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storeyl
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Join Date: May 2014
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Old April 19th, 2019, 03:17 AM
Prior to the CM I wrote my own export -> converter so I could share the player visible aspects of the campaign with the players in a useful format (players edition of RW is of no use).

I bought a paizo product off the CM and am struggling, it seems to export my own snippets but not existing ones.

So I can copy the exiting snippets into a new snippet and it exports fine but the existing snippet won't even though both are revealed. It seems like there is something on the original snippet that tells the exporter to not export.

It doesn't read like it should be DRM, as there are tooltips about preserving author on snippets etc, and I'm sure I read you could reorder things as a 'master version' to export and import to your other realms. But it does feel like some DRM thing at the moment.

Is it some DRM, anyone else struggling to export a player version?
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kbs666
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Old April 19th, 2019, 04:02 AM
It's DRM. You cannot export the stuff sold in the store.

my Realm Works videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZU...4DwXXkvmBXQ9Yw
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storeyl
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Old April 19th, 2019, 04:45 AM
Wow, so I am forced to buy a PDF I don't want which I could then just mail to who ever I want, but don't worry - any attempt to actually provide a useable player view of the campaign will be prevented in the name of copyright. Except I can get round that by just copying and pasting the snippets into new ones. Some one really hasn't thought through this before trying to annoy the customer.

WTF!?
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storeyl
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Old April 19th, 2019, 05:16 AM
Does this mean I cannot rejig the realm either into a form I'd prefer?

The RW version just appears a fairly staright PDF conversion rather than what I'd have hoped it would have been. E.g. info on key NPCs is spread all over other articles which were in different sections of the PDF, rather than all collated in one article on that NPC, indeed the big bad NPC has almost no info despite plenty of it scattered around. The first thing I had started doing was looking at rejigging it as I'm going to be using it in multiple campaign games with different players, and wanted to rejig, export and then import into 2 different realms. It was when I had a quick test of what would look like I discovered the issue with the DRM.
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kbs666
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Old April 19th, 2019, 06:01 AM
You can move snippets and do pretty much anything else you want but the snippets, and possibly the underlying material I have no idea what is marked or how, is protected by the DRM.

I agree it isn't a perfect DRM scheme but there is no such thing. This one apparently made the publishers happy and without it there would have been no store at all.

my Realm Works videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZU...4DwXXkvmBXQ9Yw
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Ualaa
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Old April 19th, 2019, 12:58 PM
As long as you're not distributing, and it's for your own use... you should be able to put whatever snippets you want into the player view.

If that is somehow blocked, you could use a utility like Snaggit, to take a picture of your Realm Works, and then add that as an image, which you should be able to put into the Player View.
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storeyl
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Old April 19th, 2019, 01:24 PM
I'm after a couple of things, both of which I consider reasonable.

1. At least for the paizo content I dislike the way it is structured and wish to change it, and also likely merge it with other stuff. I can do that within the realm it is imported into sure, but I am running multiple games so do not want to engage in a lot of work multiple times. I expected to then export the changed version and then use that as what I import into each campaign I'm running. I thought I had read about others doing that, I either misunderstood exactly what they were doing or doing something wrong.

2. I wish to have a useful players view of the campaign for them to peruse anytime, gazetteer, NPC met, stuff done, rumors heard. All the stuff I'd expect from a campaign manager. The official player version of the product is a total non starter. Ideally I'd like a web view, or even a generated pdf to email them. Note I don't use RW during games.

Both of those are possible if I manually input. I can export it as a master and use it as I want. I can convert to HTML, and am contemplating using java to write a pdf (mail the a pdf every now and again). Indeed I'm wondering now whether to experiment with reading the source PDF that paizo insist you buy anyway and converting to RW, rather than what I've been doing for so long (copy/paste sections out or hand written etc). Though I know PDF parsing is not simple if I'm picky as to the output.

For the moment I've concluded that it is easier to buy the PDFs from paizo and just put them into RW myself and ignore the CM. I can put it in how I want and can export a player version. So after my initial interest in the CM the other week I am now not seeing the point of it (for paizo stuff anyway). It's possible I'll buy something else from the CM, but it won't be paizo or anything that is locked like that.

I've never been into piracy, and always buy legit versions of what I use. I hate it when DRM effectively makes something useless, and for this product what its stopping feels to me the whole point of the product.
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kbs666
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Old April 19th, 2019, 01:55 PM
Obviously one of the biggest failings of this DRM scheme is exactly your point #1. I pointed out when I reviewed the initial free releases that the way Isle of Kandril, which was based on their official guidance document, was likely to not work well when people tried to merge it into an existing realm.

Even if they had a technique that was better for most people it still wouldn't work for everyone and as such anyone wanting to reuse their purchased material was in for a lot of work.

my Realm Works videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZU...4DwXXkvmBXQ9Yw
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