Going from Unity BACK to Classic

For reasons that aren't important to the question, we are transitioning back to FG Classic from FG Unity. We've gone a few sessions, so I copied the campaign folder from Unity folders to Classic folders. My campaign will NOT load in Classic now. I tried and tried, but it always goes to "not responding."

I made a new campaign just to troubleshoot and it loads immediately. So, the question I have, is there anything in a campaign folder from Unity that is not compatible with Classic? Is it possible that the line of sight and lighting changes I made to a map in Unity are what's causing a hang up now loading the campaign in Classic?

I'm stumped, but I'm not a Fantasy Grounds guru. Anyone have any thoughts?

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Originally Posted by ThatStoney

For reasons that aren't important to the question, we are transitioning back to FG Classic from FG Unity. We've gone a few sessions, so I copied the campaign folder from Unity folders to Classic folders. My campaign will NOT load in Classic now. I tried and tried, but it always goes to "not responding."

I made a new campaign just to troubleshoot and it loads immediately. So, the question I have, is there anything in a campaign folder from Unity that is not compatible with Classic? Is it possible that the line of sight and lighting changes I made to a map in Unity are what's causing a hang up now loading the campaign in Classic?

I'm stumped, but I'm not a Fantasy Grounds guru. Anyone have any thoughts?

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Unity has a different data structure than classic and is not compatible. Plus, Classic will be phased out eventually. Not sure the reason for going "back" but best resolve that as that's a very temporary solution. It's possible someone knows of "tricks" to try and edit your way back in the db.xml file - but I'm not aware of any.

Hopefully you backed it up before moving to unity and can use that. If not - always backup. Always. I do because db.xml auto FG backups are never safe enough for me.

You might be able to transition some of it back manually. Maybe. You would have to copy and paste from the FGU db.xml into a FGC one. Just moving the campaign folders certainly will not work.

At a minimum, all images in FGU won't make it, and don't bother trying to copy them back.they use a completely different architecture. Characters probably won't either, but you can try exporting and importing them. Story entries would probably work. NPCs, items, parcels, encounters, probably will.

"Not sure the reason for going "back""

Not everyone has a 2 GB GPU in their computer, especially people with laptops. FGU runs great on my desktop, but if I'm gonna be using FG outside of my own home (such as running a game while travelling, or if I bring it to a friend's house for in person gaming) then I'm gonna be using FGC because my laptop cannot handle FGU.

Even though I'm a FGU Ultimate owner, I'm still a Classic user/lover and much prefer FGC over FGU. Works fantastic if you don't have a LoS requirement for your games. Less resource utilization and better performance (try them side-by-side, it's obvious)... bummer that it isn't updated anymore and the new releases won't be available on it.

Not sure if this YouTube Video will help, but most of the incompatibilities will come from your images, directories, and potentially from some text formatting. You could essentially export your current campaign as a module, provided that you still can or that you do not have a bunch of links that are linked to official content, as this can be problematic, especially in regards to IP-based images. https://youtu.be/Uqi24oydcH0 Ince you have exported your work, load in Unity, make copies of most of the data, and re-associate all of your art, tokens, maps, etc with Unity. it's still a lot of work though to partially re-create a module. FGU uses a different Text standard than Classic.

Best of Luck,
FGA

FGU campaigns are not compatible with FGC. It only supports a one-way migration from FGC to FGU.

I appreciate everyone’s feedback regarding this thread! I think JustinFreitas summed it up well enough in that it’s an optimization thing. I have a pretty high end computer that I just built, but some things in Unity just aren’t optimized quite yet (which is a shame because I love a lot of the new features).

I did wind up just exporting the characters, reimporting them into classic, and going from there for now. As long as stuff with the characters is fine, the rest is easy enough to set back up. I do look forward to seeing how Unity develops over time and cannot wait to try it again once it’s a little smoother for my purposes.

For me, it' came down to two issues - Firstly, whilst I can see that FGU added improvements, the focus of the improvements was in an area that I personally do not value. Unfortunately, that did come at the expense of things I do value. The second issue is that FGU runs horribly (on a top-end gaming PC) and we get little weird bugs related to LOS that spoil enjoyment. e.g LOS crapping out and showing the players all the unexplored areas of the map. That right there spoils a lot of hard work.

I tried migrating back to FGC and, as mentioned, it's not a straight migration. I started by copying the campaign folders to see what went wrong but eventually fired up a new campaign in FGC and started moving things individually.

Start a new campaign.
Copy your images and extensions folder into the new FGC campaign.
Characters can be exported from FGU as XML files and reimported into FGC. You'll need to reattach tokens and portraits.
Notes were a pain but you can get your players to create new blank notes in FGC. DMs can see player notes so you can copy and paste them with both apps open. It doesn't take long.
Maps were not an issue. I just copied my images folder across. You don't get any masks but that's not a huge problem and an acceptable loss.
Almost all extensions went across with no issue whatsoever. In fact, many of the settings were carried over also.

Where it did suck was where I'd created custom content and, if you're relying on homebrew, this might present an insurmountable issue, especially if you have a lot of links. I put this down to the way in which Fantasy Grounds handles text which is baffling to me. If you're using an official module it's not a problem at all. Again, you can open the apps side by side and copy and past from one campaign to another.

All in all, it took me about 30 minutes.