Bring Back Story Entries

[Zacchaeus]

Sorry for the silly question, but is there a reference web page anywhere which explains the difference between these two approaches? I've not bought any new 5E adventures on FG recently (just bought Wildemount Guide) so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about?

Thanks!

No, there isn't. Basically story entries and reference pages are the same in that they contain text, speech bubbles, and links to encounters, treasure parcels and whatever else requires to be linked to them. Reference pages can contain embedded images as well as different coloured text boxes, dual column text, and breakout text which can have different backgrounds. Overall reference pages can look like a pdf or a book page whereas story entries are just text with links.

Reference pages can also be searched more easily and have a better indexing system than story entries do.

The downsides to reference pages at the moment are that the page size is bigger than a story page; it's not so easy to copy the reference page, and there's no button on the sidebar to open up the reference sections of modules. However most of these pain points will be resolved in the next release of the software.

[Nick Frost]

We have a number of updates coming to reference manual pages that will address some of the differences between story entries and reference manual entries. The goal is for reference manual pages to do everything you can do with story entries, and more. We thought this was the case already, but there has been feedback telling us that there are other features people like better about Story entries than they do Reference Manual pages. We recently had Dominic tackle a few of the most commonly mentioned ones.

If there are still others, we can continue to work on improving that experience to address specific requests. We are very unlikely to go backwards and start releasing products as story entries only. We have moved creation of content out of external tools like PAR5E and into FGU directly. This provides a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) content creation platform instead of a markup driven language that has to be learned, you have to compile into a final product and then reload it to see if the change worked properly. Requiring PAR5E limited the number of content creators, required two tools to continually be updated with new functionality, and increased maintenance costs for modules. There were already a handful of things you could do in FGU directly that you couldn't in PAR5E and it was getting worse. While it is possible to build both Ref Manual versions and Story entry versions directly in FGU, it increases the dev time, duplicates data, and then creates a double maintenance burden.

If you are comparing the two varieties, be sure to look only at recently released products that use Reference Manual pages instead of Story entries. Otherwise, you are not speaking on the current state of affairs. Recent products that use the new features for Reference Manuals are Dragonlance, Keys from the Golden Vault, and I believe Spelljammer.

Current state of Refman pages versus Story entries
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/featu...ualVsStory.htm

Changes coming soon in TEST build for Reference Manual Pages:

• New minimum window size that matches the minimum size for Story entries
• Copy Ref Page Link to Clipboard
• Duplicate Ref Page from Clipboard
• Revert a single ref page if edited from a store bought module
• We can repush old ref manual products so they are not read only (for adventures at least, but possibly for everything once the on page revert is an option)

Other changes we're considering for the future releases:

• Shrinking the window size for reference manual and pages will stack 2-column layouts on top of each other so they are both visible
• Shrinking the window size for reference manual and pages will shrink images to fit into the new width
• Create Story Entry for Ref Page
• Reference Page/Manual Sidebar navigation

EDIT: Edited by Moon Wizard to refine Test features planned vs. future items.

This posts addresses all the concerns I've been expressing on the FG Discord regarding the change to RefMan-only products. Now I'm eager to test the changes .

Thank you guys for listening to our feedback.

[Moon Wizard]

As noted in the previous posts, there is a small set of changes in the beta release currently in the Test channel; with potentially more later as we have time.

• [CoreRPG+] Reference manual and reference page minimum window size adjusted.
• [CoreRPG+] Added button to revert individual reference manual pages when edited in module reference manual.
• [CoreRPG+] Added button to copy/paste reference manual pages between each other.

Regards,
JPG