Combat Groups Extension (Fantasy Grounds Unity 5E Ruleset)

[SilentRuin]

New to the extension just now and was just wondering; is there any perceptible negative effects to having a ton of groups filled with NPCs on the Combat Tracker with this?

As you can see from the numerous discussions in here - while preventing groups from being visible can let you put a lot more load on the system (as things usually use just what is visible) the CT entries are still actually all in the DB and only being filtered out. So if you abuse it - like I do in my COS game - you can have about 20 seconds to bring up the CT (200 CT entries and many maps associated with different groups) though it will run fine once its up. Gist being - you can throttle your system - just not as easily with combat groups. I only define the number of groups I think the players will encounter during a session (keeping places they always come back to defined) and as they kill off or get past those maps/groups I just remove them so that the groups are a living entity in the CT. Where locations they revisit remain permanently part of the groups, and places they go through and are done with are added during prep and removed after they are done.

I for sure still use encounters to be able to recover any groups that need to come back.

Now - can you prep an entire campaign and play that way? Sure. Maybe. If its not to big. I keep mine down to around 200 CT entries at any one time, but I have a decent machine and good network also.

Always back up your campaign after prep. For sure I copy mine after any major work to it. And while it only takes one mistaken use of the menu remove all foes, or the group visibility icon to wreck all your work to never forget again - I warn you now - ONLY remove things or do visibility with your group controls. Doing with the menu will effect everything whether you have it filtered out of the CT or not.

Be it on your head if you decide to overpopulate the CT - or foolishly use global commands that effect all groups.

[MrDDT]

Always back up your campaign after prep. For sure I copy mine after any major work to it. And while it only takes one mistaken use of the menu remove all foes, or the group visibility icon to wreck all your work to never forget again - I warn you now - ONLY remove things or do visibility with your group controls. Doing with the menu will effect everything whether you have it filtered out of the CT or not.

Be it on your head if you decide to overpopulate the CT - or foolishly use global commands that effect all groups.

I've done this a couple times myself.
Is there a way to add this into the ext as an option to turn off those options? I have no idea how hard something I'm asking is to code, just wondering. Because I'm like you have a ton of stuff in the CT and I've had to use my back up DB a couple times because of this.

[SilentRuin]

I've done this a couple times myself.
Is there a way to add this into the ext as an option to turn off those options? I have no idea how hard something I'm asking is to code, just wondering. Because I'm like you have a ton of stuff in the CT and I've had to use my back up DB a couple times because of this.

Because they designed it as a template it means I would have to completely override/replace the button_ct_menu template code and the ct_menu.lua code. I hate templates as a general rule as they make the code completely untouchable without replacing the entire thing. Hence, I have left that to be a RISK. For sure I want a lot of the underlying logic to ignore my filtering and apply things across the entire CT - not just what you see. Effect expiration, init rolls, rest, etc. The primary purpose of combat groups is to make sure you can work with only the group of CT entries your interested in - which does not preclude the fact that the rest of them all exist simultaneously in your world. For sure sometimes I leave things filtered off the CT because I don't want them to know stuff is there (only LOS visualization on the map lets them see and interact with things). Gist being that menu button will apply to everything - and while it would be nice to safety it up for the clearNPCs part of the radial buttons - that would mean having to overload a chunk of that code and I don't feel it is warranted to take on that additional RISK. Personally, it only took one time for me never to use that menu button to remove NPCs ever again.

So while it would be nice to just toss in an option to make that clearNPCs to use my getSortedCombatantList which has only the filtered visible CT entries returned - where that code resides makes it not worth rocking the boat (RISK) to me. Sorry.

[Note: I'm nervous enough having had to replace other templates in there already - so while you could argue "you've already done it for other things" that was because I had no other way to get things to work properly. This is not required to get things to work - tis a safety thing - and not worth adding in more overrides in that template code just for that.]

The result of any changes to that logic would also span groups (everything visible) which in most of my campaigns is usually more than one group that I use to manage multiple things - which may all be visible in CT at once. I admit I myself would love an option to just turn on or off (on to do effect expiration, rest, init, remove type of things only applied to visible CT entries for all the menu radial commands). Just not sure if other extensions mess with that menu button currently - in which case I'd RISK conflicts I did not have before.

[MrDDT]

Completely understand and thanks for the reply (and fast too).

[SilentRuin]

Completely understand and thanks for the reply (and fast too).

Well I expanded my commentary in that first reply just now also. I admit its tempting to have those menu items only react to visible CT entries (even though that can cover multiple groups).

[SilentRuin]

V1.11 - Bug - changed option name to be more accurate and fixed "Players only see same Faction" option to actually only let the client show the same faction entries in the CT. If no active charsheet defined currently in CT then it will default to only showing friendly faction entries.

Was messing around with SW5e campaign and realized the combat groups was not showing the same factions when the option was set. Turned out this was because I had no active character chosen yet and that led to some testing that made me find out I had to have the active user charsheet defined in CT for this option to work (wanted it to default to friendly if nothing defined - as in my space combat its all NPCs that player controls) - then found out it was not working properly for all 4 toggleable factions in FGU (client CT should only match whatever their active charsheet in CT factions is defined as). Tested by testing with no client charsheet chosen yet (defaults to friendly entries in CT only), by dropping the active charsheet into CT for client and toggling through each of its factions on host (client should only show matching factions in its CT any time it was toggled). This is the fix once I got it all working the way I wanted.

[SilentRuin]

V1.12 - Bug - missing init call and did not place limit in combobox definitions so that scroll bar would be used properly.

[SilentRuin]

Somehow adding in limit and correct call of super stuff has added some weird pulldown arrow on CT entries - its harmless but annoying and opens into nothing. I will have to check into it later tonight or tomorrow.

Appears if you add a size limit to combobox it reserves that space in the CT entry. As the combat groups pulldown in the CT entry has a limit of 15 now (instead of unlimited) it has that arrow to indicate the space it reserved for the combo box expansion. While it was "unlimited" before it must have run time allocated that space so did not think it had need of any expansion space.

I can either put that combobox back to unlimited (with the problems that could have if you run out of window space to hold it - or leave it as it is. I'll wait to see if people care about it. It does take an extra line in CT entry for that arrow and then if you click on it will expand it out to blank reserved section.

All this is assuming as the only thing that has changed is the max number of lines before a scroll bar takes effect.

[SilentRuin]

V1.13 - Bug - V1.12 change has caused issue where the combobox button was permanently displayed even though combobox itself was not currently displayed. Fixed as best I can by making combobox initially invisible.

[SilentRuin]

I have to say that I and my players are hooked on Combat Groups "Players only see same Faction" option. They can only see things or be aware of them (target them) by LOS in map and never know which of them is going next in the initiative order
Means I don't have to mess with visibility status all the time either because if they can see them they know they are there - if they can't - CT won't be giving away anything that is there. Plus I assigned a player Assistant GM NPC control to run friendly NPCs and did not have to worry about all the enemy NPCs my full display of CT showed on host as he only saw (thus got control) of the same faction (friendly in this case). Saved me dragging them all onto his portrait as there were 5 of them. Though next session I'll be disabling his NPC control and individually parsing out (drop on portrait) the friendly NPCs.