). However, any changes/additions to these needs to be manually coded into the control. So, making any changes to the current control is not trivial at all. Will Unity make this easier? I don't know, time will tell...

[Mask_of_winter]

Damn Martin, is there a FG related topic you CAN'T answer? lol

[Cheezegr8r]

awesome! thanks for the info about the game. Has anyone seen a timeline for when they expect Unity to be out? is there a thread or something about the development?

[Dakadin]

Damn Martin, is there a FG related topic you CAN'T answer? lol

LOL. If there is, I would guess that only one of the people working for Smiteworks could answer it. :D

[Moon Wizard]

We have no specific timeline for Unity. It's a big rewrite of the code base for a new platform, and there will be several subsystem changes during the process. So, the amount of work is still unknown for some parts of the system.

Regards,
JPG