malarrya Posted December 22, 2018 Share Posted December 22, 2018 (edited) Hey everyone, I hope you're having a wonderful day. I've been working on a new LB Dungeons & Dragons system, mostly for personal enjoyment, for quite some time now. I originally made it for my Hyperspin installation but finally decided to try it out for Launchbox. Once I saw how feature-rich LaunchBox is, I decided to rework this D&D system for LB. I extracted the front and back images from all modules and manuals, reworked almost every filename so they are longer and more descriptive, and added NOTES/Descriptions for all 960 files. This took a LONG time but was totally worth it (it gave me something to do). I think I started on it in September and worked on it as I had time but the 1st draft is finally here for you all to enjoy. If you're a D&D fan or simply enjoy the artwork, I think you may enjoy this system. The games within the system consist of Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, gaming modules, cards, and boardgames from Original D&D all the way through the end of AD&D 2nd Edition (~1972-2000). This is not a video game system but a PDF e-reader system. Of course, there will definitely be updates to the filenames, images, and notes as I find misspellings, omissions, grammatical errors, and other mistakes. I did not type all the notes myself but found a lot of information and back-cover descriptions for each file on sites such as rpggeek.com, tsrbothgunsblazing.com, tomeoftreasures.com, waynesbooks.com, dmsguild.com, worthpoint.com, and several others. Much of the data on these sites had a lot of misspellings, omissions, and grammatical errors so I did my best in refining the data. The images are quite large so each folder (front, back, background, etc.) of 960 images is around 2.5 GB. I am not sure if the community wants images in this size or if I should run them through some sort of image compression process so they are much smaller. I like having the originals but PLEASE LET ME KNOW how you would like them before I upload them Also, the painstaking effort of naming and describing every file was extremely time consuming. It would be awesome if there was some way to add not only the images but all the filenames (not the PDFs themselves of course) and notes to a online repository so others can simply download these images and notes files through the LB program. Of course, I will upload everything first so people can simply BOLT-ON the system and start enjoying it immediately but I wanted to get the admins' and users' responses for what I have so far. The whole system on my drive is over 8GB so I am sure it will need to be slimmed down quite a bit, You may be wondering how it works with a PDF reader. Well, I use Soda PDF with Rocket Launcher and it works amazing. I will detail how to set all that up once I post the files in the downloads section. I've included several playlists that make up the various game settings such as Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Ravenloft, and DragonLance. As you can see in the examples, I use the front page of the manual as the background for the selected item. Using the FLIP feature, you may also view the artwork/descriptions from the backs of every item. I also included several background images and logos for the various playlists. It definitely needs more work to reach its full potential but I am happy with how it's turned out so far. PLEASE Let me know your thoughts! I will be posting the bolt-on of this system soon. I just need to slim down the size (unless people want the originals). Here are examples of the system so far: Best regards, Larry Edited December 22, 2018 by malarrya Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted December 24, 2018 Share Posted December 24, 2018 Hi Larry, this is very cool. I am slightly concerned with copyrights though if you plan to upload it here to the forums; we generally don't distribute manuals to avoid any kind of legal issues from that front. As far as the images, I think if you were to make the distribution method a torrent, then I'd just leave the full-size images in there. In the emulation world, 8 gigs really isn't all that big. But that's just my two cents. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malarrya Posted December 24, 2018 Author Share Posted December 24, 2018 12 minutes ago, Jason Carr said: Hi Larry, this is very cool. I am slightly concerned with copyrights though if you plan to upload it here to the forums; we generally don't distribute manuals to avoid any kind of legal issues from that front. As far as the images, I think if you were to make the distribution method a torrent, then I'd just leave the full-size images in there. In the emulation world, 8 gigs really isn't all that big. But that's just my two cents. Thanks, Jason, for the input. I was only going to release the images of the manual covers and backs, not the actual PDFs themselves. I would never share those. If it's OK, I may just link the images to my MEGA site. I did release all these "front of the box" images over on the Hyperspin forums a long time ago and there's never been any issues. I know a lot of people have similar images and descriptions on their websites (such as tsr.bothgunsblazing.com) but I am not sure if they ever dealt with any permissions from Wizards of the Coast. I think I have even seen image logos for Forgotten Realms and other D&D items on these forums. I guess I will upload the original larger images to MEGA and, if anyone wants smaller versions, I can easily shrink them. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RetroHumanoid Posted December 25, 2018 Share Posted December 25, 2018 12 hours ago, malarrya said: Thanks, Jason, for the input. I was only going to release the images of the manual covers and backs, not the actual PDFs themselves. I would never share those. If it's OK, I may just link the images to my MEGA site. I did release all these "front of the box" images over on the Hyperspin forums a long time ago and there's never been any issues. I know a lot of people have similar images and descriptions on their websites (such as tsr.bothgunsblazing.com) but I am not sure if they ever dealt with any permissions from Wizards of the Coast. I think I have even seen image logos for Forgotten Realms and other D&D items on these forums. I guess I will upload the original larger images to MEGA and, if anyone wants smaller versions, I can easily shrink them. This is awesome...as I currently have a large pdf collection already,I would love to get ahold of your premade setup (minus the actual books)...It would look great in my setup,and make D&D night more convenient. I will have to make a platform category video for "Books & Magazines" now if I set this up 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malarrya Posted December 25, 2018 Author Share Posted December 25, 2018 (edited) 7 hours ago, RetroHumanoid said: This is awesome...as I currently have a large pdf collection already,I would love to get ahold of your premade setup (minus the actual books)...It would look great in my setup,and make D&D night more convenient. I will have to make a platform category video for "Books & Magazines" now if I set this up Well, you're in luck! I just finished uploading the images, database, and video to my MEGA site. You can be the first one to test it out (although you may have to change your filenames to match the XML). I hope you enjoy! https://mega.nz/#F!tZtliI6Q!IrbOa3ig6xz40HV-tN31Ow Have a wonderful holiday and let me know if you come across any errors or problems with the download. I tried to make it somewhat of a bolt-on so all you need to do is drop the folders into the LaunchBox folder. I, hopefully, uploaded all the necessary files. Larry Edited December 25, 2018 by malarrya Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RetroHumanoid Posted December 31, 2018 Share Posted December 31, 2018 On 12/25/2018 at 8:26 AM, malarrya said: Well, you're in luck! I just finished uploading the images, database, and video to my MEGA site. You can be the first one to test it out (although you may have to change your filenames to match the XML). I hope you enjoy! https://mega.nz/#F!tZtliI6Q!IrbOa3ig6xz40HV-tN31Ow Have a wonderful holiday and let me know if you come across any errors or problems with the download. I tried to make it somewhat of a bolt-on so all you need to do is drop the folders into the LaunchBox folder. I, hopefully, uploaded all the necessary files. Larry Sorry for the delay...holidays and stuff,still recovering... I really appreciate the share,and can definitely tell you put alot of work into this thing. Your collection is definitely leagues above what I have as far as pdf files. I haven't had the chance to place it into big box yet,but,I can already tell that now I have to do this with my comics and magazines,lol. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malarrya Posted January 14, 2019 Author Share Posted January 14, 2019 (edited) Had to rename some of the image files on the MEGA site as they were a bit messed up. I'll soon be uploading the images to the DOWNLOADS section in hopes they will get a bit more attention there. What would really be great is if someone has Photoshop and CoverActionPro 3 or something similar so I could make 3D books out of all the images. Something like these:I really believe there is an audience for this platform but it just may not be reaching them. In the near future, I'll also be putting together a collection/playlist of as many D&D Video Game products as I can find. Such items would include things from MS-DOS, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, XBOX, Windows, etc. I'm really interested to hear peoples' feedback on this platform! Larry Edited January 14, 2019 by malarrya 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JRavens Posted February 7, 2019 Share Posted February 7, 2019 This is really epic. Definitely a labor of love and much appreciated! Keep it up! (Would love to check out any D&D playlists you come up with as well ) Award yourself 1,500 xp. If this takes you up a level go ahead roll your additional HP and choose any new skills or spells as applicable. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malarrya Posted February 7, 2019 Author Share Posted February 7, 2019 (edited) 11 hours ago, JRavens said: This is really epic. Definitely a labor of love and much appreciated! Keep it up! (Would love to check out any D&D playlists you come up with as well ) Award yourself 1,500 xp. If this takes you up a level go ahead roll your additional HP and choose any new skills or spells as applicable. This is very kind of you to say, thank you so much! Yes, this was quite labor intensive but I did have a good time putting it all together. Finding and using the GhostScript PDF image extraction program proved to be extremely useful and somewhat fun getting it to work as well as it did. Please let know if you need any further information on how to set up the system so it appears like the images above. There are around 18 playlists that I have already created for the system which are included in the downloads from my MEGA site. Image 4 & 7 in the original post shows some of the playlists with background artwork specific to that setting/campaign. Playlists include following (LaunchBox and BigBox respectively): Again, thanks, I hope you enjoy and get some use out of it. I really mostly love the artwork and reading about all the classic monsters. Edited February 7, 2019 by malarrya Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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