A couple of character sheet output questions

[atimrogers]

Hi,

I have a couple of basic SW character sheet output questions/issues -- they may well be discussed in the help files somewhere, but I couldn't find them on a quick search.

1) Weapons stacking -- I can stack weapons in the program, thus having "(6x) throwing knives," for instance, instead of six separate listings for one throwing knife each. However, my character sheet seems to drop the stacking multiplier for weapons, even though it includes the multiplier for gear -- thus, (6x) throwing knives becomes "throwing knife" on the sheet while (3x) water prints out as 3x water. Am I correct in this, or have I messed something up?

2) I haven't pushed the character sheet output to its limits yet, but I see some indications that the sheet, not including journal, is limited to a single sheet front and back. Is this correct? I ask because I notice that personal details seem to be limited to a single column on the back of the sheet -- anything that exceeds this gets cut off. I also noticed from output examples in the help file that Pathfinder output gives you many more options, such as spells and spellbooks. I thought you might need these in pathfinder so that the base character can appear on one sheet and the supplementary material appears on additional pages and that this is a feature not implemented into the Savage Worlds module (other than the journal).

Thanks,
Tim

[zarlor]

Originally Posted by atimrogers

Hi,

I have a couple of basic SW character sheet output questions/issues -- they may well be discussed in the help files somewhere, but I couldn't find them on a quick search.

1) Weapons stacking -- I can stack weapons in the program, thus having "(6x) throwing knives," for instance, instead of six separate listings for one throwing knife each. However, my character sheet seems to drop the stacking multiplier for weapons, even though it includes the multiplier for gear -- thus, (6x) throwing knives becomes "throwing knife" on the sheet while (3x) water prints out as 3x water. Am I correct in this, or have I messed something up?

I get that too. Probably a bug I just haven't mentioned here yet.

2) I haven't pushed the character sheet output to its limits yet, but I see some indications that the sheet, not including journal, is limited to a single sheet front and back. Is this correct? I ask because I notice that personal details seem to be limited to a single column on the back of the sheet -- anything that exceeds this gets cut off. I also noticed from output examples in the help file that Pathfinder output gives you many more options, such as spells and spellbooks. I thought you might need these in pathfinder so that the base character can appear on one sheet and the supplementary material appears on additional pages and that this is a feature not implemented into the Savage Worlds module (other than the journal).

Thanks,
Tim

Agreed, it's not implemented and is one of the reasons I've asked, in the requested features thread, if the character sheet data files might possibly be
implemented in a way that would let us modify it. Right now that main sheet is compiled into the program, essentially, and the only way to modify it would be to copy it out as another game system so the source file could be changed. If is could be compiled on the fly, like .user files are, then we could modify it ourselves.

They have given us the "Custom Output" method, though, for modifying sheets (just like Pathfinder has) but you need to be skilled in XSLT to really do anything with it. A couple of guys on the Pathfinder side seem to have those skills and have made some pretty good custom output sheets there, but for Savage Worlds I'm the only one I know that has even tried it and the best I could do isn't pretty, plus a few things were missing from it (the missing stuff I mentioned in a thread here a LONG time ago, but maybe we'll see it in the update coming in a few weeks.) But all I did just puts anything I could find into a kind of grid with full descriptions and such. Definitely a bit... unwieldy. Not pretty at all.

[atimrogers]

Thanks for the reply, zarlor. I had seen your requests and your custom output sheet -- I was just trying to make sure I understood the limitations of the sheet as my GM and I each try different ways of implementing his homebrew system (which includes spellbooks, and thus many more arcane powers/rank the the base SW format).

The base character sheet is limited to a single page, front and back right now, isn't it? I haven't found that in a direct statement yet.

Alas, my coding is essentially nil, I stopped at fortran in the late 80s and a little bit of html in the early 90s.

Thanks for all the time and thought you put into this forum, zarlor. Every time I search for something I'm trying to figure out, you've been there before me with at least some comment or insight on the topic.

[zarlor]

Yeah, there are only 2 "pages" (whether you view that as 1 sheet with front and back pages or 2 pages with blank backs.) So, yeah, definitely limited there. If you look in the data directory where you would normally put your .user files you'll see a source directory under there and there are 2 dat files for the character sheet, 1 for each page. I have some ideas on how to modify that so maybe if we can get it unlocked we can use that to expand on things some.

My XSLT abilities are garbage, though, so unless we can convince some of those Pathfinder guys to give us a hand I don't think we'll really be able to do much with the custom sheets. The tools for doing XSLT are not all that easy to work with and ridiculously expensive and even looking at what the Pathfinder guys have done it sounds like they just went out and learned XSLT to code it all line by line anyway.

As for time on the forum... I'm just glad to be of some help, even when I can't really be of much help.

[Mathias]

You can already put a character sheet in a .user file.

You just have to write an entirely new one - there's no way to allow modification of the existing character sheet without risking conflicts between the changes that each author makes to the character sheet. The way character sheets are coded in Hero Lab, all the positioning is handled by scripts. That means you can't just drop in something new without changing the scripts.

Please report any character sheet bugs you find the same way you'd report any other bug - in the changes/enhancements thread.

[zarlor]

Originally Posted by Mathias

You can already put a character sheet in a .user file.

You just have to write an entirely new one - there's no way to allow modification of the existing character sheet without risking conflicts between the changes that each author makes to the character sheet. The way character sheets are coded in Hero Lab, all the positioning is handled by scripts. That means you can't just drop in something new without changing the scripts.

I don't get how that would work. If I copy out the sheet_standard1.dat and sheet_standard2.dat files up to the data/savage directory level, then rename them to, say, sheet_mine1.dat and sheet_mine2.dat, then replace all of the oHero and o* stuff that gives me duplication errors, as well as the standard1 and standard2 references with mine1 and mine2 I still don't see anything show up in the print options for some different kind of character sheets, just the standard one. What am I missing?

[Mathias]

dossiers.dat is the file that stores the overall organization of the character sheets.

[zarlor]

Ah, so I missed one. Thanks!

[zarlor]

Ok, I've packaged up the appropriate .user files and made sure everything is set-up so the names don't conflict with what's in the base install for anyone who wants to play around with these (I know I will be!) the dossiers.user file is where you can name what your sheets will be and if you needed to add pages that's the place to do it. Then you'd need to follow the format of the sheet_mine1.user and sheet_mine2.user file (making a sheet_mine3.user file, for example.)

There are plenty of comments in the files from LWD so hopefully those will act as a good guide for how to play around with these. They should install in your data/savage directory and are available from https://www.dropbox.com/s/bt5sh2halfy4sik/Sheets.hl. So hopefully we can get some folks here checking into these and making up some cools sheets for whatever folks might need them for. And if you do, please share!

And thanks again to Mathias for pointing this out. I never realized we could do things this way!

[zarlor]

I've updated the sheets above (same link) to now spill over to up to 4 sheets instead of just 2 and it's really easy to add more than that if you need it (just copy the mine4 page and basically replace all instances of mine4 in the file with mine5 and add a line for mine5 in those spots in the dossiers file, or mine6 or mine7, etc., as you need; they're just built to keep handling any spillover from previous pages using the same formatting.). I've also started to try working on using the descriptions of things instead of just the summary text. Although if nothing else I've set things so that these things are supposed to be variable in size allowing for more than just a 1 line summary, although it's not completely working yet as some things only print for 1 line while others will print the entire description no matter how many lines it takes. I should figure it out eventually.

At any rate, I think the important things to look for in the sheet files are if you look for "field[descript].text" (without the quotes) you can replace it with "field[summary].text" (or vice versa) to get back to using just the summary text from a file instead of the full description. Where you find the field is the key to what it is, so the section it's in should help you decide of you prefer to use the summary or the full description for that thing.

I still have a lot more to figure out with these, but hopefully that will give folks something to start from and work with, at any rate.