Useful?

[Tenian]

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. 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. They are always looking for more players and GMs

[Sorontar]

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]

I would be interested for sure.

[RiverRat]

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]

Oh yes. PLEASE share.

And source-code too?

[Tenian]

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]

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]

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]

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]

That sounds like a really useful tool. You keep knocking these great ideas out of the park Tenian... very impressive.