New project, Theme for 4 edition

[Xander StarFire]

Hi everyone, I wanted to make a new theme for the 4th edition, which uses the old graphic fonts—specifically, the ones removed in 2024, which were the same as the official manuals—for powers, items, and monsters, or, in short, the colored ones. I wanted to know if anyone was interested in helping out or simply giving me some advice, or even a simple tip, because I noticed that the 4th edition system blocks some of the theme's graphic fonts and standardizes them. Thank you all so much for any answers you can give me

[SieferSeesSomething]

Wasn't there like a theme builder tool thing that existed for fantasy grounds, like the Ruleset Wizard but specifically for themes? Does that still exist? If so, that could be helpful.

[Zacchaeus]

Wasn't there like a theme builder tool thing that existed for fantasy grounds, like the Ruleset Wizard but specifically for themes? Does that still exist? If so, that could be helpful.

I rather suspect that themes have changed too much over the past 3 years so that would make the theme builder obsolete.

[Xander StarFire]

Any advice is welcome, we are making a new THEME through a couple of friends, and it seems to be going quite well, only that we find an obstacle precisely when changing the windows of powers, monsters and objects, it's as if the program prevents us from changing their aesthetics.

[Trenloe]

You should be able to override most aspects of the FG GUI desktop with a theme. Can you provide your theme code and details of what isn't working?

[Xander StarFire]

Posso inviare dei file qua sopra? Ho creato alcuni file ext ma posso inviarli domani, nel frattempo se avete materiale, inviatemelo per favore.

[Moon Wizard]

In general, all record types use the same GUI elements. So, there is no mechanism to customize the only the theme elements of a single record type.
That's one of the reasons why the older 4E theme was partially retired, as it broke the capability to build general themes.

Any sort of per record type customization would require a lot of override scripting beyond normal theming support.

Regards,
JPG

[Xander StarFire]

So how do you suggest I proceed? Maybe if you know someone who has already created material or anything like extensions or themes for the 4th edition.

[Moon Wizard]

Like I mentioned, we moved the general theming system away from the mechanism originally used to build the 4E theme; because it prevented general theming across all rulesets.

While you can always override to provide a theme like that; it's not a simple drop-in of graphics and templates with offsets, due to the nature of the 4E colored backgrounds on a per record type basis which requires changing both the frame graphic as well as the font colors for each record type. Instead, icons are used to indicate the different record types, while using a single set of graphics to denote the record frames and fonts. This allows a wider variety of themes without having to create unique graphics for every single record type multiplied by the number of game systems we support.

If you wanted to write a theme, it is possible for the short term, but you would need to keep it up to date with changes in the back end in the future, because it is not using the default theming that is assumed. In order to do that, you'd have to replace all the record_window templates/scripts with replacements that you would also need to keep up to date when the CoreRPG layer changes in the future. I don't have any examples of this, because we are not doing this with any rulesets at this point.

I would recommend taking on smaller projects first, before taking on this level of under-the-hood changes.

Regards,
JPG