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Tenian
October 2nd, 2008, 17:57
Recently I started playing in the 4E LFR community. For those of you that aren't familiar with RPGA play, essentially the players take their characters with them as they play in adventures run by different GMs.

This works great in the pen and paper world where all you have to do is bring a few sheets of paper with you. Not so great in the FGII VTT world as you are stuck re-entering your character / updating it in several places or the GMs have to work out some sort of campaign file sharing method.

I quickly (like the second time I had to do it) got sick of re-entering my character. I took a look at the campaign directory and figured out how and where character data is stored. I then knocked out a little VB program that extracts the characters from one campaign (saves them in serialized files) and imports them into a second campaign.

It's not quite ready for public usage, but if there is interest, I could release a version.

You can see the program here (https://dnd-4e.blogspot.com/2008/10/sick-and-tired.html). The blog is where I prattle on about my 4E projects, but the copy tool is not ruleset specific. It should work for any ruleset with a charsheet node. I wouldn't recommend exporting from one ruleset and importing into another...

And the LFR FGII community can be found here (https://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/RPGA_Group/). They are always looking for more players and GMs :)

Sorontar
October 2nd, 2008, 18:35
I'd have to say that if this is reliable then it'd be awesome, not just for LFR but for groups that share DMing in a continuous campaign also.

I may or may not get to use this but it'd be great of you to give us the option.

chipmafia
October 2nd, 2008, 18:59
I would be interested for sure.

RiverRat
October 2nd, 2008, 19:08
I think that would be an excellent contribution. I would also be nice if it were capable of transfering more that just characters. I am thinking of hotkeys. I have a general set of SavageWorlds hotkeys that I often have to reenter in each campaign file. I haven't looked through the db to see how they are stored, but would think would possible.

Oberoten
October 2nd, 2008, 19:11
Oh yes. PLEASE share. :)

And source-code too? :)

Tenian
October 2nd, 2008, 19:30
It's sorta halfway designed so you can change the node it copies (instead of charsheet) but that isn't completed. So you could copy story nodes, personalities, or the like, eventually...or at least that was the plan.

Hotkeys are also stored somewhere on the client, not in the campaign. They should be accessible, I'm just not sure where they are. They might not even be in an XML file, which would make extracting and copying them a bit more problematic.

Source code is possible at some future point, at the moment it's not in any sort of state for that to happen. Not to mention I'm lazy and write in VB6.0 because that's what I happened to have available and what I used when I last did extensive programming work.

Oberoten
October 2nd, 2008, 20:13
I think that would be an excellent contribution. I would also be nice if it were capable of transfering more that just characters. I am thinking of hotkeys. I have a general set of SavageWorlds hotkeys that I often have to reenter in each campaign file. I haven't looked through the db to see how they are stored, but would think would possible.

Application data\campaigns\campaign name\usersettings


contains files containing the userkeys.

RiverRat
October 2nd, 2008, 20:28
thanks obereton, i knew they had to be somewhere, but don't have access to fg here at work, so i couldn't check.

Spyke
October 2nd, 2008, 21:32
I'm working on a similar utility for the GURPS ruleset, building on my little app for importing the characters and NPCs into FG from the xml exported from the GURPS character generator. I haven't yet got my head round whether it would be safe to make such a utility work across rulesets.

Spyke

Atras
October 2nd, 2008, 21:32
That sounds like a really useful tool. You keep knocking these great ideas out of the park Tenian... very impressive.

Tenian
October 2nd, 2008, 22:05
Cross rulesets raises some interesting problems.

First the target ruleset needs to be smart enough to handle "missing" nodes. Since the source file may only have a subset of the nodes on the target. It is possible to make rulesets smart enough to deal with it...I'm just not sure how many rulesets are built that way.

Second you have to worry about any windowreference/links embedded in the character. The characters in the 4E_JPG ruleset have links that point to magic items, weapons, etc. Some of these are custom windowclasses that may or may not function correctly under the target ruleset.

Third you have to worry about the nodes being the same type/being used for the same thing. This could cause a whole host of problems and produce unintended/unexpected results.

The fourth issue would be if the source contains more nodes than the target. This shouldn't cause any problems as the excess nodes will be ignored by the target ruleset. However it's possible that a future upgrade of the target ruleset could start using those node for something and you'd be in a case like above

Again I think cross ruleset is a bad idea :)

You could build a much more complex program and do some node comparisons and allow the user to define translations...but that's more work than I wanted to do.

Spyke
October 2nd, 2008, 22:21
Yes, this complexity was my worry with a generic utility that would work for all rulesets (by which I mean between campaigns that use the same ruleset).

We can move characters, NPCs and items wholesale, I think, simply by taking everything between the relevant id-xxxxx tags and adjusting the id number and category appropriately, but you will lose external links to tokens and portraits if they exist.

I've got this working for importing new entries to GURPS campaigns in the utility I've put up on www.spyke.me, and it shouldn't be too much additional work to allow you to move things between campaigns.

Spyke

Tenian
October 2nd, 2008, 22:29
My test program works across campaigns of the same ruleset. Tokens and portraits do break.

External links to modules and the like still function if the module is available. Internal links (charsheet.id-0001.whatever) I swap the unique ID as needed during the transfer process.

Tenian
October 5th, 2008, 20:50
Okay I cleaned this version up some. It should work. As always back your campaigns up before using. Feel free to PM me with any questions/errors or just toss them onto the thread.

Tenian
October 13th, 2008, 02:37
Okay the file is hosted in the LFR Yahoo Group.

Link (https://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/kJ3ySCP0-exoHMesYEctI3xYZBEBkYFziVGWbyLxrzqVuHkkyEGDm7B8Blu x8cGhywFWEIe9h3g6Nolo3o8LH0ZfbXOOl38/Campaign%20Files/Campaign%20Tools%20Pack.zip)

Oberoten
October 13th, 2008, 06:52
Quoth the browser, 404

Tenian
October 13th, 2008, 11:03
Apparently you have to join the group to see it :(

I wish this site or FUM would give me a reason beyond "Invalid File" or "Upload Failed" as to why this file will not upload. It's just a zip file.