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Cult Engine 1 (internal codename: Fantasy Grounds)

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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby ChevRage » 29 Nov 2021 14:09

From page 82 and 83 of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook:

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So dan would have gotten the base animals' statistics from the Bestiary and applied the relevant changes.

It's super cool that there's a whole book of familiars. They each offer unique advantages while they are close to the master and the Core Rulebook only has a few options.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Nov 2021 21:03

I don’t see anything for Archonus’s wolf. Otherwise sweet, we just keep what you have and we make the animal book unlockable.

I will still look into it though to see if I can drag and drop your animals to FG from that book, or from the Bestiaries I just bought for that matter, because the animals we now have were manually added by dan and me, and I worry we might have overlooked something. Our implementation is hacky.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby ChevRage » 30 Nov 2021 03:58

Oh, Archonus' wolf is an animal companion and is a normal wolf, as opposed to a magical creature like a familiar. Their rules can be found starting at page 51 of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, and page 53 and 54 list some stat blocks for common choices. It also points to the Bestiary for additional selections, and more details on the creatures' actual abilities.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Nov 2021 04:09

If it's in the book, you'd think we'd be able to just add it to the campaign without having to hack it in. But it does happen that the conversion is not perfect and some things are given as just text instead of proper Fantasy Ground components. In that case, maybe one of the Bestiaries I just bought will have a wolf we can drag and drop into the campaign. I'll check it out. For the specific case of Archonus's wolf it's not a super-high priority because he doesn't have him with him right now, but I will put it on my list to check it out next week.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby ChevRage » 30 Nov 2021 05:00

Reading the animal companion rules more closely tells me that yeah its abilities aren't quite the same as a wild wolf's, for example it has an entire table dedicated to the bonuses it gets from the player's class level. So I guess you won't be able to just drag an animal's stat block into Fantasy Grounds after all. For now at least. Apparently they're working on adding proper companion and familiar functionality.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 18 Dec 2021 21:21

New rule for Fantasy Grounds: You never select "Common" as the language in the chatlog, because it floods the chatlog with pointless language status messages and makes the chatlog ugly and very hard to parse both while playing and afterwards while reviewing. So it is assumed that every spoken line in the chatlog by both PCs and NPCs is Common. Only if you want to speak in some other language should you pick it in the chatlog from the language selection box. And if you forget to do so... then your character MEANT to speak in another language but got confused and spoke Common instead... So don't get confused.

I am currently cleaning up D&D3's last chatlog from these bothersome status messages. We're talking a full 1-2 hours' work lol, because I am doing it carefully so as not to delete anything useful by mistake. If you want to review the last session's chatlog, wait until I've signalled to you in Discord that it's cleaned up.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Dec 2021 05:59

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Check out the new FG sidebar. It's nowhere near as pretty as the old goblins, but the menus are now collapsible for increased ease of use, and the new icons they come with are certainly a step up from the drab text-only menus that replaced the goblins.

I asked in the FG forums why the goblins were ditched, and they said because it was cumbersome updating themes and adding functionality to them. They would have to track down the original artist who did the goblins, so he could make another one whenever they wanted to add a menu category, and then there wouldn't be enough space for them, etc. etc. It's all in the interest of increased functionality. A damn shame, but at least there's an upshot. We'll get used to it.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Dec 2021 12:15

I just DMed this to dan on Discord and I thought it was worth posting here too:

icycalm wrote:It's pretty amazing how by copying a folder over I have suddenly access to all the modifications you made in the story elements. I can see paragraph by paragraph how you prepared and modified textboxes, etc. At first I was like, "This paragraph is doubled, better report it to the FG errors thread", but then I realized that's precisely what I would have done to prepare the segment, and then I knew it was you who did it. You can fix typos from the original PDF, you can drop in links to rules to have them handy; I've even got into the habit of prerolling Perception checks and the like for all characters when the adventure stipulates it so I know ahead of time exactly what will happen. Well, if I can remember all the circumstantial bonuses and penalties that PF and the adventure pile up, at least. That has to be the hardest part of running this game. At any rate, I can't believe how well thought-out Fantasy Grounds is. It will become my no. 1 played game on Steam within months, no doubt about that. What an amazing work these guys have done over the years.


Fantasy Grounds is amazingly well-made if you know how to use it. Its capabilities blow away any other game engine, as hard as that may be to believe. Yes, it doesn't have fancy graphics, but you can run ANY KIND OF GAME SCENARIO YOU CAN THINK OF WITH FULL INTERACTIVITY. Show me ONE other engine (that's not a VTT) that can boast this. So while you run around a barren plastic environment, bumping into invisible walls all around you, as far as the eye can see, whenever you try to take a mere step out of the railroad trip you're on, we runnin' interactive movies over here.

It well deserves its place in the GOTY list, and I think I'll bump it up over Ninja Gaiden.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby shubn » 19 Dec 2021 13:12

I think I mentioned this briefly during our last game, but forgot to post it here: it's possible to scale the FG UI, such that you could run FG at a resolution higher than 1080p, while still having the text be readable on a 1080p stream.

This setting can be changed either in the FG settings ("FGU Application UI Scale"), or during a game by typing "/scaleui X" in the chat box, with X being the percentage you'd like to apply (e.g. 125 for 125%).

https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassian.n ... or+Smaller
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Dec 2021 13:31

Fantastic, we'll try it out in the next game. Not in today's game though, because this team still hasn't done its title sequence, and that's designed for 1080p. All other teams have done it, so they're free to experiment with this.

I suppose the images and especially the maps won't be very readable for viewers, but we'll see how it goes. We should start looking at 4K streaming at some point.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 21 Dec 2021 09:22

Here’s something you guys can do to make our sessions faster, better-looking and more efficient, while lessening my workload: make a collaborative Google document with Fantasy Grounds commands for players. We have recently learned of a bunch of cool new commands, but only one of our teams knows them and it’d be terribly helpful to have everything within easy reach, just an alt-tab away while playing. If someone takes this up, post the link here and people can request permission for access via Google and flesh it out.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby ExiledOne » 22 Dec 2021 01:23

I started the document for the commands here:

Fantasy Grounds Keyboard Commands
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sA_ ... sp=sharing

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff though.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Dec 2021 08:08

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FG is rising scarily fast. A few months from now it will become my first 1,000+ hour game, and then TaleSpire will follow. And then it will get to 2,000, 3,000 hours and beyond. I see 10k coming in a couple of years, no problem.

Every moment spent with it is a joy, except the times when I hate it for being janky.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby ysignal » 16 Jan 2022 01:08

The UI scale settings for the different resolutions are:

  • 150 for 1440p
  • 200 for 4K

See shubn's post above to see how to use these numbers. The Windows UI scaling settings don't affect scaling in Fantasy Grounds, so you can use whatever setting you want for that.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 17 Jan 2022 23:00

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/s ... post636193

icycalm wrote:Council of Thieves was the first AP to be published on the new PFRPG rules. Both the "Core Rulebook" and the first part of Council of Thieves were released in August 2009.

But what is the problem anyway with converting the two remaining 3.5E APs? The ruleset is OGL, right?

As for the half-finished conversions, Giantslayer is still missing the last two parts, Skull & Shackles is missing the last part, and Shattered Star is missing the last five parts.

Meanwhile Serpent's Skull, Jade Regent, Hell's Vengeance and Ironfang Invasion haven't had anything converted.

That is a complete list of the PF1 APs that Fantasy Grounds is lacking (in addition of course to Second Darkness and Legacy of Fire, which as you pointed out are 3.5E), and I would be eternally grateful to you if you can work on some of them. In my opinion, the half-finished ones should take precedence, as long as there's no other developer working at them currently.

And then of course I'd also like all the standalone adventures and Society scenarios converted :) But the APs should certainly take precedence.

Let me also say how grateful to you I and my 17 players are. I have four groups running four separate APs in one giant overworld right now (Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne, Ruins of Azlant and War for the Crown), and you probably developed at least half of them. My entire multigroup overworld project would have been basically impossible without your work because I don't have the time to convert four separate APs myself while also running the campaigns. Every week I thank Aroden that you and a handful of other developers, and of course Doug above all, had the foresight and patience to grind through all the work necessary to make Fantasy Grounds the best VTT ever. Cheers, guys.


He replied: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/s ... post636195

sciencephile wrote:Thanks for the list. Let me make some inquiries.


I knew he'd like my comprehensive list. It's the kind of thing that motivates nerds like us to go for 100%. I am glad I was able to give him a shot of motivation. Can't wait to buy all of these.

Unfortunately we're years away from having all of them converted, let alone all the standalones and Society scenarios, which might never be (though I can do those myself). But we do have stuff to be playing for years anyway, so there's no reason to complain.
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Re: PC|MAC Fantasy Grounds

Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2022 19:28

So today I figured out how to set grids to maps with pixel-perfect accuracy. Let me show you what that did to the massive Korvosa city map for the Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign. It's like PA now.

This map is 3349x4348. It's larger than 4K. You can basically zoom in forever. So here's what I've done with the grid:

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This is the zoom level at which characters move around and battles are fought. You can see how big an individual house appears on the left. It's true-to-life. We could add furniture tokens to every house if we wanted. And we might, if there's a battle in the house or if the PCs are decorating their rooms.

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Now we've zoomed out a bit. You can see the pier behind them that the fishery is on, and several buildings ahead of them. You can still sort of see the characters too, but it's not playable at this scale. The players have to zoom in to play.

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Zoom out a bit more and you can barely see the grid, but you can make out the neighborhood better, for navigation purposes.

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Zoom out more and you can see much of the district but the grid and the characters are invisible at this level (though they are still there if you zoom in).

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Zoom out more and you can see half the city.

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And finally you can see the whole city.

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Now if you zoom in on the map's scale at the bottom-right, you'll see that I've fit the grid perfectly so that one square is 5 feet: the standard for Pathfinder and the latest D&D editions. This is made possible by the power of Fantasy Grounds where you can set exactly how many pixels you want each square to be. I didn't know how to do this before, so I placed the grid in the town of Sandpoint for the Rise of the Runelords campaign roughly, by eye. Same with the Talmandor's Bounty colony map in Azlant. For Oppara in the War for the Crown campaign, dan didn't put a grid at all, and the characters were moving around in basically theater-of-the-mind mode, but now that I've figured everything out, Oppara is getting a pixel-perfect grid, and I'll also redo Sandpoint's and the colony's.

This is the video that helped me understand the finer points of the grid system:

Fantasy Grounds Unity Tutorial --- The Grid Tools And Adding A Grid To A Tactical Map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P0k0SdkcFs

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The video is great with ONE pretty major exception: he says he prefers to SHRINK his maps so that one square will represent exactly 100 pixels. BUT WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO SHRINK YOUR MAPS? You should NEVER shrink any image in Fantasy Grounds because all it would do is make it so players couldn't zoom in further. Why remove detail from the image?? I would utterly destroy Paizo's 4K+ map of Korvosa if I did that. Even for location maps where you would "just" destroy say the ground textures, why would you want to do that? That dude is a moron.

So in that massive Korvosa map, all exploration will be done in turn-based mode, and it'll take forever to cross the city and feel like you're actually walking the streets. If you also think you might be getting random encounters, it'll make you very careful in choosing your next destination, and also which precise route you take to get there (in this case especially because the city is in anarchy mode and lots of shit is going down everywhere, but some neighborhoods are safer than others).

I've never seen any GM who treats cities like this. Probably there are some, but they must be an extreme rarity. All of them run theater-of-the-mind, but FG and high-res maps allow us to run it like a videogame.

Note that the biggest cities in CRPGs are basically villages compared to the above.

And that's merely one of the things I learned today, but all campaigns will benefit from it. Well, the four on Fantasy Grounds at any rate; the fifth in the West Marches will be in TaleSpire, and that'll be all in full isometric 3D, so THIS enormous scale, but with CRPG graphics. And it'll destroy everything in terms of immersion. That's why it's taking me forever to set up. It's a hell of a lot of work.
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Re: Cult Engine 1 (internal codename: Fantasy Grounds)

Unread postby icycalm » 28 Sep 2023 16:40

Blood Dice Preview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M__HJCMAJRE

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Cult Games Florida wrote:This is a work in progress showing the blood dice with all Special Fx active - Splatter impact, Blood Swirl, and Blood trail. Different variations of these and colorable versions will form a new Dice Pack for Fantasy Grounds Unity. They will be available in Early Access for backers of the Werewolf: The Apocalypse Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sm ... sy-grounds


Although Cult Engine 1 is getting long in the tooth now, the team at Cult Games Florida continues to improve and expand it, and with the addition of the Werewolf: The Apocalypse ruleset (itself developed by Cult Games Stockholm) we're bringing to market this special blood-themed dice set, which will however be compatible with all our rulesets.

In Battlegrounds we'll probably use it for crits or something, we'll see. It would be nice if these effects could be combined with the weapon effects so that we wouldn't have to choose between weapon dice or blood dice. It's not clear yet how they function, I am waiting for that memo to hit my desk.
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Cult Engine 1.2

Unread postby icycalm » 25 Jan 2024 16:48

Cult Engine 1.2 Feature Update
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoXe-sc2Uws

This update brings 2.5D maps, videos, music, animated characters, etc. to Cult Engine 1! It's a 43-minute video so I don't expect anyone to watch all of it, but the 2.5D background stuff is all shown in the first 3.5 minutes, so if you watch that you're golden. And you can spend a few minutes skimming the rest if you want.

This update happened all the way back in June, but I neglected to report it because I was busy with much more exciting stuff at the time. Not saying this isn't exciting, but... Well. It's not so much exciting as CONVENIENT. It's not exciting because higher versions of Cult Engine have had these features for a long time now (and done much better than here, with far more features such as multilevel maps, et al.), so it's hard to get excited for CE1 getting them. But it IS very convenient because it means that we now don't have to bother moving our characters to a higher engine just to play ONE 2.5D map, and then move them back again. This is what I planned to be doing for side-missions to the main campaigns, but it's no longer necessary. Also much of Master of Combat can now happen in CE1, which is again extremely convenient because Master of Combat is all about... combat, and CE1 has the most detailed and automated version of the PF1 rules in the industry.

Cute Dragon warming up a rock in Cult Engine 1.2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRhAjgKbAgk

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