The Basics

Purpose

As stated on the Home page, there are numerous benefits of using fpclib to help you curate:

• By default, fpclib downloads main game/animation files and puts them in the right file format based upon your launch commands.

• Logos and screenshots can be automatically downloaded from online and converted to PNG files.

• Curating similar games/animations from one or more websites is simple and easy thanks to the fpclib.curate() function.

• Nearly every kind of Curation is possible to make with this library! This library and documentation were created with the intent of making it easy to overwrite the Curation class to make it do different things. Anything you can do in the “Curate” tab in Flashpoint Core you can do with fpclib, except test games.

Ultimately, fpclib is not meant to replace other curating tools such as Flashpoint Core; it is meant to be used alongside of them. Always make sure any curation you make with fpclib is tested in Flashpoint Core before you submit it.

Usage

You can install the library with

pip install fpclib

or you can put the “fpclib.py” script (check the releases page on github) in the same directory as your script.

If you choose the second option, you’ll also need to install these libraries through pip:

pip install requests
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install pillow
pip install ruamel.yaml

Once you have all of that set up, you can put import fpclib at the top of your script to use it’s methods.

Special Functions

To help you with common curating tasks, fpclib comes packaged with several useful module-level functions. Here’s a quick list of all of them; you can click on any of them for more details about what they do:

A Single Curation

Before curating entire lists of games/animations with fpclib, it’s important to understand how to use the library to curate a single game/animation by itself first. As shown on the Home page, here’s some very basic code you can use to curate a game:

# Import fpclib curation
from fpclib import Curation

# Create a curation from a given url
curation = Curation(url='https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/218014')
# Set the logo of the curation
curation.logo = 'https://picon.ngfiles.com/218000/flash_218014_medium.gif'

# You can set metadata through the object directly or through the set_meta method
curation.set_meta(title='Interactive Buddy', tags=['Simulation', 'Toy'])
curation.set_meta(dev='Shock Value', pub='Wrong Publisher')
curation.pub = 'Newgrounds'
curation.ver = '1.01'
curation.date = '2005-02-08'

# Add an additional app
curation.set_meta(cmd='http://uploads.ungrounded.net/218000/218014_DAbuddy_latest.swf')
curation.add_app('Kongregate v1.02', 'http://chat.kongregate.com/gamez/0003/0303/live/ib2.swf?kongregate_game_version=1363985380')

# Export this curation to the current working directory
curation.save()

Here’s what each step in this code does:

1. Import the library with import fpclib

2. Create a new Curation object. You don’t have to set it’s url immediately, but it should be set before you call Curation.save().

3. Set the url of the curation’s logo. You can also set the screenshot with Curation.ss. Note that this will automatically be converted to a png file when the curation is saved. You do not need to set the logo or screenshot for every curation.

4. Set the curation’s metadata using Curation.set_meta() or directly through the object. You can put as many or little arguments into the function as you want. To see what arguments (or attributes) map to which parts of the curation’s metadata, see Curation.ARGS. Note that descriptions and notes support multiple line strings (split lines with \n).

5. Add an additional app with Curation.add_app(). You can also create extras, a message, or delete additional applications with other functions too (see the functions after Curation.add_app()).

6. Finally, Save the curation to a folder with Curation.save(). This accepts an argument named use_title which if you set to True, will generate the curation folder with the curation’s title instead of its id (see Curation.id).

You can find a full listing of every function in the Curation class in the Classes page.

Editing Curations

It’s also possible to load and edit existing curations by using the fpclib.load() function. Here’s an example of that function in action:

import fpclib

c = fpclib.Curation(url='https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/218014', title='Interactive Buddy', cmd='http://uploads.ungrounded.net/218000/218014_DAbuddy_latest.swf')
c.save(True)

d = fpclib.load('Interactive Buddy')
d.logo = 'https://picon.ngfiles.com/218000/flash_218014_medium.gif'
d.add_app('Kongregate v1.02', 'http://chat.kongregate.com/gamez/0003/0303/live/ib2.swf?kongregate_game_version=1363985380')
d.save(True, overwrite=True)

Note that if you want to mix new curations together with older curations with the same folder name, you have to set overwrite to True.

Debugging

As of version 1.3, fpclib supports printing debugging information about what it’s doing. You’ll normally see this when running fpclib.test(), fpclib.curate(), or fpclib.curate_regex(). If you want to change what gets printed, modify the DEBUG_LEVEL variable like so:

fpclib.DEBUG_LEVEL = 2

This is by default set to 1, and only prints basic information from fpclib.test(), fpclib.curate(), and fpclib.curate_regex().

Further Reading

If you fully understand how to make one curation at a time, you should move on to the Advanced Stuff page to figure out how to curate in bulk.