I ran a search on the Realm Works forum for "Mac" and "Apple," but didn't find any mention (or question) as to whether RW will be available on the Mac.

So... will it? :)

Thanks!

Not initially. But the plan is to make Realm Works available on the Mac as well at some point *after* we get the Windows version out. Exactly how long that will take is a complete unknown at this point. We first need to get the Windows version developed. :-)

I wanna emphasis my desire for two things very strongly. Pathfinder support, and d20Pro integration. Pathfinder is my system of choice, and d20Pro is how I do all my gaming these days, either face to face or online.

No to worry about the PF support. Realm Works wil be system independant. So it can be used with any system at all, even ones not supported by HL.

May I necromance the thread to ask just how things are going with Realm Works' development? Obvioulsy I missed the beta intake, but now that I'm aware of the project I'm eager for news.

I never thought I would be all that interested in a tool like this, but now - the longer I spend plotting campaigns in word processors, or try to use novel/storyline development software to apply to game planning - the more excited I get to see it completed. It probably doesn't help that I'm converting a level 1-30 adventure path with 12 modules, and I'm being super-picky about changing every incidental name and description to match my homebrew setting... my "GM Reference" document is quickly becoming bigger than any of the individual adventures. In any case, what I'm saying is that at this stage if a pre-order came up I'd probably jump on it.

Since I'm here, I may as well ask about features I'm hoping to see...

• Random name grab-bag with user-defined lists. I have big lists of names that suit particular races and areas in my campaign, since the standard D&D set don't always work with my world. When I'm put on the spot for a bit-part NPC I didn't think about too hard, I'd love a button that lets me grab a random name from the appropriate list without any hassle.
• The ability to have multiple versions of NPCs tied to each other - so you could, for example, have a level 2 version of Whatshisface and a level 6 version for later on, both tagged as being Whatshisface.
• Some manner of user-defined fields for NPCs. I don't actually give most of mine stats, since I don't want to ever risk them upstaging the PCs, but I do like to create them as "cohort" entities that can give the party certain benefits. I'm sure I could just write things like that in their description, but it would be much more excellent to see versatility similar to HeroLab, where I could create fields like "services" and "active benefit" as part of a template for my NPCs.
• Association between quests/plots and other entities. For example, working the the cohort rules I mentioned above, the party can improve their cohorts by taking on quests dealing with their personal plots. I'm hoping RealmWorks would let me categorise or tag quests/plots as being major, minor, personal, tied to a particular character or area, linked to/triggered by another quest/plot, and so forth.
• Sorting options for, like, everything. One of the most annoying things about working with plain old document formats is that most stuff has to be changed manually (embedded spreadsheets/databases have helped with some of that, but they make the document big and clunky and don't enjoy running on my netbook). Being able to sort entities by, say their location, relation to the party, time-sensitivity, plot importance, or any number of other factors (especially, in my case, old or new name) would be a huge boon.

So, am I fortunate enought that any of those things are implemented/planned/being considered?

This isn't planned for the initial release, but it's something that many GMs would find useful. That being said, it will be easy to setup your own lists to pull from within Realm Works. The only thing we won't have in the initial release is random retrieval from your list.

Absolutely in there.

Definitely in there.

This is the crux of Realm Works. You should be able to do just about anything you can think of in this regard.

As above, this is a fundamental aspect of Realm Works. It won't just be sorting, but full searching/filtering, visualizing, and navigating via the links between the assorted content.

Hope this helps! :)

The more I hear the better things sound :D

I second this idea. I've discovered recently that trying to keep the hidden features of an item hidden SUCKS.

If I give the party a gem and they don't appraise it or mark down where it came from... three months from now they are going to say "oh, and we sell the red gem." Ummm... which red gem, how much do the PCs think it's worth and how much IS it worth?

So, something that would allow me to track valuables, magic items and what the players know about it would be excellent. Sure, it doesn't seem worth it time wise for a 25 gp "red gem"... but what happens when they get it confused with the 5000gp "red gem". Neither of which had been appraised at that point.

This level of detail is all doable, you just have to be patient enough to put it into the tool. I'm sure rob and the team will be able to say more, but I would be happy with what it can do in this case.

Yeah, I'm hoping it's simple. Where I can just drag and drop an item "object" onto the "Rogue" object. Simple is good.

Another thought of something I'd like. The ability to somewhat easily export a map into the common formats for VTT games. Since most of my prep will be in RealmWorks, I'd like to be able to take a map I've put in realmworks and somewhat easily get it into MapTools or some other program.

The way I see it is similar to my current campaign in kingmaker. There are quite a few maps in the book that you may or may not need. They can be played without having a map since they are so short.

So rather than waste time converting ALL of my maps to maps for the VTT game... if I can go... Oh, crap... we DO need this map and then quickly pull it up. That would be excellent.

It certainly does :D I'll keep on hoping for the randomiser, but in the mean time it sure sounds like the core program is everything I've hoped for. I will be eagerly awaiting a public release!

Realm Works will not include its own map creation tool initially. There are a number of reasonable tools available for creating maps today, so we're not attempting to re-invent that wheel in the initial release. You will instead import your maps into Realm Works and then utilize them appropriately, putting pins on them for assorted locations and what-not. The original map file can be stored within the Realm Works database so you can readily edit it to make changes on any computer. However, conversion to different VTT formats will require user involvement, just like it does today. Please note that this applies only to the *initial* release of Realm Works and is subject to change based on user feedback and requests.

Do you have a rough idea yet of the formats RW will support?

I haven't seen if this has been suggested before... But calendars. I want to be able to have a calendar and advance the games calendar.

If I want these festivals and thigns to happens on these days I want to be able to put them on a calendar and have the realmworks tell me when they happen.

That way I don't accidentally miss either a festival for a local god or the end of the world. Nothing worse than saying... "oh, right... Umm... I actually forgot to mention. Since you didn't save the world... it ended two days ago."

Although, it also wouldn't be bad for those political campaigns where a listing of events are supposed to happen over the course of a day. 8am... king killed. 9am... cabinet killed... 10am brunch... 11 am... attempt on party... 12pm. regent declared... 3pm. final attack on party.

Any recommendations?

RW recognizes all the major image formats (e.g. TIFF, BMP, PNG, JPEG, etc.). If you use a special program to generate your maps, you can also store those files as well (e.g. PSD) within the database and edit them externally via the appropriate program you already use.

A couple that I have found useful include Dundjinni and Hexographer. There are also Campaign Cartographer and Fractal Mapper. I've heard of others as well, but I can't remember their names at the moment.

Hope this helps...

Campaign cartographer is very cool, but the learning curve is very steep.

Sadly, Dundjinni has been deader than a doornail for some time now. At least as far as I've been able to find. If anyone has other information on that I'd be glad to hear it.

Another thing that came up while using MyInfo. There has got to be an easy way to have multiple working panes or documents. If I'm working in one document, I want to be able to have another document open as reference.

Anyone running Realm Works on a Mac? Which virtual environment are they using? Any issues?

I'd like to support the kickstarter, but want to confirm first that I can get it to run on my mac.

I'm currently running it on Mountain Lion, using Parallels 8 and Windows 7 64-bit. Runs perfectly great in that.

At GenCon and other tradeshows, we use Mac Minis as demo machines. Those are running VMWare Fusion and Windows 7, and Realm Works runs smoothly.

New to the forums.

I just signed up to support the kickstarter.

As someone who has run Monte Cook's Ptolus with multiple groups whose machinations could affect each other, and who has run other campaigns where players ran multiple characters at a time, I would like the ability for Realm Works to support handling the info known by individual characters and separate groups.

I am really enthusiastic about how this project is coming along and looking forward to the launch.

As someone who does NOT run a face to face game but uses Fantasy Grounds 2, I would love to see if the LW team could work with Smiteworks to find a way to integrate or somehow find a way to use some of the '2nd monitor for player' features in a way to be shared to the players in a FG2 or d20pro (I think is similar to FG2?) environment.

Obviously, this is not a 1.0 situation but, just throwing this out there so maybe the devs can plan the structure to accommodate it easier down the road.

Time tracking?
 

Will RW allow the GM to keep track of in game time? Also allow the GM to increment time by round, turn, hour, day, and such? I have looked around the RW forum but was unable to find if RW had this feature.

Rob, in regards to data import/export with Realm Works, does it support retrieving data from external sources (ie c:\my_latest_exported_map_from_maptool.jpg or http://mydomain.net/npc/badguypic..png)

And specifically, would it be one time import and then the jpg is stored in RW until updated, or would it update in RW if the source is updated?

Furthermore, can we show/import text into RW the same way via URL? For instance, I have a google spreadsheet that dynamically generates random magical items based on town size and includes all data from Ultimate Equipment. I use it if a PC wants to buy a magic item from a store. I have a google script which regenerates this "store list" every tuesday night.

It would be sweet if I could put magic stores in different cities which grab that data/list from an external url. I would also like to update character XP into RW in a similiar way. (currently we use MapTool and all XP is calculated each encounter via macros and stored on each token, so MT is my "Source")

Or vice versa, if I could grab a NPC statblock that was in RW via a URL, I could on the fly generate a map tool token from that. Oh the things we could do with things like this!

There won't be any fine-grained time tracking in V1.0. We will have a more coarse-grained ability to do this, and we can evolve it further if lots of users want the capability. User feedback will be a primary driving force in the directions the product evolves after launch.

In an automated manner, not at this point. But you should be able to do a lot of what you're describing through manual triggering.

Right now, data imported into RW is now "owned" by RW. You could then edit that data by telling RW you want to edit it, at which point it will be extracted from the database and handed off to what program supports that editing on your computer. Once the editing is completed, RW would detect the changes and offer to import the new data in to replace the old data.

Not at this time. That's definitely something we could add in the future.

Automated integration with external tools is not part of V1.0. That's another layer of complexity on top of getting everything orchestrated cleanly without the automation, which is our initial focus.

Time tracking would be one of the key things I'd want as well. At least by day. I have several players into crafting now and the ability to track progress would be great.

Note: this is Pathfinder crafting, so the days do not need to be consecutive, so in 7 days game time, the PC may only have worked on it 3 days. A convenient way for both the GM and PC to adjust/view this would be great!


Regarding the import/export questions:

Thanks for the responses! I'm perfectly fine with "future" updates, I know you guys never just put out a 1.0 and sit on that version for years. In fact, I'd much rather have "incremental" updates to the software as you guys add it in, vs waiting a year for large batches of updates.

Now back to work! <cracks the whip> :)

A couple suggestions for when you get to the point of allowing multiple GMs to have access to the data:
Make sure the default setting is "Co-GMs see nothing"
When assigning rights to edit material, make it possible to select specific subsets of the entry (at the very least, "don't share secrets", with an ability to flag a piece of data as secret).
"Secret" data should always be shared on a per-item basis.
I don't know if the relationship data will be complete enough, but the ability to select a portion of a map (more properly, the corresponding "Region" entry) and easily assigning co-GM access to all associated entries (again, excepting "secret" data).

What I am envisioning, is a situation where one person develops the world, but then allows another person to take responsibility for a subset (for instance, one player develops a foreigner from an undeveloped region as a character, and the GM assigns that player the job of at least starting the development of the region so they have some additional backstory material to work with.)

Ok, since I don't have access to the beta boards yet... but wanted this written down. The maps functionality... Can we get access to the google maps API but with the map pins linking to a Realm Works page. I'm thinking of my Shadowrun game where I use a google map of seattle to illustrate my game.

Thrantor, do you do this currently? From what I understand about googlemaps, that while there API is free, the geocodes (which contains the data thats essential) is not. The company that I works for has to pay for that from google. I imagine it might be different for a non-commercial entity, but once LW plugs it in, i would expect they would have to pay for the geocodes as well.

Yeah, I've got a "custom map" with them that I already have like 300 tags in.

Although, what do you mean by Geocodes? For us, I work at a company that uses the term as well, when we talk about geocoding it's when we take an address and turn it into GPS coordinates.

And for a company that runs a bunch of addresses through Google, that makes sense. But I was under the impression that the API used to display maps and then the pins on the maps is free. Vs querying the google database for GPS coordinates for addresses.

Obsidian portal uses their APIs but with maps that have been saved local to the Obsidian Portal site.

Ahh i see, i thought you wanted the "real maps" (when you mentioned seattle). Yep, Geocodes is generally turning address info to GPS and vice versa. with addresses and the like. The company I work for purchases their map data from google. Google makes their money from the maps by licensing their data (millions of addresses). The API to display maps is free, and javascript, as far as i know, and do pins and the like, but you have to have the map. I was assuming if you wanted seattle youd want to show the Seattle map you wanted the addresses associated with it.

Meh, for this experiment/idea I'd really just need the ability to stick pins in locations in seattle and map them to Realm Works articles. I don't need the ability to search for locations since most of those locations really won't exist in 2070 anyway. For those locations that do exist I can always search in maps.google.com, get the location, move over to Realm Works and put the pin in roughly the same place.

That way they aren't doing the geocoding through Realm Works. They are just allowing us to use the google maps functionality while linking to articles. Admittedly, this would only be useful for real world games. But it might be easily extended functionality from their current mapping system.

im not sure.... i think theyve already done some neat pinning. and from what i know about google maps, its only browser based. (well, mobile too, but thats a different story)

Google's solution is browser-only. As such, we haven't even looked at it, since we can't leverage it in the standalone client. In addition, the Google API likely has some significant limitations with various capabilities we'll be providing for maps in Realm Works. For example, I doubt Google has provisions for the integrated revealing of regions, revealing of pins, marking of key locations, placement of tokens to indicated monsters/PCs/whatever, indicating on pins what has/hasn't been revealed yet, etc.

Yeah, I just love being able to use the real world maps of seattle. Getting that level of detail in RealmWorks is likely to be technically impossible or data size prohibitive. Wonder if in the future(with the cloud) I could imbed realm works links in the Google description. Click on a pin, have it bring up the short description and include a link to the article in the cloud.

Sure, the player would need to login but there could still be some level of connection there.

Oh, that is a definite feature for the cloud. Allow for URLs that will take you to an article for a specific campaign.