Content and Pricing

[Grey Mage]

KBS666, as for the slow down due to massive data drop on a 32bit platform I have to say it is noticeable but not inordinately so (at this time).

I presently have all of the Core Rulebook and GameMastery Guide inputted in. Started on the bestiaries but I am probably only at 10% at most for them.

Have about 6 thousand third party spells and feats (each) in.

Magic items is probably close to the same (5-6k of 3PP stuff).

Where I have noticed lag the most is in extremely large snippets (over 500 lines or more) during linking.

Will the program HAVE TO migrate to a 64-bit platform... definitely! The sources I am migrating data from show that for PF1 (with 3PP addons) there are about 45 thousand spells, 15 thousand feats, 68 thousand individual magic items, 3000+ classes, prestige classes and races, along with about 3500 pages of rules and addons for them. The above sources do not include any maps, locations, NPCs, continents, etc. Figure an easy 10000 articles there.

Does any given realm NEED all of that... no. But 35+ years playing and GMing has taught me that if there is a supplement, magazine, etc. out there someone will just have to have it sooner or later. Just in the past 10 years the wiki on a stick I have been using has gone from an 8gb stick to a 256gb one. So data sprawl is inevitable...

My faith in LWD (from having used Hero Lab since is first came out) is such that IF Realm Works is popular and sells they (LWD) will continue to tweak it. Ultimately it is up to we the users...

[kbs666]

Have you tried opening tabs in that realm? When I had just the PFSRD Feats, Spells, magic items, races, classes and bestiaries 1 -4 in a realm opening new tabs was painfully slow. It's why I deleted all the data.

[daplunk]

I dont work with tabs. Try to start in one most of the time. If you stay within one its not bad. If you try to use tabs though its painful.

[Grey Mage]

I never have less than 6 tabs open when I am doing data entry. I will admit that I do it that way so that I do not have to open more. But moving between them is not that bad.

Could it be better? Of course!

But still manageable at this time... ask me again in a few thousand spells...

[Valyar]

The tab game is horror. I don't have big realms, ~2.3k articles and even with categories minimized the switching between tab when I have more than 3-4 is super annoying.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by Valyar

The tab game is horror. I don't have big realms, ~2.3k articles and even with categories minimized the switching between tab when I have more than 3-4 is super annoying.

I would consider ~2.3K articles IS a big realm.

The tool wasn't really designed to store the entirety of the rule set.

Moving to 64-bit won't necessarily increase the performance of the DB, when it has to keep accessing different parts of the DB in order to fetch all the different records required for a new article when switching between your 2,300 choices.

[Valyar]

Compared to what Josh has... I consider this small

But I have no other choice... We can't have separate realms for every book, because I can't launch separate copies of RW and can't open more than one realm at time... therefore I upload all books I have for a game system in single realm to have all available during session or prep time.

Probably the idea back in the days when RW started was a bit different, but the usage I have is as single repository for all mechanical and setting information of a given game. I found that it is inconvenient to separate mechanics and adventure section in different realms, because of the hyperlinking that helps to identify visually in an article what is going on and remind myself, without really reading every time.

In regards to DB performance, I disagree - SQL/Oracle servers who handle insane loads compared to what RW has are common and the database engine that supports RW can handle it as well... if they do it properly. Memory is not problem nowadays... even potato computers come with 8GB and SSDs are cheap compared to their insane amount of price 5 years ago. Even NVMe can be affordable.

The hardware is not limit.

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by Farling

Moving to 64-bit won't necessarily increase the performance of the DB, when it has to keep accessing different parts of the DB in order to fetch all the different records required for a new article when switching between your 2,300 choices.

The DB is not the issue. RW is using a well thought of DB. I do not personally have any experience developing using it but I have never seen any complaints about it and it is not some toy. It should be able to handle datasets into the billions of records without a problem. Querying it for a database where the primary table has less than billions of records should take a minimum of clock cycles.

Databases are fundamentally designed to be random access. Hitting different parts of the dataset is what they are good at. Anyway it is highly unlikely that there are that many different table hits needed to show a single topic or article. There is probably a table with a topic names (probably another table for article names but the two are likely nearly identical) which also includes other names and the necessary underpinnings to associate aliases with base names also the names have a unique ID which is how topics are put together. There's probably a huge table of sections, maybe separated into topics and articles again, with each one including the snippets inside it, their ordering, the sections ordering in the topic and the unique ID for the right name. There's also likely relationship table, pretty simple 2 unique ID's plus a relationship and a reveal state. The last table is a top level topic table with stuff like prefix, suffix and containing topic info.

So you can build a topic with something like 4 table hits produced from either one massive query or a couple of less complicated ones.

Yes, I've spent a good chunk of my career writing DB code.

[ruhar]

Getting back to the list of content and pricing, I too would like to know what will be available and the price for them. Then I can budget accordingly.

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by ruhar

Getting back to the list of content and pricing, I too would like to know what will be available and the price for them. Then I can budget accordingly.

Not that I'm likely to buy a lot but if transparency is the name of the game going forward this would be a step in the right direction.