Are New Titles Being Released on FGU?

[ddavison]

COC sells fairly well for individual modules, but it has declined somewhat in the last 2 years. It has mostly been a community developer led effort to support the system. Sometimes community devs wax and wane in interest and enthusiasm in converting new material. In order to maintain enthusiasm within a community, it requires players and GMs in that community to be active as well. Let the community devs know what you are currently playing, what new stuff you really want to see, and maybe consider becoming a community dev yourself if you enjoy that aspect of the hobby.

If you want to join the community dev program, you can earn a 15% commission on conversion work. You can reach out to [email protected] and provide your username, background in FG, and a list of what game systems and/or specific products you would be interested in. Initially, we ask people to convert something they already have a PDF for, but once you are a proven resource, we can even request PDFs and raw source files for you to use in conversions.

[Egheal]

Dough, could you share your opinion on the impossibility of translating FGU content on the fly? As a non-native English speaker, I can see the advantage for your competitors to translate English on the fly. But I can also see that this may not be legal. That said the competition doesn't seem to mind. In fact I think it's Google that does the translation, and it doesn't always work (the character sheets are translated, but not all the texts for example). So is it something that could be implemented in the futur for our beloved FGU?

[Zacchaeus]

Dough, could you share your opinion on the impossibility of translating FGU content on the fly? As a non-native English speaker, I can see the advantage for your competitors to translate English on the fly. But I can also see that this may not be legal. That said the competition doesn't seem to mind. In fact I think it's Google that does the translation, and it doesn't always work (the character sheets are translated, but not all the texts for example). So is it something that could be implemented in the futur for our beloved FGU?

Translating in FGU would need t be a manual process, since it's not web based and can't hook into web tools such as Google. It would mean that modules would need to be available in several languages taking up a lot more server space. I think you are also correct in that publishing modules in another language would require fresh licensing from the publishers. I'm assuming that Foundry have such permission but probably not since they have a fairly lax attitude to IP. Maybe also they don't need it if it's being done on the fly and not actually published in that language.

[ddavison]

There are indeed licensing restrictions that come into play. Some publishers license out the rights to their IP to only specific companies to do translation services for them. You might be able to skirt around this with some sort of on-demand translation. I'm not sure.


For mechanics and UI translation, that stuff can be translated because game rules themselves are not copyrightable. Check out the link below for the community project for translating the UI.
LanguagePak (LPak) Community Project/Program

Most of our rulesets have been moved out of the vault so you can access the strings folder and the .xml there with the translations.

[Egheal]

Thanks for your insights on this matter guys.

[sedgetone]

Do we think Chaosium would be open to the ruleset and the equivalent of the quick start content being made available for free? Much in the same way PRD and SRD content is provided. That would certainly make it more enticing for people to try.

I love the fact that the ruleset isn't in the vault any more, I lack time though to dig into it. I hope we do get some more content. I'd love to see vehicles fixed and the ability to put in dice roller style codes for random values. I get that the fact the it's Cores implementation of vehicles thats a fundamental issue thouhh. FGU implementation is still my favourite of this ruleset.

[RLacey]

This thread reminds me that I really should get back to working on the conversion I was on before life got in the way. I do have some time off coming up, so will try to get back to it.

Also, I will second that request for the bestiary/Malleus Monstorum. I thought someone was working on that at one point. Otherwise I'd be tempted to give it a crack, but that might well be one where access to the raw resources would be required, since presumably players would want it to play nicely with all the first person gubbins that exists nowadays, and individually cutting out the images would destroy my sanity...

[sedgetone]

I did make a start on Malleus Monstorum for myself. The issue I hit was there wasn't a way to enter the random NPC states as laid out in the books. Essentially your tied to a x5 modifier being applied, so unless there was a mod to all the equivalent of dice roller expressions you'll never make it work.
I think the books have some interesting material but I certainly don't think they're necessary. What I would much prefer to see is more of the adventure modules. My time is hugely limited currently, gaming has very much taken a back seat. So I have less time to prep games. I'd also love to see CoC content from other publishers on here, like Stygian Fox or Critical Hit.

[Nyarly Dude]

I'd be very surprised if Chaosium would sign off on a free version of the ruleset considering that they only thing they've put under ORC is the (updated) BRP Universal Game Engine. I don't believe that they've updated the licensing of related games like Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest, nor was there any pre-ORC open license for such as far as I can tell.