Tutorials?

[Mojobacca]

Is there anywhere I could hunt for a tutorial for this program? I'm not one of those guys who can read-do nearly as well as I can watch-do.

[Griogre]

I don't think there are really any tutorials for just using the software. However, I know many GM's don't care if you want to sit in a just watch a session as an observer. You would have to have a non demo version to connect to a full version though.

Bascially, though, FG is really easy to pick up if you have played in a face to face game. There is dice, a battlemap, figures and a character sheet. For people new to FG but who had played RPGs before I could usually walk them through FG features in about 20 minutes. The one new feature that really helps online play is learning to use FG's hotkeys.

[Mojobacca]

I was thinking more along the lines of the creating part of the program. I've got a few idea, but with my work schedule the way it's been lately, it would take a good deal of time more for me to try and decipher the "theory" before I could try to put it to practice.

Maybe it's just a matter of not being afraid to screw something up since I'm not messing with the core of the program... just my campaign.

[Foen]

Take a look at Xorn's module creation tutorial, that will give you some ideas although it might not be 100% what you're looking for.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8586

Welcome to the community Mojobacca!

Foen

[Xorn]

https://www.eugee.net/downloads/module.tutorial.v1.pdf

That's the PDF that should be up in the Library soon, if folks want a sneak peak. (I'll take it down once it's in the library, so that it's updated at only one place.)

[Foen]

Great job Xorn!

[FryCook]

all i can say is "Wow, Xorn. Your tute is totally awesome!"

very informative and i appreciate all the times you talked about your philosophy for or thoughts behind doing one thing or another. really makes the actually process make much more sense.

now if only there was a document like this for making rulesets!

[Mojobacca]

Thanks a ton, Xorn!

[Griogre]

Nice tutorial. One thing I do on tabs besides drag a name on to them is change the icon or color from the default red ones. That way it is clear at a glance which tabs are for a module. In the following module I used green. I leave the "host" campaign module tabs red.

https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/ColoredTabs.png

Note this is an old module - the first one I ever did actually. These days I *never* use more than one tab per module per book. You will run out of tabs very fast if you have several modules open.

[Sorontar]

I always set the Index of the module as purple (I like purple)with the star symbol (its shiny), that way even if I have two modules in I can locate the index ;)

[Griogre]

Naturally, the method that works best for any one person is the best one for them. ;)

However, I quit using a separate index for each adventure a while ago for a couple of reasons:

1) I found I never used them because I always ended up opening encounters from the map.

2) On a medium to large dungeon the index becomes so large it really isn't helpful. Further you can't search a storybook entry either.

However occasionally I do want to open an encounter not from the map so I found that if you use map keys in front the name of any book entry your books can be their "own" index.

Here is a one module of a huge dungeon with the image and storybook open and leading area numbers:
https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/books2.png
This particular dungeon has a very old fashion level numbering system. There are actually seven different levels in this module. :p

As a bonus, books *are* searchable and with a lockable search display. So if I wanted to show just the 2nd level entries all I have to do is search 02, ie:
https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/books2S.png
Note the little check next to the magnifier glass in the image entry. This signifies the search is "locked" on 02. Not many maps for that level. :) I could also have searched on Map or Pic which is how I tag different entries. On the story book entry I have not yet locked the search at "02-" yet but you can see that only 2nd level encounters are being shown.

I find the lockable search feature in the books one of the best of the “little hyped” features.

Edit: To finish off my thought on indexing. Indexing is *really* just a different *sort* of the book data. If you use the identifiers you want in your index - in your book entry names the index is not required. :)

[JMnITup]

The biggest issue I've had so far trying to put my adventure info into a module are related to the read-only nature of the module.. I'd have thought the meta-data would be stored still, but doesn't seem to be.

I.e.

If you open a map, put tokens down, add some to the drawing layer, change the visibility mask, etc, etc, or add shortcuts, it all LOOKS like it works... but it's only in memory, none of that is stored.

So if you close FG2 to finish the session later, or more likely FG2 crashes, when you re-open the map, everything is wiped clean... even if you saved the campaign properly and close and re-open, it's all gone, whereas with the same items in the campaign itself, everything is saved.

Is there any fix or workaround for this? I would THINK that such meta-data should still be saved in relation to the data from the module, but it either isn't being saved, or there is a bug with saving.

Also, you can freely change any of the module stuff, but again, it's memory only and all gone when you reload/refresh/restart. Would be nice if it could save a 'delta' of your changes to the module... lots of times I'm running the same module for 2 groups, and want to make group-specific notes directly to the module data, but this definitely won't work in this setup as-is.

[Griogre]

Seems like you may have a perfect storm situation there - it sounds like you have two different bugs making each other worse. JMnITup, technically (if you don't crash) the changes persist until you unload the adventure module from the campaign. However, I said technically because there are some pathing issues with module masks/drawings which cause module masks and drawings to be "lost" when you close FG2. It seems likely this is compounded in your case with a pin or tab bug that causes FG to crash on exit.

From what you said I think it likely you can do what you want with work arounds, though. First, you have to get rid of that crash on exit. That is screwing the save out of the changed module data (effectively the diff) into the base campaign so you are losing those changes because of the crash on exit. The most common causes of crashing on exit with FG right now are tab problems, two or more pins pointing to the same book entry (i.e. empty rooms), or odd characters in the xml file.

Why are you adding pins to each map later? You can get the masks and drawings as well as the placement of tokens to be persistent if you move a copy of the module map into each of your different base campaigns and use that one as a player map. Adding pins from a module to a map in the base campaign might be iffy.

On the crash on exit, when you load the adventure module campaign into FG and exit does FG crash? If so you probably have bad character or have two or more pins pointing to the same storybook or Image entry. You need to fix this. If it is multiple pins just either delete the duplicates or make each entry unique. If you look up at the first screen I did above you will see where I did something like this with Storybook entry 00-03 the Rat Tunnels. Probably in that module there was just one entry for the rat tunnels at different locations. You can see I added an a, b, and c at the end of the entries as well as changing the rest of the name.

If FG doesn’t crash when you exit inside the adventure module’s campaign you might have a problem with tabs. I think they mostly fixed this one but some have said they still have troubles. The latest I saw was with merge tab settings. Are you using them?