Pathfinder Creature Parser - Alpha release

Thread, why you no sticky? I spent all afternoon looking for you.

A couple things I noticed about the parser that would be nice to change:

Languages, these are being reported to the 'Other' tab and there is actually a spot for them now on the main tab. The tag for languages is <languages>.. (yeah.. surprising huh? :) )

Racial Modifiers, these are not being broken out from 'Skills' and it would be nice if they were yanked and dropped onto the 'Other' tab. They end up being 'rollable' where they are and it's kinda tweaked.

Another thought... but somewhat more complicated... Some critters have 'Companion' rules as part of their writeup. Is it worth building in a catch for that info?

OK.. one MORE thought.
Many creatures have both a short description at the beginning of their writeup and a longer description at the end... is there any way to separate these and list them on the Other tab... short at the beginning and long at the end?

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Originally Posted by Blackfoot

Languages, these are being reported to the 'Other' tab and there is actually a spot for them now on the main tab. The tag for languages is <languages>.. (yeah.. surprising huh? :) )

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I'll look into that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blackfoot

Racial Modifiers, these are not being broken out from 'Skills' and it would be nice if they were yanked and dropped onto the 'Other' tab. They end up being 'rollable' where they are and it's kinda tweaked.

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It's a little bit of a pain having them show up as rollable, I agree. But, I don't want to deviate much from the standard Pathfinder Statblock and it is at the end of the skills that racial modifiers are displayed. I'll have a think about it though...

I won't have time to create an udpate for a few weeks. The main item I want to work on for the next update is NPC spells - putting them in the spells tab. This would be the most advantageous piece of new functionality in the parser.

I hope people who've used the parser in the past have kept the text statblock file so you can just run it through the parser again when I release an update.

How are you going to make that work? Most of the writeups are pretty vague on spells, I guess you can pull them in from available modules.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blackfoot

Another thought... but somewhat more complicated... Some critters have 'Companion' rules as part of their writeup. Is it worth building in a catch for that info?

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Yeah, a bit complicated judging on my brief look at how the companion stats are listed in the bestiaries. I think this will have to be something on the wishlist for now - although when I'm doing updates I may get a flash of inspiration. ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blackfoot

OK.. one MORE thought.
Many creatures have both a short description at the beginning of their writeup and a longer description at the end... is there any way to separate these and list them on the Other tab... short at the beginning and long at the end?

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I could look for a new heading "Description" after special abilities and then just dump everything after that into a "Description" heading on the other tab. The only real problem here is that once you get to parsing the special abilities there is a chance that "description" might appear in special abilities and screw the final parsing up. But, if I just looked for it as a header - "Description" on it's own line (like Offense, Defense, etc.) then that should work.

Also, there's not an easy way to distinguish paragraph breaks in the copy/pasted text from a PDF. Each line of text ends in a CRLF (carriage return, line feed) so is essentially a new paragraph in itself. I may initially just have to do this as a bulk "dump" of everything and then leave it up to an individual to put the paragraph tags <P> around each paragraph.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Blackfoot

How are you going to make that work? Most of the writeups are pretty vague on spells, I guess you can pull them in from available modules.

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I was just going to link to the Complete Paizo spells module. I haven't had a good look at how the DB entry looks for NPC spells, so I may end up having to parse some key bits out of the spell module to get it to work.

Perhaps the first release will require the GM to go into each spellcaster NPC within FG and select "reparse spell actions" to get all the data out of the module spell entry correctly.

The
Description
idea seems like a good one. If the parser user knows about the tag they can add it, if not they can leave out the long description entirely... and it would make it an easy edit on the statblock rather than juggling one has to do now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Trenloe

I was just going to link to the Complete Paizo spells module. I haven't had a good look at how the DB entry looks for NPC spells, so I may end up having to parse some key bits out of the spell module to get it to work.

Perhaps the first release will require the GM to go into each spellcaster NPC within FG and select "reparse spell actions" to get all the data out of the module spell entry correctly.

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Looking at the DB format it doesn't even link to a spell module of the spell that was dragged onto the NPC spell class. So, I'd have to extract all the info from the module and put it in the NPC module DB.

I knew it wasn't going to be a simple task - hence why I haven't started it yet as I know it will take a long time to get it even 80% right.

I figured as much. Ouch. :)