Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Rochester, MN
Posts: 1,516
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Custom Almanacs Story Almanac vs. World Almanac To summarize my view: there should be an "almanac" that shows everything, and then zero or more "almanacs" that form subsets for quick filtering. The fixed almanacs (everything must be in one or the other) aren't that useful. We can fake this by leaving everything in one of the two Almanacs and filtering on tags, but having better support in the UI would be nice. |
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#41 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 411
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^^^ What Parody said. ^^^
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#42 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 1,147
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Ohhhhh, Parody....
One all-seeing, almighty almanac to rule them all. And baby almanacs that slice the data into different views. Use filters to create the baby views. Make each of the views a tab (with a second row of tabs for open categories within the current view). |
#43 |
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
Join Date: Apr 2013
Posts: 691
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Remember, one of our major use-cases is people who want (or need) to be able to game completely offline. Think spotty basement wifi or convention/game store play. We don't want to require a constant, reliable internet connection in order to use Realm Works effectively. I'm sure you can think of some video games that have been burned by that approach, if you're into that sort of thing. |
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#44 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2012
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posts: 781
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That's a kin to designing a VTT that does not support anyone else from connecting to the host in and seeing the VT from their players view....On the off chance that maybe not everyone has a network? on a side note, why not support sync via local player to host connection? That is about as common a feature as it gets for sharing. I get it, you had to decide what's in and whats not, but it is really hard to understand the thought process of RW with its amazing cloud feature, but not have live reveal? |
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#45 |
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
Join Date: Apr 2013
Posts: 691
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Quote:
The main purpose of the split almanac is to make it simple and easy for novice users to have a logical division between what's "in focus" in the story right now and what is backstory, history, or far off kingdoms that won't be visited anytime soon. Originally, we were going to handle this with tags and filtering, but those are more advanced concepts that we didn't want to require novices to learn. That said, we want to keep the Story Almanac/World Almanac "system" as simple as possible. It is intended to provide very basic but very useful functionality to the majority of users. Adding complexity to this system caters to a smaller cadre of advanced users at the expense of more basic users. For advanced users, tags and filtering are much more powerful and customizable for this purpose. A topic can have multiple tags on it, while it can only be in a single almanac at a time. This also means that you can search and filter across tags quite easily, while the same is not possible for multiple almanacs. Tags can be concealed from the player so that the GM can use it for their purposes only if desired. Making the almanac system as flexible as the tag system would also make it just as complex, not to mention duplicating functionality (and likely code). We want to avoid both of these things. What I'm hearing though is that you like the ease of using the Almanacs. Right now, tags and filtering are unfinished. What is needed is a way to easily save and recall sets of tags and filters. This would be the holy grail for advanced users, who are looking for both power and flexibility, but also ease of use. It also satisfies the needs of novice users, who won't need to dive into that system until they are comfortable, and can continue to use a simpler approach for as long as it suits them. |
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#46 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 1,147
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Yes. Saved and easy to access tags and filters would definitely be useful and very appreciated. And I agree that the story/world almanacs are truly quite useful as the number of categories increases.
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#47 |
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
Join Date: Apr 2013
Posts: 691
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@Exmortis
Like I said, we may look into doing something like that at some point in the future. We didn't tackle it first because we're a small team and can't do everything at once, so we prioritize and focus on our initial vision. There's a lot of cool stuff that could be done if players had full, live access to the realm at their fingertips, but there's also some challenges. Philosophically, we want to preserve the unique magic that RPGs have. That's why the initial model for a GM using realm works at the table has a central, public presentation (Player View). This keeps the players directly engaged with the GM and each other, changing the "normal" interaction model as little as possible. It's harder to do that with 6 people at a table who all have their heads buried in their laptops. It's a fundamental change to the interaction model. Instead of all the players focusing on a shared presentation of the content, they are focusing on their own personal presentation. Instead engaging the GM with questions about the game world, they are typing in searches. That's not to say that it isn't worth exploring (it might be nice to get a few less "What was that guy's name again?" questions!), but that's why we didn't go there first. |
#48 |
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232
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#49 |
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232
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#50 |
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