Coding has a fairly steep learning curve. One of the benefits of open source projects is someone can download the source for the entire project and look through the code and see how things are done. Of course the quality of code is all over the place. Some people write plenty of comments and document their code, some use variables named x all over the place with no rhyme or reason.

Further discussion of any thoughts on an open source project might be better on Discord. I do not want to annoy our gracious hosts.

hmm... is using PCGen as a starting point an alternative? It's open source and already does the character building kinda like HL.

Which discord would that be?
As with others, time is the most limiting factor for me, but I'd try and contribute where possible.

I actually found Combat Manager to be an excellent tool for managing combat, you can import a HL portfolio directly into the "enemy" list of the tool.

I've been using Improved Initiative. It does almost everything I want. The only thing that's missing is the ability to trigger from Realm Works which I can get used to.

And it took me 20 minutes to upload an entire monster manual into the tool. That included the time I took to create the dataset. Granted I already had the table to work from but the benefit there is I use the same table of data for both Realm Works and Improved Initiative.

As for annoying our hosts... do they even read this? Havn't seen Rob in the forums since he announced the hack and slashes.

Can you not store each encounter's worth of monsters in RW, so that clicking on the "external tool" icon (whatever it's called) will launch II and load your file?

It doesn't work on files. It's got database in the back end that it pulls everything from.