Hello everyone,
This post is about a set of scripts that will allow you to generate Fantasy Grounds modules from the "Portable Compendium" data.
Foreword
What is the Portable Compendium?
For those who never heard about the "Portable Compendium", I was like you a few weeks ago. I personally use an other called the "Offline Compendium".
These two softwares had the same goal, allow people to access DDI Compendium data without internet access.
Nowadays since the online DDI Compendium has been shut down by WotC, these data troves are the only way to access all 4E data.
But as you said, there is several compendium existing, how do I know this module generator will work with my compendium?
There is two compendium hosting 4e data these days. Or at least, two that I am aware of. These module-generating scripts will only work with the one called "Portable Compendium" or "Portable D&D Compendium.exe".
If your compendium looks like this picture below, you are in the right place. If it's not, you might want to check my other thread here
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...read.php?60221
How does it work and which modules will I be able to create?
The scripts I bring here will allow you to generate modules sufficient to launch any campaign of the fourth edition in Fantasy Grounds.
These are based of the scripts I originally created for the Offline Compendium and managed adapt for this one. It only create 3 base modules that should be enough to start running.
We're talking about
5000+ NPCs for you DM and for your players of
9000+ Powers and
3000+ Feats ready to drag and drop in their character sheets.
Installation & Usage
Ok so now how can I make it work ?
It should be easy, or I least I tried to make it easy.
First things first you need to
download and
unzip the module generation scripts here :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hQQ...Tg9Wruwthup2Es
And follow carefully the detailed steps written below.
1. Copy the
ddiFeat.sql,
ddiPower.sql and
ddiMonster.sql, files from
"PathYoYourPortableCompendium/sql/".
2. Then
paste them inside the
sources folder of the generator located at
"4E Module Generator - Portable Compendium/sources/".
3. Execute the
"4E Module Generator - Portable Compendium/_run_all.bat" file (double clic should be fine). Then
three executable will be launched and three consoles should appear (once per modules generated) with info of the parsing happening.
4. Each consoles will ask you to
press enter to close them once finished.
5. Finally you will be able to
find the generated modules in the
"4E Module Generator - Portable Compendium/export" folder
in each specific repositories (i.e.
"4e_NPC_PortableCompendium.mod" in
"4E Module Generator/export/npc")
6. Just copy these 3 modules from their export folders into your FG modules folder (default should be
".../Fantasy Gounds/Data/modules") and
load them in your campain!
7. Don't forget to
give access to your players to the basic feats / powers modules
to ease character creation.
And voilà you should be done and ready to start creating colorfull characters and dreadfull encounters!
Last notes
What is up with the 5000 monsters when there was only ~2000 in my Portable Compendium?
As @kevininrussia noted it, this seems to be an issue with the b29 version, the b30 should show all ~5000 properly so you should not be surprised.
The Portable Compendium b29 I managed to acquire only shows only 2327 entries when filtered by creatures.
But in fact, in the sql data used to initialize the database of the software, the 5326 are available but a lot of them have invalid html structure.
My guess here would be that because of their "corrupted" nature, the Portable Compendium b29 does not display them to the user.
And it was tricky to get these to work but even if you run with this older version. I managed to pull out a trick that allows to export them properly either way.
So yeah you might end up with more monsters than you could actually see in the Portable Compendium list!
I'm curious, how does it works?
You can learn more about this on the original thread for these generation scripts in the "Last notes" section :
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...read.php?60221
Any known issues?
- Recharge for monsters skills is not tracked, this is due to the source data not storing this info at the same place every time. An upgrade of the npc script should put things back in the right order.
I sincerely hope this can help many of you the way it helped me setting up my last campain!
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