GM Portraits

[nyanya]

I'm so baffled why this is impossible. The system can display a token in a window, but cannot display it in the chat, because chat entries are special and hardcoded that way.

And converting tokens to icons is hardcoded to characters. Not like "you should only do this for characters," it'll literally throw an error "Unable to locate character specified in parameter 1" if you dare try to add a portrait for anything else. As far as I can tell, the icons it makes are even automagically named.

This is such bullshit. I wasted too much time and money on such a broken product.

[LordEntrails]

If you tell us what it is you are actually trying to do, we can tell you how to get there. Please provide clear and concise steps, so that we can understand what you are looking to do. Also, please tell us what ruleset you are using, as behavior is often different between different rulesets. As well if you are using any extensions because they can change FGs behavior.

"Portrait" & "token" are a very specific terms in FG, and I don't want to assume how you are using them.

[nyanya]

I'm running 2E on top of CoreRPG. Since FG doesn't have a system for GM chat portraits, I decided to give making my own extension a try. At first glance, it seemed fairly easy because there's code (seemingly easily extended code!) to set chat message icons, and it's not very difficult to add a lookup from "John" to "john's portrait" that only the GM can play with.

The problem I ran into is that there seems only one way to convert tokens into icons, and it's using some magic User.setPortrait() function, but that's super hardcoded to characters.

Thus the only way for me to work this is either something skeevy involving creating character records (after I posted this, a friend linked an extension that does this, literally relying on Fantasy Grounds not cleaning up certain resources until it closes in order to work), or creating all my NPC portraits as icons and doing things that way (of course, this also means completely branching off from being able to use tokens, e.g. those that come with modules, not being able to quickly add in a portrait mid-game, also I might still need to use tokens on the side for the combat tracker unless there's a way to go from icon to token).

I'm just baffled why this magic function was made to smooth over character portraits, but there's apparently no other way to go from token to icon, and no way to use a token in chat messages. As opposed to NPC portraits merely not being implemented, it seems more accurate to say that the whole system was designed against ever having them.

I might try the extension, but knowing that a basic feature in other virtual tabletops only works here because of a memory leak is... more than a bit crazy.

[damned]

Some parts of the engine were coded a long time ago - as in more than 10 years ago, closer to 20 years ago, before SW even owned FG.
Other things were coded on top of these.
And more on top of those.

It is possible for SW to fix this but it is not simple because of the number of long term dependencies that were coded on top of the original decisions.

It will probably be fixed at some point but at the moment the dev team have prioritised it behind other tasks because of the amount of work required to achieve a small gain.

Other VTTs have it because they came later, saw that it was a good feature and coded it, without the baggage to prevent them from doing so.