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  1. #11
    Thank you Trenloe, that is very helpful. I draw a few conclusions from it:

    1) In best practices, it talks about crosslinking but doing so isn’t “free”. All the heaviest NPC groups are heavily cross-linked. I would bet that the players half of the reference manual, which is the only completed half, has many more XML lines than the mostly unlinked, unfinished GMs half.

    Cross linking is still a best practice, it’s just that advice considers smaller data groups than something like the entire 1E core rulebook set heavily cross-linked all over the place.

    For example, many of the demihuman templates in OSRIC/1E contain the thieves skills. All assassins contain those plus another dozen assassin skills. Gnome and dwarf assassins contain all of the above plus another half-dozen racial skills for determining depth underground, etc.

    Then every Demi-human will have at least three cross-links on its description page to NPC magic item determination tables relevant to their level, so the GM can just push a button and get personalized magic items, and other similar tables.

    Pilgrims, caravans, and NPC adventuring parties all together weigh about as much as demihumans even though they’re about half as many combined entries. These, as completed characters would have fully complete spellcasters and assigned magic items. It wouldn’t be uncommon for a magic item to have a half-dozen crosslinks to spells, per item, and of course a mid-level spell caster could easily have 20-30 spell cross links in “spells known” in addition to voluminous magic items. A staff of power probably has a couple dozen cross links or more by itself

    Takeaway - cross-linking is a valuable time convenience but is not the negligible additional weight I had thought.

    Since pilgrim, caravan, and adventuring party NPCs were added immediately before I tried to finish the ref manual just before uploading, that 400K+ additional lines of XML was like adding 5 full starcraft mods to the mod. And thus it redlined.

    But one of the objections I’m trying to meet with the module are those who say using a VTT means twice the work: first to make the content as they would without a VTT, and then the work of remaking the content in the VTT. I think I’ve succeeded at actually making it faster to generate campaign content directly in the VTT. I will have to figure out the resource load.

    You’re right: NPCs are the issue. And I have to manage so a GM never has to load everything at once.

    But I don’t think I can keep everything else on the DM side together and just split the NPCs, because the encounter tables pull across many of those NPC groups at the same time. The DM would have to load dragons, giants, humanoids, animals, sylvan, undead, men, other monsters, etc., simultaneously for the wilderness encounter charts to work. They’d need to load a subset (10%) of the current demihuman group as well.

    But I think I have a path. I won’t need to segment it quite as much as I said above, but probably still 6-7 mods with the segmenting along functional lines instead of type lines. If I segment by type the DM still has to load nearly all of it sometimes.

    But I need to cut out all redundant cross linking. Example: the base orc entry has several cross links. Those are repeated again in the orc sub-chief entry, the orc shaman entries, and witch doctor entries, etc., because all of those are replicated/tweaked versions of the base orc entry.

    Repeat that redundancy across a lot of monsters and that’s probably a Starcraft mod or two by itself in excisable bloat. I only need the cross links in the base monster entry.

  2. #12
    One other question: is it a less expensive XML cost to call upon a table by copying/pasting the table name between brackets than it is to shield-drop the same table, when making it a sub-table in the cell of a larger table?

    Right now I mostly have shield-drops as subtables since it allows clicking through to the sub-table. But if that creates more lines of XML than bracketing the name then I may not be able to afford the convenience

  3. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by EOTB View Post
    One other question: is it a less expensive XML cost to call upon a table by copying/pasting the table name between brackets than it is to shield-drop the same table, when making it a sub-table in the cell of a larger table?

    Right now I mostly have shield-drops as subtables since it allows clicking through to the sub-table. But if that creates more lines of XML than bracketing the name then I may not be able to afford the convenience
    I think the benefit to typing the name is it wont require a a direct link to access it... it will look for a table with that name. At least thats how I understand it. Using direct link will mean if you change the name of the module/rebuild and the ID changes, it'll break.
    ---
    Fantasy Grounds AD&D Reference Bundle, AD&D Adventure Bundle 1, AD&D Adventure Bundle 2
    Documentation for AD&D 2E ruleset.
    Custom Maps (I2, S4, T1-4, Barrowmaze,Lost City of Barakus)
    Note: Please do not message me directly on this site, post in the forums or ping me in FG's discord.

  4. #14
    Edit - I misunderstood. You mean if bracketing the text of a name, rebuilding it doesn’t “break” the sub-table reference if that table moves from “OSRIC full” to “OSRIC module #4”?

    Whereas with shield dropping, it would break the master table in that circumstance(?)
    Last edited by EOTB; August 1st, 2021 at 00:20.

  5. #15

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    Hi EOTB,

    i have tried your mod as discussed over the weekend, i loaded the GM part and the players only loaded their part...

    Sure the initial loading time was longer than usual but the subsequent ones were a lot shorter and mildly longer than opening any other 2E campaign. I don t remember any of the players complaining about loading the players part...

    It works flawlessly to create characters. just had to remind them to drag the skills associated to their race and class if needed. Also noticed that Character creation needs to be in certain order... putting characteristic, race then class does not work well...

    Finally well yes it s a big mod, it contains a lot of stuff... now we should maybe stop expecting people making mod built in 2021 to load perfectly in FGC (RIP) or FGU... I am sure you can tweak your mod... as can FGU be optimised by the dev. It goes both ways.

    IMO no one for example who played the original Battlefield 1942 when i came out is expecting to play the latest instalment with the same rig...but the FG community think so...well they are somehow right since not much changed practically beside LOS and lighting and a map making tool with very...very limited usage. I see FGU as having untapped potential being held back by his predecessor. Anyway i diverge here...

    Honestly EOTB, you have done a lot of work to get this out and i know there s more in the pipeline, I would not bother cutting it off in pieces. It s working fine, only the initial loading is longer... oh well, i can live with that.

  6. #16
    Thank you for taking it for a spin Readymeal, I appreciate it! Glad to hear you ran a game without hiccups.

    I’d be interested in hearing about character creation, as stats-race-class in sequence was how I was creating them, so if you found any glitches doing the same I should track that down.

    Also good feedback on the splitting issue. I need to weigh that with the size of the work in the pipeline, as if the dangerous dungeons supplement to OSRIC is released on FG, that’s about as much new content as is in OSRIC itself...

  7. #17
    Trenloe's Avatar
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    Whatever you decide to do, you should consider the minimum system requirements stated for Fantasy Grounds Unity here: https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...m+Requirements

    At present, the OSRIC full module makes FGU use nearly 8GB of RAM just opening it - that's going to take twice the minimum spec RAM of 4GB (even before the operating system uses any); let alone playing on a map, with a few players joined and a bunch of monsters in the combat tracker. People on the recommended hardware (8GB RAM) are still going to struggle. So my recommendation would be to provide some way for people on FGU minimum spec machines to be able to fine tune the amount of memory used by having different modules to load/unload as needed.
    Private Messages: My inbox is forever filling up with PMs. Please don't send me PMs unless they are actually private/personal messages. General FG questions should be asked in the forums - don't be afraid, the FG community don't bite and you're giving everyone the chance to respond and learn!

  8. #18
    I expect to split it, over a period of time, because there’s more work in varying stages of completion that builds on this - more monsters, more races/classes, more spells, etc.. So loading “everything OSRIC-compatible” at once (speaking in general and not this base mod specifically) won’t likely be possible anyway, even for those with premium machines.

    But I’ll probably keep an all-in-one GM’s half available for those who want it - maybe vanilla OSRIC is all they plan to run and their system can handle it.
    Last edited by EOTB; August 1st, 2021 at 18:57.

  9. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by EOTB View Post
    I expect to split it, over a period of time, because there’s more work in varying stages of completion that builds on this - more monsters, more races/classes, more spells, etc.. So loading “everything OSRIC-compatible” at once (speaking in general and not this base mod specifically) won’t likely be possible anyway, even for those with premium machines.

    But I’ll probably keep an all-in-one GM’s half available for those who want it - maybe vanilla OSRIC is all they plan to run and their system can handle it.
    To be clear, it loads fine for me in FGU tho it does take about a minute+ to load.

    If it was me I'd break out the DM only into it's own module excluding monsters. Make a module specifically for monsters. Then player version with all the class/race/spells/normal items and non-DM specific instructions.
    ---
    Fantasy Grounds AD&D Reference Bundle, AD&D Adventure Bundle 1, AD&D Adventure Bundle 2
    Documentation for AD&D 2E ruleset.
    Custom Maps (I2, S4, T1-4, Barrowmaze,Lost City of Barakus)
    Note: Please do not message me directly on this site, post in the forums or ping me in FG's discord.

  10. #20
    That would be pretty simple to do

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