CreatureGen Extension: Import Stat-blocks on the fly with populated spells

[darthmask]

Ken L. It is SO good to see that you have made this for FG. I am currently the process of making the switch from roll20 (where I used your CGEN API plugin religiously) and the biggest thing I was dreading was having to create my NPCs from scratch again. Also this extension is very, very clean and easy to use so props!!!

However, I am currently attempting to import the attached statblock (with your spell library module loaded) and I am getting no spells in the spells section of the NPC that it creates. I am also attaching the log that is created on generation of the NPC (which isn't throwing any errors that I can see). I grabbed this statblock from a Paizo Iron Gods AP PDF (legally obtained and paid for...totally worth it) and everything else is parsing perfectly (after the obvious OCR fixes and alignment)...just the spells aren't which seems weird.

Any assistance would be appreciated. I obviously can still make serious use of this extension (and I plan to) but I would like to see about fixing this if possible.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the CGEN does actually create the spellclass entries for the sorcerer spells known and spell-like abilities, however they are empty.

EDIT2: Hmm, on a whim I decided to grab a different spontaneous spellcaster from the PRD to ensure there wasn't an issue with my installation and it imported just fine so something tells me I may be missing an OCR error...but if so I can't see it...

[KevenSimmons]

Hey Darthmask,
The separator after the "(#/day)" needs to be a double-dash, or the "long-dash" character (not sure what it is called). For example, either of these should parse correctly.

4th (5/day)--fire shield, freedom of movement, phantasmal killer (DC 18)
3rd (7/day)—fly, protection from energy, slow (DC 17), vampiric touch

[Ken L]

Keven looks to be correct here. The attached log is only showing level zero though. You could tick log level 3 or 4 as those tend to show some details about spell parsing (4 more for spell library lookup, 3 for only parsing). Either way from the statblock, it's an OCR copy paste difference. FG has a strange unicode format that Keven helped me debug earlier so I replace the long-dash with a double minus along with other pre-processing before the actual parse begins.

To be honest, Smiteworks should really look into UTF-8 support rather than sticking with iso-8859-1,

[darthmask]

Ye gods I agree...UTF-8 is almost universal now...but hey, I'm not a programmer, just a lowly DBA/database designer :P

anyway, that did in fact fix it for me. Would a double-minus work on the import statblock? That would be easier for me since my keyboard doesn't have the em-dash available as a single key and I can't remember the alt code all the time so I have to do a lot of character selection...

[Ken L]

Ye gods I agree...UTF-8 is almost universal now...but hey, I'm not a programmer, just a lowly DBA/database designer :P

anyway, that did in fact fix it for me. Would a double-minus work on the import statblock? That would be easier for me since my keyboard doesn't have the em-dash available as a single key and I can't remember the alt code all the time so I have to do a lot of character selection...

The pre-processor just substitutes the entity groupings that FG spits out into characters it can deal with.

Here's the list of subsitutions

So "--" is literally what is substituted for the long dash and is safe to use, also it's unicode so unless you have a unicode keyboard, that's an alt+# thing.

[KevenSimmons]

I don't think I have ever seen a more accurate use of the word "literally" than when describing a literal

[darthmask]

Perfect, thanks guys. Also, I love the programmer humor.

[Blackfoot]

There is an issue with the concentration checks for casters created by the extension .. it doesn't set the caster stat (probably because it has no way to know what that is) and ends up adding a bonus for concentration that is too high... it probably should at least subtract out the caster level from the number in the stat block.. I'm not sure what it can do to figure the caster stat. You could pull it from a list.. but there are exceptions that would still make it wrong.

[Ken L]

I have no desire to maintain a class index to correct or check for correct levels of X class to resolve this issue. The spell section is there primarily to be populated with prepared uses and available casts, it's even noted earlier that the spell population CLs or DCs may be wrong as I rely on the 3.5 spell manager to perform the spell parse. In the grand scheme of things it's a minor piece of information that can be corrected post parse, especially as it already does a vast majority of the heavy lifting.

If you feel you're up to task, the script is all open source so you can freely edit and modify it.

Update 1.79: Case correction
- Fixed: Case sensitivity for 'At will' as 'At Will' was not being picked up. Case sensitivity remains in some of the parse logic as it remains a distinguishing feature to find labeled sections of the stat-block to differentiate it from similar text in descriptions or abilities.

See the git hub for the freshest update.

[Blackfoot]

Just reporting a bug here.
You are probably better off not putting anything into the Concentration box. Most of the time (unless the caster has some sort of special trait or feat) the 0 value in concentration will be correct.