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alientude
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2011
Posts: 101

Old September 6th, 2020, 10:22 AM
I'll try to explain how it will work, based on a generic understanding of APIs and programming in general.

HLO is going to have an API (Application Programming Interface) created and made available that allows data about characters to be exported from HLO. Think of the API as a set of tools. In order to get the data from HLO, whoever wants to get it, whether it be a user, a VTT, or something else, will use those tools to get the data.

Because it would be impractical to expect HLO to support exporting the data into the specific format required for every VTT out there (not to mention future VTTs that might not exist yet), HLO will export the data into a format designed by Lone Wolf. The VTT importing the data will not know how to read that format when the HLO API is released - it's something that will need to be added to the VTT.

So, when HLO's API is released, VTTs will not immediately support importing data from HLO - they'll need time to learn how the API works, and they'll need to come up with a way to translate the HLO format to the format their VTT can read and understand. Each VTT that wants to support importing from HLO will need to do this process.

Hopefully that helps clear things up. Keep in mind that I'm not affiliated with Lone Wolf (and heck, I don't even use HLO), so there's a chance I'm off-base with this description. I'm pretty confident I'm correct, however, since this is pretty standard API interaction.
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