Felderburg
commented
1 year ago Attached is a character created mostly by editing, with a few career events dragged and dropped. We can now see the "edit type" items for stats are the base number. Without attaching too many files, I've also found that editing the "total" line item does nothing—it is automatically calculated. The "misc" line item is the temporary change one.
Of note, when creating a character "from scratch" by editing the character sheet directly, dragging and dropping career events doesn't do anything, but dragging and dropping items like upbringing/environment create little popups that allow you to choose stats per the selected item. (Also of note, you can not manually edit below the totals given by lifepath options—our test vulcan has 5 from various steps (edited down from 6 during the final touches) and can't go below that manually but the temp item can go as low as you can scroll.)
Lt test from scratch2.txt Lt test from scratch2_drag and drop2.txt
At this point, I wonder how much time and effort this will take, and if it's "worth" it. Random thoughts as they come to me:
- The character creation in FG is pretty easy, so it may not be necessary to have an import at all.
- It should be possible to create a pretty pared down version of the code, including only necessary line items. The links that I think you noticed aren't necessary per se—they do provide a nice way to view lifepath option descriptions in popups which I don't see a way to do with handwritten items. (I'll test with importing in a pared-down way.)
- But the links shouldn't be that hard to do for someone who owns the modules; knowing how to code the link for "Homeworld" would just be a matter of exporting a character with it and seeing what the xml says. That runs into an issue when someone opts not to pay $$ for the FG version of a pdf they already have, so you may need more helpers.
- I'm not sure how links work for a custom item added to the master list (rather than writing "upbringing x" on the sheet directly, you can add it to the list of upbringings itself, with a potential category, and link it from there). That's the next item to test an export of.
bcholmes
Per discussion in #119 an FG-specific issue is requested.
Proposed: a way to export characters to XML files, for import to the Fantasy Grounds official ruleset/modules.
The relevant items from #119 (conversation between BCHolmes (quoted) and myself):
Attached is an exported character (they export as xml which github evidently doesn't support, so I saved it in notepad++ as .txt with no changes). This character was generated through the FG "character creator" which walks people through the lifepath creation process. Characters can also be created from scratch, which I assume would yield different results (especially in the attribute and discipline sections, which it looks like have the calculations from the lifepath steps—while a scratch character can have those options drag-and-dropped, if someone were to type them or change them manually I am currently unsure what it would look like).
I will endeavour to get other examples to you, specifically a drag-and-dropped character and a totally manual one, but not tonight.
The thing about FG is that most talents don't actually have mechanical effects, and must have their effect be manually done in FG. So that probably makes an export easier. You can make "custom" talents as well, so it should be possible to see what an export of a character with talents and lifepath options not covered in the available FG modules looks like, which would make an export of a character with Delta Quadrant stuff, for example, possible from this tool to an FG-readable xml.
Vulcan Test Export.txt
Edit: you will note the presence of curly apostrophes converted into ’ ; type stuff; I submitted that issue as a bug on the FG forums. Most of them seem to appear in talent or item descriptions, so they shouldn't affect anything mechanical if you use straight apostrophes.
Edit: I strongly suspect a simplified version would work. Many items have a lot of formatting that is, mechanically, unnecessary. For example, the career events, while looking nice in FG, probably don't need the bolding and extra lines to be readable. I'm not sure how hard it would be to take things like that from the helpers files and turn them into xml—the text is there, but is it worth formatting for FG?
I should also note that I will provide screenshots of the character sheets in FG at some point, because looking at the xml and the sheet in FG, it is immediately obvious what tags are important and how they go in the UI, but won't be if you don't have FG.
I don't think that the way the points are gained/calculated matters to FG mechanically (I assume that the dev of the ruleset kept things notated this way for transparency/better record keeping). That's why I'll be creating a character manually, to see what that looks like (I will also edit Mr. Vulcan Test manually to see how that goes). I'm away from my FG computer, but as I recall you can just type a new number in, or do a "temporary" change which changes the total but has an indicator number next to the stat of how much it was changed by, which should be interesting to see the xml of.
Correct. For the steps that have a focus or a value, I put [step] [item]. It seemed like that would be easier to see the structure of things that way.
They currently support the Starfleet core book and Alpha Quadrant. Based on how quickly Alpha came out after the core, I assume the other quadrant books will also be out relatively soon. I will not be purchasing anything other than the core from FG (maybe Klingon core if it includes updated milestones and the House system).
The links are interesting, and another reason we need to see a manual/custom character. Not only can things be typed in manually to a character sheet, it is also possible to create custom lifepath options, which link in the same way as the rules-as-written ones on the character sheet, but I assume don't link to "reference.environment.id-00001@Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook" (e.g.).
I'll muck about this evening (maybe) and do some more exports. I still strongly suspect that this version of an export is more complicated than a custom character will be, or if I just type in stats from a character created using this tool.