some authoring questions..

[martin_cy]

I've just wrote a definition file for Warhammer: Invasion (Living Card game from fantasy flight)

a few questions:

1. is there anyway I can put local images to the cards? or is it only possible to use a proper URL, meaning I would have to upload them somewhere first?

2. has any tools been written form handling bulk card creation? I got all the cards in csv files, I guess I could write something in python but if there is some tools already somewhere out there that would be easier..

Lone wolf on good terms with Fantasy flight games? good enough to ask them to start publishing all the card images in low res (similar to Wizards of the Coast for M:tG)?

[rob]

Originally Posted by martin_cy

1. is there anyway I can put local images to the cards? or is it only possible to use a proper URL, meaning I would have to upload them somewhere first?

You can use just about any valid URL. It *is* possible to reference a file on the local computer using a URL. For example, the URL "file:///c:/foo.tmp" references the local file "c:\foo.tmp".

The only problem with using a local file is that other users of your data files will be forced to install all the images into the exact same directory on their computer to access the images. That's generally a pretty poor tactic, since you can be sure that different users will want to put the files in different places on their local computer, based on their personal preferences.

Originally Posted by martin_cy

2. has any tools been written form handling bulk card creation? I got all the cards in csv files, I guess I could write something in python but if there is some tools already somewhere out there that would be easier..

There have been a number of tools written for automatically converting card data from a starting format to the format needed by Card Vault. Unfortunately, the source data for every game system seems to start out in a substantially different format from other games, so there is little opportunity to re-use those tools. Also, the contents of the various fields in the source data need to be appropriately mapped to all the various tags you'll want assigned to each card. That entails unique work for each game system that can't be re-used. The net result is that we've had little opportunity to re-use any of the conversion tools we've written, and I'm guessing that you'll be in the exact same boat with Warhammer: Invasion. :-(

Originally Posted by martin_cy

Lone wolf on good terms with Fantasy flight games? good enough to ask them to start publishing all the card images in low res (similar to Wizards of the Coast for M:tG)?

We're on friendly terms with FFG, but we certainly don't have any influence on how they handle operations internally. If we asked them to make such a change, they'd look at us like we were smoking something and ignore us. If you want to get them to offer low-res card images, a request from multiple users with a solid justification for the request will have the best chance of success. :-)