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Originally Posted by rob
I don't believe that's accurate. The bulk of the internal work to support individual player reveal was done last year. In fact, one of the delays we've experienced with Player Edition involves making sure the internals for managing individual player reveal all work cleanly. There is still some internal work left to do, but it would be less than some of the other big tasks on our todo list. The biggest remaining chunk of work with individual player reveal is weaving it cleanly into the user-interface.
I would say that the overall amount of work involved for adding individual player reveal is comparable to some of the tasks you listed above.
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I was making that determination based on your supposition below ....I was reading into this that if there are multiple changes of varied types (reveal among them) makes the sync and the "custom reveal" more complex.
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Originally Posted by Rob September 19th, 2014, 05:07 PM
First of all, Joe's statement that we "might" support "live reveal" is him just being cautious. He's trying to hedge on things, because he's not sure what he is or isn't allowed to share about the evolution plan for Realm Works. That responsibility falls to me.
So...
What you call "live reveal" is something we think of as "continuous syncing". And continuous sync is definitely part of the evolution plan for Realm Works. It has been from the start. However, doing continuous sync is significantly more complicated than what we're currently doing. There's a long list of nasty considerations that need to be handled for continuous sync, and many of them are going to be non-obvious until you look closely at the problem. So we started with something that's less complicated yet still highly useful, with syncing being performed when a realm is unloaded. We'll be looking at continuous sync in 2015.
As for local syncing, I believe you're overlooking two very important details. First, a large number of GMs do not trust their players. That means player syncing has to identify only the material revealed (in the future, only to that one player) and send only that information to the players. On top of that, it needs to track what information has already been sent so that it only sends the subset that has actually changed. That's a LOT of complexity that would entail vast amounts of extra work to support. Not just that, but now we have to deal with fun issues like communications failures during the syncing that result in everything being messed up. It's just not realistic to try to do that. You "common" reference seems to conflate what's done for extremely simple tasks (e.g. a simple VTT client) with something having the complexity of Realm Works.
The above concerns are overshadowed by something even more critical and non-obvious. How do we handle users syncing between themselves and now having multiple different computers - GMs and players combined - all possessing differing sets of data? Let's assume you have a desktop and a laptop. Let's further assume your players each have a desktop and laptop on which they will want to use Player Edition. You run your game and the players sync directly to you, but you don't sync to the server. You're playing at your friend's house and he's a player, so that player now wants to sync everything to his desktop after the game - but you're still driving home. So now his desktop is not in sync with his laptop unless he syncs the two directly, which means we also have to support player-to-player syncing or your players are stuck until you've finally synced.
More concerning, let's say you spend a few minutes after the game to update some information in your realm before you go home and those changes involve the content you've already synced to your players, then you sync to the cloud. When your players next try to cloud sync, their content is now at odds with what's on the server (just like if you make changes both on your desktop and laptop), so their only choice is to download everything again. If a player goes home early from the game, he's in the exact same boat. I could go on with further examples, but the bottom line is that it all gets very convoluted unless everything routes through a single sharepoint, which is the cloud.
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Glad to hear its not as extensive as first thought... this leads me to believe, (combining the two posts) that the only "
hard part yet to be visited" would be the "live portion"?
"Live" would be a bonus (been hoping for that in hero lab for years), its not a deal breaker for me either. As others have posted .. I utilize RW as a management tool, not a VTT.
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Originally Posted by rob
The question then becomes which features are in higher demand by users, as that will be a significant component in our prioritization of tasks after Player Edition finally goes out. I'm not sure if there's a thread for this in the Feature Request forum, but there definitely should be, as the votes there will be important to that prioritization.
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I'm sure there are varied +1 listings for features.. and I assume Liz / Colen (I know assume is dangerous) may have better insight as to where those "counts are" or the ability to develop polls (I have that on another forum I write for)
So per Rob's Request,
Here is my attempt.
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=50809