Quote:
Originally Posted by MNBlockHead
I don't think I have blinders on, calendars are very important for my campaign. Where your analogy falls apart for me is that I have found *nothing* that provides the calendar functionality that is on the RW development roadmap. There is no campaign-management software that is less feature rich that supports calendars for me to consider. I would be very interested in knowing what you are using to support multiple custom calendars as well the rest of your world building and campaign management.
The current state of calendarless RW is not akin to using a simpler word processor that supports tables versus a new, groundbreaking word processor that, however, does not support table. A better analogy is that I have to use a spreadsheet program in addition to a word processor program, because the spreadsheet program just doesn't support the kinds of calculations in the tables that I need to run.
I do not put information on historic events in RW. My historical timelines are managed outside the program. For current and future dates, I have a spreadsheet, outside of Realmworks, where I have the conversions for the various calendars. These dates I enter in RW. I use the Gregorian date field and also paste the dates from the other calendars in a snippet.
When custom calendars are released, I will not need to re-enter these dates, because RW will allow calendar formats to be toggled and will convert dates on the fly.
I could do the same for past dates as well, except that I already created a number of important dates and time lines in the custom calendars and doing the calculations for events that took place centuries or millennia ago is not trivial.
The fact that I have to do so is not ideal. I REALLY cannot wait for custom calendars to be released. But I've seen no other compelling option that makes me reconsider using RW.
There may very well be something about your campaign that makes custom-calendar support so critical to your campaign that their is almost nothing you can enter into RW that would be useful to you. If this is the case, I am very interested in knowing what you use instead. I'm not saying this as a challenge, but I've looked high and low and found nothing that work short of kludging a solution in a spreadsheet. I would be grateful if you could share a better way.
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As I said in my previous posts (but not specifically this one), lack of custom calendars is only half (and perhaps not even that much of) my issue. Of honestly as great or greater concern to me is lack of export, because my work is essentially databasing my realm for eventual PDF/POD/3P publication, so when I put the data in, I can only line-by-line cut and paste to pull it out. So while I agree with you that there is no campaign manager that works custom calendars that has half the reasons for using it that RW does, there is a small plethora of options for me to be able to export my work in bulk or print to PDF-- working with them is not as elegant or enjoyable as RW, but they produce what I will need.
Right now, most of what I am working on in my project is my historical data of several countries and empires, and for the time being all my notable dates are being kept in a file in Scrivener categorized by era... and no, it's not by any means an ideal solution. I don't even honestly have an idea how to extrapolate Gregorian dates based on my calendar (I'm sure it's not a hugely difficult affair, but the math for it is beyond me). I've tried Aeon, and it's not bad, but not good enough for me to justify sinking the additional money into when I'm not financially well-off at the moment.
I'm not angry at anyone for trying to point out that they think I'm unreasonable for not putting all my stuff into RW right now. And I'm not bashing anyone; certainly not RW or its creators, who are doing a damned good job with the software. The challenge was just laid out there that people who say they're not using the software don't know what they're doing (or summat) and I'm just trying to explain that for my particular situation, using RealmWorks would double the work I have to do, and I look forward to the time when that's not the case.
However, this is a post about custom calendars, and I apologize if my bringing export into the equation as well has crossed wires or is off-topic.