The Mortar Pit

Completing Weird Wars Rome was a very satisfying feeling for me, but it left me wanting to do more. It's pretty cool to be helping grow the Fantasy Grounds library, and knowing that there are people waiting for that one to hit the store. Just as I finishing up that project I caught a post on G+ about one of the Accursed books by Melior Via. I actually sent an email to them and asked if they had any interest in seeing their products on Fantasy Grounds. John Dunn got back to me and said that they would love to see their products on here but they neither have the ability or a license. I am still aiming to fix both those problems.

However, during a conversation with Mask_of_Winter about the Accursed books I happened to mention that I would love to convert the Winter Eternal setting to FG but I had figured he was already doing since he has been involved with the setting and Just Insert Imagination for a while now. Mask responded to the effect of "If you want to do it...go right ahead." Well, since I already owned Winter Eternal at the time, and I would need to go buy the Accursed PDF's before I could start converting the choice was pretty clear. Sorry, Melior Via...but Accursed is just going to have to wait a couple more weeks.

So I actually started working on Winter Eternal on the 13th of April. In about a little over an hour I had entered the first few pages of the PDF. I picked back up after submitting WWR. A couple more hours work I had all the races entered, this took far longer than I originally anticipated. In Winter Eternal as they take through the steps in Character Creation there is two sections on the Races. To make it a more logical flow within FG I decided to combine those two sections. At first I envisioned the Race page opening up to the whole description about races in general, as you scrolled down each race would have its own expandable section - you know the ones marked by the little + symbol.

As you clicked open that symbol what I wanted to happen was you'd get the first very general blurb about the race with a link to the more detailed description. No matter I set it up and played with that XML I could not get the +'s and links to co-operate. I would get one of them or nothing. I must have redone that section two or three times trying to get it to work. Finally, I said enough is enough. So we I wrote it into its current iteration. You open the race window, you get the general race info, as you scroll down you get the brief little intros to each race. Below that you have the links to the detailed race description.

Over last night and earlier today I put a couple more hours into the project, and completed all the race descriptions and all the various racial abilities. This is one area that I have certainly improved upon over what I did in WWR. Rather than linking each ability to the Core Player Guide or Fantasy Companion as the case maybe, I actually created an entry for each ability in the reference portion of the library. So when you click on the ability in the race description you get the feat window to open up and see the ability description. It feels less clunky than the way I created bestiary entries in WWR. It also means all those ability entries can be dragged and dropped onto the character sheet.

So that's where it sits. About 7-8 hours worth work into it so far. The only thing I wish I could have figured out was having the Just Insert Imagination logo appear automatically when the credits/legal page is opened up. I suspect that some sort of lua script will do the trick - but haven't tried to learn lua yet.

Up next the new setting edges and hindrances.