Shop & Town Extension for 3.5E / Pathfinder / 4E

[Trenloe]

another question about something i noticed the other day, when i was exporting a test version of my adventure module found that you cant seem to export town and shop data? i use modules so i can hide away large amounts of unnecessary data, as most of my campaigns are quite long, so is there anyway around this?

Exporting has been mentioned earlier in this thread, but development of that has been put on hold (see post #24).

If you're familiar with XML (or want to learn on the fly) you may be able to manually copy the Shop & Town info from the campaign db.xml file into a module - look how story entries etc. are stored in a module xml compared to the db.xml of the campaign and see if you can create a module yourself!

[Zeus]

i want aware you could do this that's quite useful,thank you.
another question about something i noticed the other day, when i was exporting a test version of my adventure module found that you cant seem to export town and shop data? i use modules so i can hide away large amounts of unnecessary data, as most of my campaigns are quite long, so is there anyway around this?

Drop a request to bradmcadam who developed the Shop/Town extensions and request that he register the pertinent database nodes with the /export utility. This will then allow you to be able to export Shop/Town Information to modules.

[bnason]

Drop a request to bradmcadam who developed the Shop/Town extensions and request that he register the pertinent database nodes with the /export utility. This will then allow you to be able to export Shop/Town Information to modules.

How difficult (time to design) is it to do that, Dr.Z?

[Zeus]

How difficult (time to design) is it to do that, Dr.Z?

Very simple, for 3.5E/4E just add the following in an onInit() function:

if ExportManager.registerExportNode then
  ExportManager.registerExportNode({ name = <db root node>, class = <windowclass>, label = <label>});
end

Where:

<db root node> is a string of the database node (under root) to export
<windowclass> is a string defining the name of the window class
<label> is a string defining the label to use for the new entry in the /export window

e.g.

if ExportManager.registerExportNode then
  ExportManager.registerExportNode({ name = "table", class = "table", label = 'Table"});
end

would add a Table entry to /export which will export nodes under table (under root) of class table.

[bradmcadam]

Okay! So here's 1.6:

I'd like to give a huge thanks to DrZeuss, Griogre, Silveras, and Trenloe for helping me put my thoughts together and get the code needed to complete the features on the to do list. If you feel you contributed and I missed your name, I apologize, you are also awesome.

Changelog:
- Changed naming convention so now you simply replace the old files and they'll overwrite. No more having 15 copies of my silly addon
- Added chat window output so you can see the version # you're using as it loads up in case you forgot to look at the version # in the display window where it is also visible
- Added the ability to export towns & shops. I have only tested this a little, so please do some thorough testing of it yourself and report bugs to me.

Enjoy!

[Silveras]

Happy to see this, and I will give the export some testing just about immediately.

Were you able to resolve the issue you were having with the drag-n-drop in the lists creating new nodes instead of linking to the existing ones?

[bradmcadam]

Unfortunately I haven't had a lot of time to spend on the addon, so no I wasn't. I have a feeling it'll take me a lot more scripting to get the exact functionality I want out of it. I do apologize for that.

[Silveras]

No need to apologize... I appreciate the efforts and find the extension quite useful "as-is".

The exporting worked nicely for me tonight, no problems at all using the exported module with my main campaign.

A couple of thoughts
- I am not sure how many towns you expect to see listed together. For my own use, I will probably create a module for each city or town, so the town list window will be mostly empty, usually one entry.
- Have you considered a tab for Districts? The new Magnimar supplement breaks each district out separately, allowing each to have different modifiers and lists of places of interest.
- For the shops... had you considered giving them a "type" field ? I noticed that the new Magnimar supplement breaks out the interesting sites in each District by broad categories like "Entertainment" and such. I think you had said you wanted the NPC list to be sortable by either the name or job column? If so, a similar list for sites, sortable by name or type (or, more ambitiously, name/type/district), would be a nice addition.

In any event, the extension is very helpful and effective right now, so thanks for the effort and for sharing.

[bradmcadam]

Once I figure out the sorting I'll make sure it can sort by each column. I'll look into dividing it into districts. I'm weary of having more subwindows each time, although there could still be a nice way to arrange it.

As for how many towns are listed together. I have some pretty nutty players. The scroll box for tabs allows for added tabs at the bottom, each with labels, and my players are currently jumping between 25 towns in a country roughly the size of France, each tab for me keeps track of a different country. Most of my design for this addon has been to try and stay one step ahead of their crazy brains. The rest is things you all request, so the more data you give me like the districts idea, the better I can make it

As for the shops idea, that was really quickly thrown together. I'm thinking about changing it to a 'businesses' or 'establishments' addon with a 'goods and services' tab for trading items, but I agree, it needs more info in general for taverns, inns, 'companion' type shops (woo! firefly reference) etc. I'll jot some ideas this week.

[bnason]

Dumb question - I have a custom theme that I use, and I've tried modifying the Town/Shop buttons in the theme file like this:

	<icon name="button_towns" file="graphics/sidebar/button_towns.png" />
	<icon name="button_towns_down" file="graphics/sidebar/button_towns_down.png" />
	<icon name="button_shops" file="graphics/sidebar/button_shops.png" />
	<icon name="button_shops_down" file="graphics/sidebar/button_shops_down.png" />

in my graphics_misc.xml. Every other button from the default 3.5e theme that I've reskinned shows up correctly - but this doesn't appear to work with the extension.

Is there some other way that I can call for the icon name to be reskinned from the Town/Shop extensions? I'm assuming that the lines in my theme/extension XML are being called BEFORE the actual town/shop extension, and therefore overridden, or something like that.

Of course - I can always just manually replace the PNGs in the extensions, but that's a PITA