Fantasy Grounds II Ruleset Making Walkthrough #1
December 23, 2008
So I recently acquired Fantasy Grounds II, a rather interesting shared online roleplaying program. I’m sort of loathe to give the class of programs a name because every name I’ve seen for them sounds wrong – but it’s a shared chatroom and multimedia interface designed to facilitate roleplaying over the Internet.
I’d previously experimented with OpenRPG, which I’d assumed was a good system for doing these things. As it turns out, it includes core functionality up the wazoo, but very, very little in terms of “prettiness” – which is where FG2 delivers.
Take a look at some of Fantasy Grounds’ screenshots, and you’ll immediately see that it’s prettier than your average IRC client.
One of the more interesting facets of FG2 is the “ruleset” system – you can plug in various “rulesets”, typically unique to a role-playing system, which provide resources specific to that system. It comes with a default d20 SRD ruleset as well as a few others (Savage Worlds, GURPS 4e, and some others). There have been attempts at some other systems (notably for me, new World of Darkness (or nWoD) and D&D 4th Edition), but I thought I’d try my hand at building up a ruleset for myself – surely it can’t be that hard (words to die by shortly after stating)?
Trying to decide out what to try, I figured I would attempt to write a ruleset for Paizo Press’s new “D&D 3.75 edition”, Pathfinder RPG. It’s close enough to 3.5 that I should be able to just adapt the the material instead of doing a complete rewrite. Also, it’s still in Beta testing so the licensing is probably not going to result in lawyer’s jumping on my head (or at least not as hard as a certain company which suffers from draconian Intellectual Property paranoia).
So the first step – copy the d20 folder in the application’s folder and rename the new folder to “Pathfinder”.
The rulesets use Lua scripting for the object handling and XML for data storage, so it’s dead easy to crack the stuff open and mess around with the innards. First step, and completely useless in the grand scheme of things: changing the desktop background in the app!
I’m doing this completely blind, as I haven’t found any “how to make a new desktop background for Fantasy Ground II” resources handy. Taking a look at the desktop background (conspicuously named “desktop.png” in the “frames/” folder), I fire up my two image-work apps: the GIMP and Inkscape. Each has a specific purpose for this endeavour.
Firstly, a recon run before anything changes. Actually, the zeroth point: backup. Backup any file I’m opening, be it edit or read-only. The first rule of creating ANYTHING in terms of software is back stuff up before you touch it.
THEN I go on recon – fire up the GIMP, and take a glance at the desktop background image.
Using a few handy measurement tools, it’s easy enough to figure out that this image is broken horizontally into three components: the far left 512×512 general background, a 100×512 strip in the middle that holds the icons for various in-game utilities, and the 512×512 logo which is overlayed onto the desktop at run-time.
Alright. Time to use Inkscape.
I discovered a few months back – and maybe everybody knows this and I’m just an idiot, but I don’t think so – that Inkscape can be used as a PDF editor. So I take my Pathfinder Beta PDF which you can download for free from Paizo (PAIZO WE LOVE YOUUUU!), and we nick the background from the text:
We can then export that into a png, and load it up into the GIMP.
The last step before purely doing GIMP edits is to grab a nice overlay logo. I chose to steal the Pathfinder logo form the cover of the book, anything which uses few strong contrasting colours works well.
Firing up the GIMP, then, I brought the two parts together into a single image, in seperate layers.
I’m not going to walk you through the silly details, as you can find the techniques I’m using here in Grokking the GIMP. I added the logo on a layer, used the rotate tool with clipped rotations to make sure it was at ninety degrees, then adjusted the layer’s alpha value. I then copied the Pathfinder background layer, flipped it horizontally, expanded the layer size and offset it by 512 pixels (the size of the current square) and reduced the size of the layer to 100×512 before merging the layer back down.
I then added a layer to cover the 100×512 bit with an appropriately dark colour, changed the mode to multiply and adjusted the alpha.
Saving this and firing up my new Pathfinder ruleset resulted in less than satisfactory results – no manual on how to do this resulted in my not knowing that the 512×512 block on the left would be repeated as a textured background instead of stretched. Fair enough – now to make the image repeatable on the edges!
Unfortunately, my attention span drained by my disappointment of this not being a cakewalk, I immediately took a break to jam some Frets on Fire (a GPL’d, free Guitar Hero clone – highly recommended). Part 2 coming soon!
