Importing characters
 

Are there any plans to permit importing characters made by other people? This will be useful for NPCs and to give GMs the details about players, confirming they are made according to the settings permitted for the campaign.

That will probably be provided by the Campaign Theatre that might be launching soon-ish.

Campaigns will initially launch with the ability to import characters you've made on your own account, as well as characters from purchased content (that's the "Create from library" button on the character selection screen).

Campaigns won't initially launch with the ability to share characters across accounts. I don't know where that falls on our priorities right now, but I know we want to offer something like that eventually.

Sure would be nice if we could export characters in JSON or something similar. I thought this would have been already, along with the html, bbcode, etc.

I'm sure you know already why I'm asking. To create character importers for Fantasy Grounds and Roll20.


Dave

Joe, IMHO, sharing characters across accounts is critical. Not sure why it hasn't been there already (and should be as I wouldn't think it's a campaign feature). We're just asking for simple export/import. This along with fixing the PDF output so it prints all the information needed (I won't even get into the separate file issue) should be at the top of the list.....not a nice to have 2 years from now.
Flyteach

Agreed

I believe that Joe using the term "import" actually keeps the characters associated with their original accounts, but they are also displayed in the ref's campaign theatre.

This wouldn't require a corresponding export to get the character back to the players.

I understand that, but if I want to give a character I've built to another person (with a current paid up active account of course) then I should be able to do that. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to share a character file just like an HLC portfolio file can be shared, including putting the file on a web site for community use. That's powerful and that's what I'm asking for.

I was mostly responding to Farling's statement here, where he implied a relationship to the upcoming Campaigns functionality.

I should have said "The Campaigns launch won't include the ability to share characters across accounts, outside of players being able to import their PCs into the campaign."

Any future support for direct copying of characters between accounts, or exporting for use in 3rd party software will not likely be tied to Campaigns.

Joe, please don't add information to my request/critique. I'm not referring to 3rd party software. I just want to share between users of HLO.

That may be all you want personally, but as is clear from this thread, others want to export for use in 3rd party software. It is our (Lone Wolf's) job to address not only the features explicitly requested by users in forum threads for their own benefit, but also that of anyone reading who may not be directly responding.

Sure, but I can only read what's written. You specifically mentioned 3rd party, which is very different from sharing only between HLO users. I respect that LWD is making decisions on what they think their customers are wanting.

I think he was also taking into account Boomer's comment (above your first post) who does specifically mention 3rd party software using HLO data.

@Dami,
Headslap! Yes, I'd like FG integration too, but I was trying to take baby steps as exchange between the native application shouldn't be that difficult. Sorry I missed that one line.

The hinky part of exporting a character from one account to another is the possibility that the character uses resources/add-ons that the receiving account doesn't have.

You run into the same issue even now. Save out a portfolio of a character and email to someone else to import into their copy of HL and watch it puke errors all over the place when they don't have supplement X.

I'm sure that they'd like that to degrade gracefully. How that would be, I have no idea.

The way HLC handles it is ugly, but fundamentally sound. Any content you don't have access to in the file will not be loaded, but the rest of the character will load. This of course, can leave the character in an unfinished state, with validations to resolve, etc. The errors you mention aren't fatal, they are the intentional (but admittedly crudely presented) way that HLC resolves this discrepancy. You are perfectly able to use the character after the inaccessible content is automatically removed in this process

HLO will work the same way, albeit with a nicer presentation of the content that won't be loaded.

I would be completely happy if it simply listed the supplements that contain the missing content.

So I need Players Companion #15 for the missing feat. Got it!

As it is now, it's all guess-work.

HL Classic was used in my campaigns for as long as it's been around. It was so prevalent among my players, if HLC didn't have the item (and I bought into $$$ worth of Pathfinder supplements) the players couldn't have it. But the number one goal was for me to have a repository of everyone's sheets. With .POR files, this was possible.

Today as we play PF2E, I'm less likely to use HLO as it's a standalone tool; I can't import what the players have created. If I updated the player's sheets with XP, items, etc., I could send them their sheets. They were able to immediately import, view the changes, keep notes in the Hero Lab journals, and send it all back.

This isn't about 3rd party anything for me. It's about organization, ease of use, and portability.

In a world where most everything can be saved and imported, this was a backwards step for Lone Wolf Dev and a rather surprising one at that.

Steve

Essentially it's just JSON out, JSON in, besides validation checks (for funky data) it should be trivial, but that's making assumptions about how they handle their service calls.

Oh, if software was really this simple! ;-)

Heh, most software isn't; but JSON is usually the output of almost any well-built service built nowadays and ingestion really isn't that hard. ;-) Of course, that assumes they built it in any kind of recognizable manner. Ed: I'm biased and spoiled though, internally at AWS it's a shit-ton of self-service APIs :-)

With HLO we envision a completely different model, where there's less annoying bookkeeping like this (emailing files around, dealing with out-of-date files, conflicting versions, etc). You may have seen threads about the upcoming Campaigns feature, which will allow players to join their characters to a GM's game, much like an online multiplayer game.

We are hoping to launch the beta of this very soon, and while it won't cover all of the cases you mentioned above initially, our goal is to build it up such that it erases the need for any such manual drudgery.

None of that is to say that we won't introduce import/export at some point for other reasons, but we are not planning on relying on it to facilitate group play.

that'll be great if/when it gets released, but in the meantime we're SOL.

i guess the real question is "why was HLO released in such an incomplete state to begin with?"

that's more of a company management issue than a programming one though.

Without the group license I don't expect to use the Campaigns feature. I know that some of my players haven't and won't buy an account. How useful will the feature be if one character isn't in it?
Most of my players sent me their characters via PDF which I then added to my account so I could validate the characters and understand what their capabilities are. This isn't straightforward as the PDF doesn't include all the details needed.

I don't know what SOL means.

But the company released the "single-user" capabilities allowing individual character generation first.

Now they are adding the "multi-user" capabilities - via the campaign theatre.

There are more features to come in the future - presumably you wouldn't even want the campaign theatre available until everything that they want to put into the product has already been added? (Since in your eyes even with campaign theatre it would be in an "incomplete state".)

SOL = Sh*t Out of Luck.



I'll guess that Hero Lab Online was released incomplete, because it's an evolving product that may never be in a final and finished state... ie., it's constantly being improved.

Also, at the time of release it had enough features done to be a useful tool at that point.

And lastly, Lone Wolf would have revenue coming in to cover their costs, as the product was being improved upon.

One short and easy answer is that we're a small company with limited resources, and nearly everything we do is paid for by what we release. Sometimes that means making hard calls, like releasing things before they have all the features we want, or before they have all the polish we'd like. Such is the life of the scrappy, independent developer.

Personally, I'm grateful to everyone who supports us, despite the bumpy road it sometimes is. Your willingness to stick with us through thick and thin is what keeps me and my pups fed, but more importantly, keeps me working on HLO to make it better.

The reason HLO was envisioned and released was to have the resources available to be able to do up the Starfinder Ship statitics, which HLC would not have an easy time doing, or even may not be able to do at all. Starfinder was made HLO exclusive.

So now any new license will likely use the App instead of the Program.

Oh, I would certainly agree there are far better ways to share instead of ye olde timey ways.

I have and very much look forward to it, whenever it's released.

Which will, undoubtedly, be lovely. My complaint was the lack of the feature now that, while depricated later on by Campaign Theater perhaps, would allow for a continuity of workflow for those migrating from HLC.

Understood, however unfortunate.
I assume Campaign Theater is offered at a separate sub?

Bingo.
Pathfinder 2E. PDF shows stats, not how they were arrived. The complexity of Pathfinder 2E makes it difficult at best to reverse engineer higher level characters only so they could be imported on the GM's side.

Well understood.

It's an unfortunate truth -- no software today is considered complete upon initial release. And sales of that initial release is what allows for continued development.

Hell, beta testers were paid back in the day. Today, it's a privilege to be handed something incomplete. No snark at all, just how it is. :)

We're the early adopters and want to be heard, sure.

Problem here is I spend hours reverse engineering or asking for screen shots of my players' screens as I recreate high level characters created in the same tool. I'm left wondering if someone else has created a different product that does allow for import. And I'm one of the early adopters of Hero Lab Classic saying this.

In this case, we're talking standards of the industry which is beyond mere design or business model. You wouldn't want to retype an entire document for future editing because someone's doc resided in the cloud and couldn't be exported or shared with you.

Nonetheless, I'm aware I may be in the minority and we're not the ones for whom software is designed. That feature request aside and a damn bug that reminds me I can't use a particular character until the LWD team looks at it, I do like the software. I just pray Campaign Theater keeps me with LWD.

I wanted to pipe in here that i really like the initial release of the campaign theater and have already started a test campaign to see if it will work for my group (and if it does myself and my whole group will likely be buying individual licenses, unless the group license released before we start in june-ish) and the ability for me to include characters other create into the campaign is excellent, however... not being able to see the sheets of the added characters added is a problem. It makes what would be a really cool feature basically useless.

The ability to fully import characters into the CT is vital and needs to be top of the list. As a gm it does me no good to include characters from other log-ins if i cannot see their stats or apply conditions to them from the CT