rpotor
September 17th, 2015, 15:29
Most likely this is a newbish question, but hopefully someone might be able to help me with. Sorry for the wall of text in advance :-)
I'm very new to Fantasy Grounds and our group is considering changing to it after long long years of using Maptool (I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's feet in case this might be a curse word or something like that around these halls :-) in which case I'm sorry), but we're not yet committed to cough up hundreds of dollars from our group wallet for the 5E character modules. So we are going to do a test run in the near future and for this purpose I recently purchased a monthly paid Ultimate license to make this as painless for our wallets as possible.
I noticed that Fantasy Grounds has the capability and gives users the opportunity if they're willing to get their hands dirty with XML to basically enter their own data using an existing ruleset. I was very happy to find out this and I delved right under the hood to see if I can whip up a basic library. Seems fairly easy to do thanks to a really cool tutorial on the FG wiki, and I envisioned a library module in which I would for example make a little "spellbook" containing only the spells the players have for quick reference at the virtual table, just to spice up the testing of FG. I'm not necessarily planning on adding the spells to the players' character sheets and not looking towards automation at this time, but I'd like to see a "proper" spell window opening when I click on a spell name. I think I need XML definitions of the spell reference window for this purpose. Now if I look for example at the 3.5E ruleset and more specifically at the ref_spells.xml file I can figure out what XML tags a 3.5E spell description window has to have, like "name", "school", "components", etc. and if I look at the 3.5E-spells module in client.xml I see the spell descriptions conforming nicely to this XML declaration, so I think I'd easily be able to make for example a custom made 3.5E spell and save it as a library.
Now if I look at the 5E ref_spells.xml file I kind of go: "wha...?" because I can't seem to find out what kind of XML tags a proper 5E spell description window could have. Instead I'm seeing in this .xml file a call to a lua script. My thinking is that because of some copyright or licensing reasons the XML declaration is hidden behind a script and the script maybe basically makes up the spell reference XMLs from the official 5E databases sold in the FG store.
My questions:
1. Is this a correct assumption or am I just missing something here because of me being a complete newbie at this?
2. Does this mean that for the 5E ruleset there is no possibility for users to implement for example their own custom spells in a separate library? Is this maybe an intentional limitation of the 5E ruleset and essentially we are kind of "stuck" with only the official modules here and no dice if we'd like to manually enter data for spells?
Sorry if these questions are already answered somewhere and this is common knowledge. If that's the case I'm sorry for the long winded explanation above and I'm going right back under a rock to hide. :-)
I'm very new to Fantasy Grounds and our group is considering changing to it after long long years of using Maptool (I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's feet in case this might be a curse word or something like that around these halls :-) in which case I'm sorry), but we're not yet committed to cough up hundreds of dollars from our group wallet for the 5E character modules. So we are going to do a test run in the near future and for this purpose I recently purchased a monthly paid Ultimate license to make this as painless for our wallets as possible.
I noticed that Fantasy Grounds has the capability and gives users the opportunity if they're willing to get their hands dirty with XML to basically enter their own data using an existing ruleset. I was very happy to find out this and I delved right under the hood to see if I can whip up a basic library. Seems fairly easy to do thanks to a really cool tutorial on the FG wiki, and I envisioned a library module in which I would for example make a little "spellbook" containing only the spells the players have for quick reference at the virtual table, just to spice up the testing of FG. I'm not necessarily planning on adding the spells to the players' character sheets and not looking towards automation at this time, but I'd like to see a "proper" spell window opening when I click on a spell name. I think I need XML definitions of the spell reference window for this purpose. Now if I look for example at the 3.5E ruleset and more specifically at the ref_spells.xml file I can figure out what XML tags a 3.5E spell description window has to have, like "name", "school", "components", etc. and if I look at the 3.5E-spells module in client.xml I see the spell descriptions conforming nicely to this XML declaration, so I think I'd easily be able to make for example a custom made 3.5E spell and save it as a library.
Now if I look at the 5E ref_spells.xml file I kind of go: "wha...?" because I can't seem to find out what kind of XML tags a proper 5E spell description window could have. Instead I'm seeing in this .xml file a call to a lua script. My thinking is that because of some copyright or licensing reasons the XML declaration is hidden behind a script and the script maybe basically makes up the spell reference XMLs from the official 5E databases sold in the FG store.
My questions:
1. Is this a correct assumption or am I just missing something here because of me being a complete newbie at this?
2. Does this mean that for the 5E ruleset there is no possibility for users to implement for example their own custom spells in a separate library? Is this maybe an intentional limitation of the 5E ruleset and essentially we are kind of "stuck" with only the official modules here and no dice if we'd like to manually enter data for spells?
Sorry if these questions are already answered somewhere and this is common knowledge. If that's the case I'm sorry for the long winded explanation above and I'm going right back under a rock to hide. :-)