Herolab NPC to FG import on a Mac...

[Sam Elmore]

Very Newbie here with crossed eyes from reading so many posts and trying to make sense of it all! I've just purchased both Fantasy Grounds and Herolabs for a 3.5 (not Pathfinder) game that I'm running. My question, is there a way to create an NPC in Herolab and import it into Fantasy Grounds as an NPC on an iMac running Seirra? I've seen solutions for Pathfinder rulesets and for Windows computers but nothing for an Apple user. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Apologies in advance if I've posted this to the wrong forum!

[Zacchaeus]

Hi Sam Elmore, welcome to FG.

I know very little about macs but from the snippets I've gleaned I think your answer depends on what you have installed on your mac. The imported is a windows program so you need to find a way to run windows on your mac. I've heard Parallels mentioned without me knowing exactly what that is (I assume a Windows emulator of some sort). As far as I know the converter won't run within Wine (or is it Wineskin). Your question has come up once or twice but I haven't seen a definitive answer either.

[Sam Elmore]

Thanks Zacchaeus for the quick reply. That's kind of what I thought from what I've seen but was hoping for a miracle :) You might know the answer to this then...right now, we create our characters in HeroLab on the mac, export and email to someone with a Windows computer, run the Character converter app on that computer, and email it back to the Mac to upload in Fantasy Grounds. Do any of the other programs that run on Windows support this type of work around? Or does Fantasy Grounds need to be installed on the computer being used for the conversion and import of the NPC?

[Trenloe]

You might know the answer to this then...right now, we create our characters in HeroLab on the mac, export and email to someone with a Windows computer, run the Character converter app on that computer, and email it back to the Mac to upload in Fantasy Grounds. Do any of the other programs that run on Windows support this type of work around? Or does Fantasy Grounds need to be installed on the computer being used for the conversion and import of the NPC?
I'm not completely clear on what you're asking here.

The converter is installed as part of the FG inctallation - so you need to at least do a FG installation to get the Character Converter. You can get this with an unlicensed install of FG. You can use just the converter to take the .hlfg file exported from HeroLab and run the converter with Output = XML - which will create a local XML file. Then that XML file can be emailed to anyone and loaded into a campaign (or Manage Characters) through the character management window. See GM Actions here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/Character_Management

[Sam Elmore]

Sorry for the confusion... The Character Converter won't run on the mac that has the Universal License. So, we export the HeroLab character as an .hlfg file and mail it to a Windows computer that has the unlicensed version of Fantasy Grounds. They convert the file to an XML and mail it off to the person whose character it is or back to me, the GM, to install in the Fantasy Grounds program as a character. This works fine for a Player character. I'm wondering if there is a program that is a stand alone program that will do the same thing with an NPC exported from HeroLab so I can do a work around the Mac issue; take the NPC character exported from HeroLab, email it to a Windows computer, convert it into whatever type of file is necessary to import it back into the Fantasy Ground program as an NPC, and then email it back to me, the Mac user to import into Fantasy Grounds... is that a little clearer?

[Trenloe]

I'm wondering if there is a program that is a stand alone program that will do the same thing with an NPC exported from HeroLab so I can do a work around the Mac issue; take the NPC character exported from HeroLab, email it to a Windows computer, convert it into whatever type of file is necessary to import it back into the Fantasy Ground program as an NPC, and then email it back to me, the Mac user to import into Fantasy Grounds... is that a little clearer?
There is exactly that - available here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?20522-Pathfinder-Creature-Parser-V2-Beta-Version

But, you'd be better using the very good extension Ken L put together - as it runs within FG, there's no Mac issues, as long as FG is running fine, that is! ;) Find the extension here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?34199-CreatureGen-Extension-Import-Stat-blocks-on-the-fly-with-populated-spells You may need to do some editing of the HeroLab NPC export - there are some notes around this in post #2 of the external Pathfinder Creature Parser linked above, but I don't know if these are 100% accurate for Ken's extension.

[Sam Elmore]

Hmmm, tried running that...got it set up on the computer and installed in the Fantasy Grounds extensions folder but it wasn't loading so I thought it wouldn't work b/c I wasn't running a Pathfinder game, just a 3.5 game...should I go to that thread and ask them for help with getting it working? I think it may have something to do with the download folder not having the .gitinfo file inside of it...can't figure out how to download the .gitinfo file from git hub either...not that computer literate unfortunately...

[Trenloe]

Sorry, I forgot you were using 3.5E. If you use the Paizo 3.5E statblock standard, you'll probably get a lot to import - but you'd have to be fairly careful and I don't know the exact format of the HeroLab 3.5E export.


...should I go to that thread and ask them for help with getting it working?
Yep, ask questions about that specific extension in it's thread.

[Sam Elmore]

Will do then! Thanks for the answers and the suggestions!

[Nylanfs]

Also note that PCGen output can be imported fairly seemlessly also. Either a xml output or the statblock importer.