Modified Export Tag

[Bidmaron]

We need an export tag that either:
1. Automatically flags topics changed since last export.
2. Let's you apply tag to items modified after a given date/time.

[rob]

Please explain this "need" and give me a concrete, detailed example of how you can only achieve your objective with this particular capability. I can think of lots of ways to do lots of things, and lots of different things that users will want to do with export. But I can't come up with a scenario that would fundamentally require the capability you're asking for here. So I need you to explain so that I can understand.

[Farling]

Perhaps what is required is some indication as to which topics have changed since they were last imported (possibly identifying the snippets which are different from the last export).

[Viking2054]

I can think of one scenario:

Lets say I've got a friend that is taking over GM'ing in a world I've created, but I inform him that I'm still working on some details and thinking of changing a few others. But He needs what I've created so far. I give him an export of my creation and then go about my business, including creating new content or changing/updating content already given to my friend.

Now, a month or two later, I decide I want to give my friend the updates I've made. But I don't want to send him stuff that hasn't changed or isn't new since I last did the export. I want to keep the export as small as possible and only send the updated data.

Don't know if it is worth the work, but that is one scenario I can think of for date/time based export tags.

[Bidmaron]

This is a poor man's way of sharing GM between license holders. Someone already posted in detail about how to do it by duviding up areas of responsibility to prevent contention. But there is no good way to export cjhanged topics between without doing all the ones you own.

But that is not my use case. Mine is using this great tool to maintain my world and exporting to Fantasy Grounds for running my game. I want to be able to maintain my world and export changed entries to Fantasy Grounds for import over the changed topics.

[rob]

Originally Posted by Bidmaron

But that is not my use case. Mine is using this great tool to maintain my world and exporting to Fantasy Grounds for running my game. I want to be able to maintain my world and export changed entries to Fantasy Grounds for import over the changed topics.

For this scenario, I'm not seeing the need to ONLY update what has actually changed. If extra material gets exported and updated, it seems perfectly reasonable and not a big deal to me. So I feel like I'm missing something here.

Note: I wholly understand the DESIRE to only update the least material possible. The critical question, though, is whether it's just a desire or an actual NEED. That's the question that I'm having difficulty connecting the dots on, and that question has some profound implications on how we would go about delivering a solution.

[Farling]

Bidmaron's use case appears to be the concern that an external tool (in his case FG) will not be able to detect unchanged material and would import everything a second time (ending up with a lot of duplicated material). If there was a "patch" export of only the latest changes then this could be applied to the external tool as a simple import of additional material.

[kbs666]

I think the biggest advantage to this ability comes when realms get big. A full export could get unwieldy so an incremental update would be easier to share by email or the like.

Consider my main realm which isn't all that big and has relatively few images exported as a 9 Meg file. However the solar system realm I'm working on which has lots of images was 26 Megs and I didn't have any of the Saturn moon or beyond images in yet, I wouldn't be surprised if the final version of that which I intend to share with the community winds up being well over 75 Megs. Being able to provide incremental updates on a realm that big would save people an awful lot of time and bandwidth.

[Bidmaron]

The issue is processing the material. There will have to be a converter on the other end, and the xml format you need for any other imaginable VTT (and certainly Fantasy Grounds) is going to require conversion on the export. Keeping the number of export items low will reduce the time necessary to process it.

Further, I would argue it is extremely useful within RW itself. As games go on and players have a lot of revealed content, they will find it useful periodically to go look at things that have, for example, changed in the last month (for revealed material, of course).

[Farling]

Originally Posted by kbs666

Consider my main realm which isn't all that big and has relatively few images exported as a 9 Meg file. However the solar system realm I'm working on which has lots of images was 26 Megs and I didn't have any of the Saturn moon or beyond images in yet, I wouldn't be surprised if the final version of that which I intend to share with the community winds up being well over 75 Megs. Being able to provide incremental updates on a realm that big would save people an awful lot of time and bandwidth.

My current campaign (a single pathfinder adventure path) has an export file that is 353MB in size. I wouldn't want to be trying to share that size of file.