Players cant manage characters in unity???

[jerrie]

Players cant import character xml files, nor can they manage them on the start page of the software... this is really troublesome. When will this be fixed? Will it be fixed?

[Zacchaeus]

Players can start a campaign in Unity and go to the PC tab and click on import character and see any character that they have created in any campaign. They can also import any character they have created in any campaign from the join screen of any campaign they join.

[Granamere]

I agree I like the Manage Character's feature in Classic and I do feel it is something missing in Unity. I would expect, if it is going to be added, it would be much lower on the list of things to work on. Since as Zacchaeus points out there is a work around.

[humby]

According to the Known Issues (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?50483-FGU-Playtest-Known-Items) thread:

Manage Characters (i.e. Local mode) has been deprecated. Create an empty campaign to import/edit/export characters.

[Kelrugem]

I agree I like the Manage Character's feature in Classic and I do feel it is something missing in Unity. I would expect, if it is going to be added, it would be much lower on the list of things to work on. Since as Zacchaeus points out there is a work around.

that is not a workaround, that is intended :) There is really not a reason to keep it, it just adds to maintenance while you can do the same in campaigns :) That is the reason why demo accounts can now save data in campaigns while in FGC they couldn't :) (but they cannot host, not even for one other demo like in FGC) :) I am not sure why it feels like "missing" when you can precisely do the same character management in campaigns :)

[Granamere]

Sorry this is the exact definition of workaround. We have function in FGC it is not in FGU so there is a work around (a method for overcoming a problem or limitation in a program or system.).

The reason for it is easy of use. In FGC I can just go into Manage Characters and there they are. I do not have to remember which game system they were made in I can just launch the character and view it directly.

As you can tell from the original poster they are upset this is currently not part of FGU. I mainly DM so it does not impact me that much. I can poll my players and see how they feel about it missing in FGU since it might impact them.

[Kelrugem]

Sorry this is the exact definition of workaround. We have function in FGC it is not in FGU so there is a work around (a method for overcoming a problem or limitation in a program or system.).

The reason for it is easy of use. In FGC I can just go into Manage Characters and there they are. I do not have to remember which game system they were made in I can just launch the character and view it directly.

As you can tell from the original poster they are upset this is currently not part of FGU. I mainly DM so it does not impact me that much. I can poll my players and see how they feel about it missing in FGU since it might impact them.

With that I wanted to say that the developers once said (I think, one statement is cited above), that they do not intend to bring that back; the campaigns created by players are the "manage character" screens now :) So, that is fully intended, and hence demos can now save campaign data :) Since campaigns manage everything, including characters, I personally do not percieve that as a workaround, but that is just about some definition of a word :D

But, yes, the new approach is of course less obvious for character management than a "manage characters" button :) Especially new people might indeed not think about that until they asked or so, leading to problems such that it feels like a workaround

[Zacchaeus]

Sorry this is the exact definition of workaround. We have function in FGC it is not in FGU so there is a work around (a method for overcoming a problem or limitation in a program or system.).

The reason for it is easy of use. In FGC I can just go into Manage Characters and there they are. I do not have to remember which game system they were made in I can just launch the character and view it directly.

As you can tell from the original poster they are upset this is currently not part of FGU. I mainly DM so it does not impact me that much. I can poll my players and see how they feel about it missing in FGU since it might impact them.

As noted above the player can go into any campaign and click on the PC button and then on Import character and 'there they are'. Each character is listed from any campaign they created or played in - not just the one campaign. The import window also lists the name of the campaign that they were created or exist in. This is much better than the situation in FG Classic. This is the replacement feature for Manage Characters and is a lot more elegant and useful than the Manage Characters functionality in Classic.

[LordEntrails]

EDIT: ignore, superseded by statement direct from oon Wizard.
Manage Characters is unlikely to ever be implemented in FGU. It was a conscious design decision to deprecate (get rid of) it. The current designed workflow is, as stated before, to create a campaign and use it to create/manage your characters.

[Moon Wizard]

The problem with Manage Characters in FGC is that many rulesets just didn't work or there were unexpected limitations in the data you could review. It was basically an odd man out mode of the software.

With moving the character management into a dedicated characters campaign, it allows people to fully manage their characters, and re-import into games.

At some point in the future, I may look at implementing a dedicated Manage Characters button that just opens up a hard-coded "Characters-<Ruleset>" campaign for each ruleset; but it's not something I've settled on, and is a lower priority to look at than other items we're working on.

Regards,
JPG

[Granamere]

As noted above the player can go into any campaign and click on the PC button and then on Import character and 'there they are'. Each character is listed from any campaign they created or played in - not just the one campaign. The import window also lists the name of the campaign that they were created or exist in. This is much better than the situation in FG Classic. This is the replacement feature for Manage Characters and is a lot more elegant and useful than the Manage Characters functionality in Classic.

That is an opinion.

Unfortunately when you have a xml file you do not know what system it was made in so you have to create a campaign then try to import it to see the information that you mention. If the XML (and the person does not know how to read code) is several years old then this can add to the challenge of finding the right one. This is also another barrier of easy of use for new people picking up FGU.

When you tell a new person to just see your character you have to do what?
How do I do that?
Why is this so hard to just see my inventory, stats, spell list, etc?
Guess what their next statement is going to be?

Character creator is a easy and simple way to cycle through them, at least that is my opinion.

[Zacchaeus]

Sorry, I’m not getting your point. In both Classic and in Unity you need to select a ruleset before you can view characters created for that ruleset. So if you don’t know what ruleset you created the character for you would need to cycle through several possible rulesets in order to pin it down. And in Classic you would need to cycle through every campaign you played in to find the character since I assume if you don’t know what ruleset the character was created for you are unlikely to know what campaign you played in either.

[Granamere]

FGC
Actually it shows you to the right, what rules set it was made it so you just select the campaign and you are done. (6 clicks and I am inside and editing my character. If I click the X on the settings box.) This does change if I exported my character to XML and need to import it.

FGU currently.
Go online and do a search to find out how to see your character. (Sorry as the original poster shows you will not figure this out from the interface.)
Make a new campaign.
Import the character. (Now were did I save that xml? What did I call it?)
So 14 clicks for me to do the same thing in FGU not including the google search and the typing in a campaign name.

[Side note. Also interesting thing just happened. When I imported my character I had to close the Player Character window and reopen it before I saw the character I imported. The XML was from a FGC character. This added to the click count.]

Sorry the manage characters is a much easier way for non IT people to have access.

I completely agree with Moonwizard. There are much more challenging problems that need to be done before this gets looked at. Again there is a workaround.

It is just the lower you set the bar for people to get in and play then more people can play. The higher and more challenging you set the bar unfortunately people do not want to learn a computer program to have fun at a game. They will look for what is easier and has that lower bar even if it is not as good or as powerful.

This is why you see me telling people all the time to go FGC and see how cool this community is. You want people to get in and see how powerful this system is and get them over the first part of the learning curve.

[Kelrugem]

Import the character. (Now were did I save that xml? What did I call it?)


I think that is the step you did not quite understand here :) there are two ways two import characters: Xml or from another campaign like the manage character thing :) When you click the first import button, then it shows a list of all your characters and from which campaign :) There is no real need for character xml anymore in FGU (except for transferring characters to other people etc.; but for most cases no xml needed anymore). Your cache saves the characters from other campaigns you joined and have ownership over, such that you never need to export your chars to xml. It will also only show chars for the corresponding ruleset (and players normally know in which ruleset they play, I am also a bit confused about when you say they do not know the ruleset, but maybe I misunderstood that point) :)


https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=39959&stc=1&d=1601860286

[Granamere]

I have not moved over to Unity so I am still learning but your picture does a good job to illustrate the point. You launch a 5e Campaign and I can see all of the 5e Characters I have. If I did not know which ruleset it is in I could just make a single campaign for each I have played in then go to import and I would see all my characters there.

Not as bad as I was imagining it but nowhere as simple as classic.

[Kelrugem]

I have not moved over to Unity so I am still learning but your picture does a good job to illustrate the point. You launch a 5e Campaign and I can see all of the 5e Characters I have. If I did not know which ruleset it is in I could just make a single campaign for each I have played in then go to import and I would see all my characters there.

Not as bad as I was imagining it but nowhere as simple as classic.

Hm, I am confused a bit here, players will surely know their ruleset and how their character is named (I have just a lot of testing campaigns with the same character name, thence, the picture as above), that is all you need to find your character most of the time. For Manage characters in FGC players need to know the campaign name which also helps in FGU, but in FGU it is not necessary. So, in FGU you even have two possible informations you can use to select the character from the list, name of character and/or campaign name; while in FGC you need to certainly know the campaign name for the manage character stuff. Personally, I rarily know the campaign's name, but I certainly know my ruleset and my character's name :) (I was now in several campaigns and I have a lot of own campaigns I joined, my campaign list in FGC is extremely long now; at the moment I play in a 5e campaign, I just tried it out: I have no idea which campaign to choose in Manage Characters, and I would now need to click on all the 5e campaigns there until I found the campaign of my DM. Of course I could ask my DM, but the same argument holds for the possible problems you see here :) ) I found FGU's way easier at the moment, it is also easier to use when you want to apply changes to your character for that campaign, no need anymore to send xml files back and forth :)

I understand your issue that it is a bit "hidden", but once one knows it, then it is way better in my opinion, and I used both :) I think there you may overthink it a bit, I would suggest to try it out :)

[Granamere]

Current games they are playing I would agree they would know the ruleset. My example I was using was if I was looking for one from a long time ago.

I need to do more testing. I brought over my classic campaign to Unity and none of the characters came over. Their tokens were on the map they are on but that was it. Also I am betting if I just copied over the campaigns into the right directory Unity would not search those for characters. I am betting it will only know about the campaigns that have opened up in Unity. This might be part of my problem because I brought over the same campaign a couple of weeks ago and it opened no problem. I need to do more testing with more characters to see how this all works. Too late tonight to do all of this but I will try it out tomorrow.

Part of the problem I was seeing earlier was that when I opened my test campaign I did not see any of the characters from the classic campaign I moved over and opened up to play with. So I expected when you went into import you would need to import the XML. The picture cleared this up for me. Currently I need to make a few more test campaigns and make characters in each of them. Then I need to delete a campaign and see what happens when I try to open a character from it. Tons of test cases I want to see how will play out.

I also want to import a few copies of the same classic campaign with different names but all have the same data to see how that works. If I find any bugs I will report them in the bugs channel.

[LordEntrails]

If you moved the entire campaign folder, the characters should have come to. Mine did when I migrated my campaigns.

[Zacchaeus]

If your characters didn't show up in Unity when you transferred over your campaign then the most likely explanation for that is that you are using an extension which isn't compatible with Unity. I've seen reports of people using some kind of spell token thing which doesn't work but other extensions could leave code in the character which Unity doesn't like and so stops loading your entire database.

[drklotus]

The problem with Manage Characters in FGC is that many rulesets just didn't work or there were unexpected limitations in the data you could review. It was basically an odd man out mode of the software.

With moving the character management into a dedicated characters campaign, it allows people to fully manage their characters, and re-import into games.

At some point in the future, I may look at implementing a dedicated Manage Characters button that just opens up a hard-coded "Characters-<Ruleset>" campaign for each ruleset; but it's not something I've settled on, and is a lower priority to look at than other items we're working on.

Regards,
JPG

The problem is that FGC actually came with the CharacterConverter.exe utility and FGU does not. I know that CharacterConverter.exe works and can be used to import characters into FGU campaigns as I've done it. Is there a reason why you can't integrate CharacterConverter.exe with FGU so I don't have to maintain both FGU and FGC on my system. Would be nice if like some other folks have stated, have a button within FGU Launcher that can automatically launch the CharacterConverter.exe utility. I use Hero Lab and have spent hundreds of dollars so I would like to be able to properly use it with FGU to make character creation a lot simpler. You need to step up your game and compete or exceed the features that your competition has to be the number one rpg platform.

[Moon Wizard]

Yes, the character converter is not being maintained or carried forward any further (and hasn't been for some time); so it is not included with FGU because it will be going away long term. The challenge is that both the FG and Hero Lab data formats were constantly drifting over time, and we do not have the resources to maintain for the existing systems let alone add support for new systems.

Any transformation of character data between another application and FGU will need to be handled outside of FG-provided tools.

Regards,
JPG

[trbrelinski]

This was basically a really poor decision on their part to remove. Very unintuitive. Why in the world as a player, would I create a campaign to create a character when I'm going to play that character in someone else's campaign? And as a player, I also like to explore different concepts of characters and make different characters. I ask again, why in the world would I create a campaign to do that? It makes no sense. Frankly, it seems like lazy programming to me. So it was an "odd man out" kind of feature. Well, instead of being lazy and ripping it out and then creating a unintuitive workflow, create the feature so it's not "the odd man out" situation. I mean, you are developers that have complete control over the product. You could have rework it to function just like a normal character manager. Honestly, it was one of the more intuitive features of this product compared to Roll20. Now you have to jump through similar hoops that Roll20 has when creating characters. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous.

[damned]

This was basically a really poor decision on their part to remove. Very unintuitive. Why in the world as a player, would I create a campaign to create a character when I'm going to play that character in someone else's campaign? And as a player, I also like to explore different concepts of characters and make different characters. I ask again, why in the world would I create a campaign to do that? It makes no sense. Frankly, it seems like lazy programming to me. So it was an "odd man out" kind of feature. Well, instead of being lazy and ripping it out and then creating a unintuitive workflow, create the feature so it's not "the odd man out" situation. I mean, you are developers that have complete control over the product. You could have rework it to function just like a normal character manager. Honestly, it was one of the more intuitive features of this product compared to Roll20. Now you have to jump through similar hoops that Roll20 has when creating characters. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous.

Your statement is made on knowing X amount about the reasons why and the architecture and coding required to support it and why there are better ways.

There is basically no difference in number of clicks in doing it via a Campaign. I dont understand you comparing it to "jumping through hoops". It is actually much easier in many circumstances to import characters using the new method. Some rulesets didnt even support manage characters.

Manage Characters was based on a licensing model that did not allow free licenses to save any content. The licensing restriction changed so there was no longer a need to maintain (and constantly develop) a separate set of code for Manage Characters.

[Jiminimonka]

This was basically a really poor decision on their part to remove. Very unintuitive. Why in the world as a player, would I create a campaign to create a character when I'm going to play that character in someone else's campaign? And as a player, I also like to explore different concepts of characters and make different characters. I ask again, why in the world would I create a campaign to do that? It makes no sense. Frankly, it seems like lazy programming to me. So it was an "odd man out" kind of feature. Well, instead of being lazy and ripping it out and then creating a unintuitive workflow, create the feature so it's not "the odd man out" situation. I mean, you are developers that have complete control over the product. You could have rework it to function just like a normal character manager. Honestly, it was one of the more intuitive features of this product compared to Roll20. Now you have to jump through similar hoops that Roll20 has when creating characters. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous.

1. Create a campaign called Character Management.
2. Create as many characters as you like.

No hoops. Or loops. Not complicated at all. And you are double posting the same message.

[Trenloe]

This was basically a really poor decision on their part to remove. Very unintuitive. Why in the world as a player, would I create a campaign to create a character when I'm going to play that character in someone else's campaign? And as a player, I also like to explore different concepts of characters and make different characters. I ask again, why in the world would I create a campaign to do that? It makes no sense. Frankly, it seems like lazy programming to me. So it was an "odd man out" kind of feature. Well, instead of being lazy and ripping it out and then creating a unintuitive workflow, create the feature so it's not "the odd man out" situation. I mean, you are developers that have complete control over the product. You could have rework it to function just like a normal character manager. Honestly, it was one of the more intuitive features of this product compared to Roll20. Now you have to jump through similar hoops that Roll20 has when creating characters. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous.
So, adding *more* functionality and making a standard process is being lazy? Think of it this way - something that had problems for some rulesets (as mentioned by @damned) has been removed and now there is just one workflow required for a player to create/edit/maintain/upload their character, with more functionality to boot. The process has changed, that's all, and it's now a standard process. See this video for further information: https://youtu.be/30o7jjJpLoo

[Kelrugem]

I think "the loop/hoop" is there because people do not know how that works and need to ask someone usually to get aware of that :) And in that point I agree that it could be a bit more obvious; on Discord someone argued that the list of features for demo licenses is a bit misleading, showing that one cannot build campaigns although that works now (even with official modules), one just can't host them :) I wrote to the support once that it may be nice to change that bullet point a bit and maybe clarifying that this is especially useful for managing characters :) (but maybe also adding an entry to the wiki, since the list of features in the store is not were people look for features after a purchase)

Simply because of that people do not associate "Campaigns" with an UI for managing characters; yeah, that is just labelling, but that confuses people from time to time, similar to the confusion in 3.5/PF1 of some people that one uses "spell classes" for actions which are not spells :)

[Granamere]

One for the great things about these boards is everyone can have an opinion and we can all talk about them and share.

Going back and reading my old comments shows me how much things have changed for me now I am over using Unity full time. First I still really like the Character Manager from Classic but if it was in Unity it would not work for me now. I found the world of addons. I now have several tabs on my character sheets that just are not there in the default game. To get them I need to load extensions. The character manager would have no way of doing this so I can see what Moonwizard was talking about. Character Manger had limitations that I just had not gone deep enough to see yet.