Frog Gods' Bard's Gate

[JohnD]

Any chance of this making its way into a 5e compatible product for Fantasy Grounds?

[Zhern]

I heartily second this! I would love to see more Frog God's Games - Lost Lands setting products turned into official FG products. I know SmiteWorks and Frog God Games have an agreement in place so I am hopeful we'll see more content in the future. Once The Blight is out, I would love to see that for Fantasy Grounds too. And if the Tome of Horrors ends up being revised with a 5e version, that would be a MUST HAVE.

[Nickademus]

Do we know who is doing the FGG conversions?

[Zhern]

I don't know who has done them.

[Zacchaeus]

It tells you in the Store. ddavison did the spells one and Jim Hauber did the other one

[Zhern]

Ah hah! It looks like Jim Hauber did the Quests for Doom conversion too, at least for 5e, that is. None of the Pathfinder stuff lists the conversion author.

[Nickademus]

It tells you in the Store.

I knew this at one point. Just didn't remember. Virtual +1 (since I can't rep you right now).

[Zacchaeus]

It doesn't always say who the author is but it mostly does.

[mattcolville]

Any chance of this making its way into a 5e compatible product for Fantasy Grounds?

I'm really surprised these companies don't kickstart FG versions of their products. The is bigger than ever and I'm certain they could cover their costs and then some.

[Zhern]

I'm really surprised these companies don't kickstart FG versions of their products. The is bigger than ever and I'm certain they could cover their costs and then some.

I mentioned this to Bill Webb when I talked to him about creating the Swords & Wizardry ruleset for Fantasy Grounds. They don't have the skillset in house to do so, otherwise they would. Frog God Games does have the agreement with SmiteWorks but I don't have any insight into what the work queue for conversions looks like for new products that are coming out of a Kickstarter. Doug might be able to shed some light on that, though.

During the recent Castles & Crusades kickstarter for the Adventurer's Backpack and the short Three Days in Darkenfold, Steve Chenault did say there would eventually be FG versions of those but gave no indication of when or who would be doing the conversions. My assumption from that is he needed to coordinate with SmiteWorks, who Troll Lord has an agreement with, to have the work queued up and prioritized.

I'm making a lot of assumptions here by having no view into the inner workings of SmiteWorks and how they handle these conversions. My assumptions are based on generic agile practices without the application of a specific agile template/framework.

[Talyn]

I'm one of the freelancers who recently took on a few C&C projects. I've emailed Steve (and others) a few times now and they want to build their C&C audience on FG that's for sure. Right now, there are only two (that I'm aware of) community freelancers working on C&C stuff in our spare time. Work and the holidays have slowed down my first couple so that isn't helping.

I was actually considering either doing the Lost Lands (Frog God) or Midgard (Kobold Press) for the Pathfinder ruleset. We'll see. I have a lot on my plate already.

That's actually why no one Kickstarts (or anything else) their own FG content -- they don't know how to do it because why would they? So it falls to us freelancers. Doug at SmiteWorks does some Pathfinder stuff too but otherwise they're busy working on the actual FG product and getting more licenses for us to work and play with.

[Zhern]

I'm one of the freelancers who recently took on a few C&C projects. I've emailed Steve (and others) a few times now and they want to build their C&C audience on FG that's for sure. Right now, there are only two (that I'm aware of) community freelancers working on C&C stuff in our spare time. Work and the holidays have slowed down my first couple so that isn't helping.

I was actually considering either doing the Lost Lands (Frog God) or Midgard (Kobold Press) for the Pathfinder ruleset. We'll see. I have a lot on my plate already.

That's actually why no one Kickstarts (or anything else) their own FG content -- they don't know how to do it because why would they? So it falls to us freelancers. Doug at SmiteWorks does some Pathfinder stuff too but otherwise they're busy working on the actual FG product and getting more licenses for us to work and play with.

Lost Lands is my favorite setting, hands down, but I draw a lot of inspiration from Midgard/Southlands too. The Lost Lands 5e stuff has been well done too.

And I would definitely rather the publishers/creators devote their time and resources to content than trying to push out FG content.

[JohnD]

... I've emailed Steve (and others) a few times now and they want to build their C&C audience on FG that's for sure.

Well if that's the case they could do something, anything to promote FG over on their boards; everything is the "but it's free" war cry over there. A word or two in support from TLG wouldn't hurt.

[Myrdin Potter]

There is no secret to how a lot of the content comes over. There is a thread near the top of this forum that calls for community developers. Much of the conversion content is actually done by community developers. Smiteworks does coordination and quality control.

[Nickademus]

Out of all the third-party companies for PF and 5E, Frog God Games (and Necromancer which they bought) has been the one that I've been most impressed by. If I were to make freelance content for any company, it would be them. Maybe I'll look at my schedule and see what I could do...

[Zhern]

Once I finish the S&W ruleset and it works the way I want it to and Bill & Matt are good with it, I might send support/Doug a note about creating some of the Frog God stuff for FG.

[Talyn]

Keep me in mind then, Zhern. If your S&W ruleset becomes an officially licensed retail ruleset and if (big if right now but I still want to) I end up doing Lost Lands for PF/5E then we can coordinate; I can set you to collaborate on it so you have access to the content bits then can add in the S&W mechanic bits on your own. Unless someone beats me to it.

[Zhern]

Will do, Talyn. I'm not sure what will become of the S&W ruleset since I set out to do it as a community ruleset, but who knows. I'd definitely like to coordinate on the Lost Lands stuff when/if the time comes.

[Myrdin Potter]

I have the Borderlands books and PDF and the Bard's Gate PDF (KS hardcovers did not clear customs yet). The good news on Bard's Gate is no new classes and no new spells. Same for Borderlands. Monsters and magic items can even be done using the in game tools, so no special par5e magic needed. The bad news is that the books are huge (over 400 pages for Bard's Gate) and the maps have grids and numbers for the most part.

Since FGG already has an arrangement with Smiteworks, I bet James at Smiteworks is the right guy to talk to. They might be able to get access to the images without grids and other DM only markings and you would make sure you are not duplicating work.

[Zhern]

Bard's Gate (KS hardcovers did not clear customs yet)

Actually, they did! Bill posted on Failbook that they are all shipped out now with the exception of the forged metal covers and the gigantic maps. Apparently they got them sometime after Skeeter posted the last update. He believes they got all the regular orders packed and shipped.

[Myrdin Potter]

That is a pet peeve of mine, updates not done via KS ....

[Zhern]

It wasn't really an update. His wife posted a picture of him and their kids packing with the information about it. Bill simply confirmed that they had gotten them packed and to the post.

I do agree with you, though. I'd rather see that kind of stuff on KS. I did see someone post that their book arrived too, so maybe sometime next week we'll get ours.

[JohnD]

Packed and shipped doesn't mean cleared customs. They have to make sure that Bard isn't smoking a blunt on pave 342, or that the Death Star plans haven't been reverse printed on pages 7-296.

[Zhern]

Hah, well, there were Bard's Gate books being packed in his garage by he and his kids. He mentioned the postal lady nearly had a coronary when presented with all of them.

[Talyn]

You people are a Bad Influence! LOL :)

How's this for a start?

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17058&stc=1&d=1482769265

[GunbunnyFuFu]

That looks fantastic, Talyn! I'd also be down to help out on Bard's Gate..I just finished the Tomorrow Legions Player's Guide for Savage Rifts, and now working on Savage Foes of North America. I'm looking forward to the Lost Lands Campaign Set due out sometime in 2017...

GB

[Zhern]

You people are a Bad Influence! LOL :)

How's this for a start?

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17058&stc=1&d=1482769265

Looks great! Bad influences are the best influences!

[Myrdin Potter]

What do you do to get the reference book look? Par5e and edit the output?

[Talyn]

Notepad++ :) PAR5E only does 5E stuff, everything else is borked and you end up having to massage the XML anyway so I just cut out the middleman and do it all myself. Also lets me optimize the code.

[Zhern]

Can you post a snippet of the xml structure and such that shows the reference book look? An outline or what not, non-product specific, obviously.

[Myrdin Potter]

There are a few that seem to make modules directly in the xml just cutting and pasting into notepad++. I assume that they have a framework they use.

What I am curious about is if this is just for story entries (and maybe the associated inline images) and items and NPC and encounters can be built using other (in-game as an example) tools.

I could convert one of these books using in-game tools but you cannot get the reference book look doing that.

I also thought there was a memory tradeoff for doing a reference version as the search indexing uses more memory.

[Talyn]

I hate doing the keywords for the search feature. If Notepad++ had a plugin that would strip punctuation then only return unique words I'd pay for it. As it is, I use 2-3 different websites, copy/pasting between them to finally get the keywords that I can paste back into Notepad++. It's very time-consuming and I usually end up forgetting about it because I'm coding the actual pages and navigation. Then I think I'm finished and ready to submit and remember all the blank keywords tags. As for memory, yeah, adding those keywords does increase the file size. Though when it's all said and done, after all my whining about having to make the keywords and get them in there, the file is still like 300k or something ridiculous LOL. I've also noticed that the search index does not actually bother to load the keywords until the user clicks on a specific page. Unless JPG fixed that. So to get the full list of keywords the reader would have to go through the refmanual and click the index to bring up each page one at a time.

There's not really any framework per se I use, I hand-code everything, although once I have a single entry I will copy/paste then change the reference numbers just to save time. Up til recently there was no IDE (for lack of a better term) to handle all the formatting other than coding the XML and seeing how it looked. I think even PAR5E can't do all the fancy stuff, you have to go in and tweak the code. Could be mistaken though, it's been a long time since I bothered with PAR5E.

However! Ikael recently made a big extension for Savage Worlds that has a new function to build reference manuals. I haven't tried it yet, and if I had to guess -- since the reference manual feature itself is part of CoreRPG you could probably use that, export the module then edit the definition file to the appropriate ruleset instead of Savage Worlds. Just a guess though, I haven't tried his extension myself yet.

[Zhern]

I hate doing the keywords for the search feature. If Notepad++ had a plugin that would strip punctuation then only return unique words I'd pay for it. As it is, I use 2-3 different websites, copy/pasting between them to finally get the keywords that I can paste back into Notepad++. It's very time-consuming and I usually end up forgetting about it because I'm coding the actual pages and navigation. Then I think I'm finished and ready to submit and remember all the blank keywords tags. As for memory, yeah, adding those keywords does increase the file size. Though when it's all said and done, after all my whining about having to make the keywords and get them in there, the file is still like 300k or something ridiculous LOL. I've also noticed that the search index does not actually bother to load the keywords until the user clicks on a specific page. Unless JPG fixed that. So to get the full list of keywords the reader would have to go through the refmanual and click the index to bring up each page one at a time.

There's not really any framework per se I use, I hand-code everything, although once I have a single entry I will copy/paste then change the reference numbers just to save time. Up til recently there was no IDE (for lack of a better term) to handle all the formatting other than coding the XML and seeing how it looked. I think even PAR5E can't do all the fancy stuff, you have to go in and tweak the code. Could be mistaken though, it's been a long time since I bothered with PAR5E.

However! Ikael recently made a big extension for Savage Worlds that has a new function to build reference manuals. I haven't tried it yet, and if I had to guess -- since the reference manual feature itself is part of CoreRPG you could probably use that, export the module then edit the definition file to the appropriate ruleset instead of Savage Worlds. Just a guess though, I haven't tried his extension myself yet.

Have you met Sublime Text? :)

I'm curious to see the XML structure of a layout like this. I'm curious about any special elements you define, etc. I've only used Par5e for a few 5e things but prefer to do the layout myself in Sublime Text - much easier than tracking down a missing #; that Par5e barfed on.

[Bidmaron]

What is sublime text?

[Talyn]

Have you met Sublime Text?

Used it for a couple minutes and it was so different from Notepad++ I was immediately lost and at the time was not in the mood to learn a new text editor. Maybe I'll give it another shot though if I ever manage to install a Calm Down and Be Patient 2.0 app. :)

[Zhern]

It is very likely the best text/code editor out there. I highly recommend it.

[Talyn]

$70 is pretty steep for a text editor though... :(

[Myrdin Potter]

Was my feeling when I googled it and found it.

[Zhern]

Given how powerful it is and how easy it is to create your own plugins for it (if there isn't one out there already), it is definitely worth the $70 and is much, much more than a simple text editor. It is probably the best code editor on the market - better than the editor in IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc. I want to say that the trial version is fully functional and doesn't expire - you get a nag screen for every 10th file save or so. Obviously, I would recommend getting a license should you find the product useful, though. I got my license when it was $35 or so, but that was several years back.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Notepad++. I use it too for some things as well, but for code outside of an IDE, I use Sublime. Microsoft did release the editor from Visual Studio for free not too long ago also. It is called Visual Studio Code.

Just throwing out options to help streamline things so it doesn't take you a ton of time to setup keywords for a keyword search.

[Nylanfs]

I like jEdit for my PCGen work

[Zhern]

I've never tried jEdit. I'll check it out.

[Trenloe]

I'm curious to see the XML structure of a layout like this. I'm curious about any special elements you define, etc.
Defined here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Reference_Manuals

[Zhern]

Defined here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Reference_Manuals

Thanks, Trenloe. I hadn't made it that far in my search through the docs yet.

[Talyn]

Ok so if I'm using Sublime, how would I go about doing what I need: select a region of text, have all punctuation stripped, convert to lowercase, then munge the result into only the unique words which I can paste into the keywords section of the reference manual?

[Zhern]

Sublime Text supports standard regex. To strip out all the punctuation you need to make sure you have the correct regular expression pattern identified to strip out the appropriate characters.
1. Select region of text.
2. Ctrl-H (brings up find/replace)
3. In the Find What box, enter: [^a-zA-Z0-9\-\s\r\n]*
a. This pattern will find all non-alpha, non-numeric, non-hyphen, non-whitespace, non-end of line characters in the selection
4. In the Replace With box, enter nothing, leave it blank
5. Click replace all

That should remove all the characters you don't care about while maintaining whitespace and carriage returns.

To convert to lowercase, with the same region of text selected, hit: ctrl-k followed by ctrl-l

I would encourage you to explore the edit and selection menus. They have a lot of great, built in tools. Also, I like to use a plugin that trims all trailing whitespace from lines - all I have to do is hit ctrl-alt-s. The plugin is called trimmer. (Installing a plugin is easy and I can post a quick tutorial on that too, if interested).

To remove other words that you don't care about for the keywords, you could create another regex pattern or just do a search/replace.

[Talyn]

Oh. So I'd still be left with copying the text somewhere (extra tab) to munge it, then paste it back. I was hoping there was some function or plugin that would just do it and copy the results into the clipboard for me so I wasn't destroying the original text in the layout. I'll have to think about it then.

[Zhern]

There is probably a way to do what you want. Let me think on it and look at some options.

What process do you use to identify unique keywords? If you can give me an idea of that, I can probably come up with something easy and reusable.

[Trenloe]

You could probably do the same (similar) in NotePad++ by recording the process as a Macro and then assigning the macro to a shortcut key combination. You can even copy the text from a current tab, put it in a new tab view and do the operations against it there, select all, put in clipboard, etc. all as part of a recorded Macro.

[Zhern]

Yeah, I just wrote a quick routine to do the same with Sublime. I can find the unique words easily with python, just need to see if I can import that same function into Sublime as a plugin and have it work as desired.

While I prefer Sublime, largely because I use it all the time and am used to it, I would say stick with what you prefer, whether it is Notepad++ or sometime else. The learning curve on any new editor with the power that Sublime or Notepad++ or whatever else can end up taking more time away from what you are intent on working on. If someone does decide to adopt Sublime, I'll be glad to help them along. Heck, I'll probably look at Notepad++ some more for doing some of this and see if maybe it provides an easier way to do something.

[Talyn]

I use two, sometimes three, websites to handle everything. The one for Unique Words I use is: https://tools.perceptus.ca/text-wiz.php?ops=4

[Mortar]

Notepad++ has a couple of regex plugins, although I haven't checked them out yet. There also plugins lua/python scripting (both way above my head at the moment)

[Zhern]

Notepad++ has a couple of regex plugins, although I haven't checked them out yet. There also plugins lua/python scripting (both way above my head at the moment)

Makes sense that Notepad++ is extensible via Python or lua. Sublime Text is also extensible by Python. This evening when I get home I'll see if I can get the unique words plugin working (intent is to determine unique words in a selection of text, organize them and then spit them out to a new, open tab in Sublime Text, or to the clipboard buffer so they can be pasted directly into somethign else). I can share that when I'm done.

[Talyn]

Well for the CS1 revamp I'm finishing up, I just made an Executive Decision and I will only be putting keywords that are important to the specific page rather than every unique word. That alone already reduced the file size by nearly 30%. Don't know that I'll be doing this for every reference manual I make, but I thought it would be a good thing to try out.

[JohnD]

Alright well... I guess I got my answer somewhere in there.

17102

[Myrdin Potter]

I got back from a quick trip to Vegas and sure enough, my 5e Bard's Tale had arrived.