Brainstorming ideas to improve Player View
 

Yesterday I ran my game at the local game store instead of at my apartment, I finally got the place painted and the fumes were epic.

The store let me use one of their big screens for my second screen and it really showed just how badly Player View is aging. People walking by would stop and look for a few seconds and ask what that was but they would be very unimpressed.

Here's the problem, I use it weekly and really have never liked it but am at a loss of what would improve it. To make RW a better tool for use at the table, which now that its 64 bit it really could be, Player View needs to be better.

So any ideas?

That all depends what you were showing on the player view :-)

A partially revealed exploration map?
Some portraits of NPCs that they are currently interacting with?
Lots of text of revealed snippets with some topics?

All of the above but mostly 1 and 3.

Interesting! I don't think I've ever shown text in player view. For me it's usually maps, portaits and mood pictures (landscapes, city views, etc.).

I use it quite frequently to display revealed info on a topic. That saves me having to read that stuff back to the players over and over again.

What do find is missing. I use a 55" plasma as my second screen and I've never felt anything was lacking. I'll be replacing this with a smaller display horizontally for battlemap once my custom case is done.

I guess if my goal were to stop passers by speechless in their tracks, I would agree. But as a game aid for sharing information during a live in-person game it is still the best tool I've seen or used.

That doesn't mean that their isn't room for improvement. I appreciate the incremental improvements they have made -- like the recently released polygon reveal -- and I'm looking forward to more changes. But I guess I'm having a difficult time understanding where your post is coming from.

You are obviously disappointed with the player view, but it is unclear to me what improvements you are hoping to see made.

I've been thinking about in my spare time all weekend.

One thing and I guess this is partially due to not having images in every topic, which is my problem, is that those topics when shown look very plain.

The ability to render text in player view in a more stylistic way, would indeed be cool. For example, add a "handout" snippet style and then have a submenu of some font and background styles (medieval fantasy, sci fi, etc.). So when you share with players it displays as calligraphy on a parchment, for example. The ability to design your own handout styles would be nice as well.

I expect, however, that something like this would be pretty low on the dev priority and we'll need to continue relying on image snippets (i.e. creating our handouts in another program, saving as an image, and adding to a topic as an image snippet).

Doing it manually isn't really an option for the details of every NPC and location in my world. It's huge. As I get time I have been adding character portraits from Daz3d, I work with a 3d artist who has taught me to do some really cool stuff with Blender and Daz. I just wish I could follow half of what he says.

So adding some sort of style to the displayed text, only in player view, would definitely help.

+1 for having different handout styles for snippets, that would be real nice. But that also would require the ability to display single text snippets in player view. I don't think that's possible right now, only for images afaik.

Also I can let this thread pass without once again mentioning that not being able to hide the title of pictures in player view is really bad for the immersion. When you forget to drag the picture upwards so the title is hidden before you reveal it, things like this happen:
GM: "On a crystal pedestal you find a mysterious female statuette made entirely from needles"
Player: "Cool, that's the last relic of Lasay, goddess of pain."
GM: "What? How do you... oh."