Calendar

[weogarth]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

I have been one of the most vocal calendar champions and was very disappointed with the survey results. But I don't understand why you need to suspend all work in RW until the calendar feature is out. There is so much value RW brings to the game-master's table with out calendars. At this point, it is hard to imaging managing a campaign world without RW.

I can see holding off on entering some event topics and even holding of on entering dates (esp. historical dates) until calendar functionality is released, but not using it at all? You are missing out.

I very much agree.

BTW - currently typing this from my hotel in Duluth. In town for hockey.

[ruhar]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

I can see holding off on entering some event topics and even holding of on entering dates (esp. historical dates) until calendar functionality is released, but not using it at all? You are missing out.

I agree. I have wanted the calendar since the Kickstarter. At the time I was running a werewolf campaign so it would have been very helpful. But there's more to RW than the calendar so you should be using it. Plus, you probably have a ton of data to enter and I'm sure it's not all for the calendar. Entering all of that data is going to take time. If you wait until the calendar is done I am sure you will be wishing you had started working on it sooner.

Personally, if you aren't using the program because you don't have the calendar I don't want to hear your bellyaching. You are not only cutting off your nose to spite your face but you can't see the forest for the trees.

[Chemlak]

Nothing I can say that hasn't already been said, other than that I agree. RW is fantastic, and I think everyone should use it.

[ArgoForg]

Okay, I think I owe it to people to explain my position here: I can't speak for anyone else, as I'm sure a lot of people use RW at the table, and the idea that not continuing to use it because it lacks a certain feature seems ludicrous. But I'd beg to take your blinders off for just a moment and understand why I haven't used it in a little while, even though I adore the software:

Let's assume for a moment that I wanted to support a brand new word-processing program that offers tremendous database capabilities. I love the creators of the word processor, I use other software by those creators, and I completely understand that their product is a new one and will probably be a raw product for a little while... but I'm still very excited about the possibilities that this new word processor offers me and love how it looks at first blush.

Now this word processor does a crapload of stuff that I really want it to do, but it just doesn't handle creating tables yet. That's in the offing, but right now it simply isn't capable of handling them, and a lot of other people have voiced that really don't have a pressing need for tables, so it's not all that high on the priority list-- but nevertheless, it's there. And unfortunately, to confound manners a bit, this WP uses a proprietary file format that I can't open in any other program. I still really do want to support this software-- there's no reason for me NOT to-- but I'm in the midst of working on a large-scale project that absolutely requires inline tables. If I use this new word processor to handle it, even though I desperately want to support these guys, I will have to do this immense project twice: once in this wonderful word processor with no tables, and once (even if it means cutting and pasting) in a less elegant but functional piece of software, like Word or Writer, just to handle this project. No matter how much I want to support a piece of software or its designers, the idea of writing/cutting/pasting this much stuff twice is daunting.

From an efficiency (and lack of time) standpoint, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to input things twice when I can make do for the time being with a lesser alternative (Evernote, OneNote, Scrivener) and then pick up cutting and pasting from that program into Realm Works once RW has all the functionality I need from it. Especially when the alternative to me is basically letting my projects start gathering moss and lying around, unfinished. So understand, please... I'm not sitting here bashing RW and saying I'm not using it because it's useless. Far from it; I'm still a huge supporter of it, and look forward to when I can jettison the other, less elegant solutions. I realize that it's gonna get some ire, especially around here, but for what I had planned to use RW for, it's going to actually going to be more of a pain for me to use it at the moment than for me not to use it.

[Mmurphy]

Originally Posted by ArgoForg

Okay, I think I owe it to people to explain my position here: I can't speak for anyone else, as I'm sure a lot of people use RW at the table, and the idea that not continuing to use it because it lacks a certain feature seems ludicrous. But I'd beg to take your blinders off for just a moment and understand why I haven't used it in a little while, even though I adore the software:

I agree with this position, I got into the Kick-starter almost three years ago because of the potential of the software. I cannot remember the last time I actually opened one of my realms. The potential of the software was listed in the kick-starter as (I went back and re-watched the kick-starter video and re-read what the kick-starter was about--that where I got the following):

As we demonstrate in our video, Realm Works lets you manage your RPG content in one unified environment. This includes all the people, places, things, and events of your world. Beyond just text, it encompasses pictures and maps, custom calendars, dates tied to those calendars, statblocks, Hero Lab portfolios, audio and video files, and a wealth of other material. Realm Works weaves all this content together through a simple, intuitive interface.

Create custom calendars for your world. Link multiple calendars together and see how all the dates translate to your master calendar. Calendars can reflect different in-game cultures, lunar calendars, and worlds.

I choose not to take Wolflair up on the 'refund' of the kick-starter and at this time, I think I would still make the same decision but it has been almost 3 years since the kick-starter started and 2 years since the 'official' release of the software. I bought into the kick-starter for the calendar control and "The Grande Temple of Jing". I am planning on changing the some of the data to run with the game system I play but I can foresee the 'new backer rewards' being out of date by time they actually get released. I think my main issue is the time since the kick-starter (which Wolflair may or may not regret doing) and the features/concepts being ignored (Calender's).

The kick-starter focus was to:

Player access to all revealed aspects of your world
Share your creations with other GMs
Find ready-made content to integrate into your world
Automatic sync to cloud spanning multiple machines

Along with the calendar, I am waiting for these features before I re-look at the software.

[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.

[ArgoForg]

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.

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.

[weogarth]

Originally Posted by ArgoForg

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.

Just from my point of view, it's 'puzzling'. 'Unreasonable' would be highly presumptuous of any of us, IMNSHO.

G'luck to you and your gaming whatever you use and when.

[Vargr]

Originally Posted by ArgoForg

Okay, I think I owe it to people to explain my position here: I can't speak for anyone else, as I'm sure a lot of people use RW at the table, and the idea that not continuing to use it because it lacks a certain feature seems ludicrous. But I'd beg to take your blinders off for just a moment and understand why I haven't used it in a little while, even though I adore the software:

I do understand your position.

It is just, that I have found no other tool that does what RW does (with or without tables ).

The deciding factor here is, that there a great many word processors out there but no other tool similar to RW (that I am aware of).

Hence, I just think it would be a shame not to use RW.

Well, 'nough said.

And yes, we all long for the calendars.

[MNBlockHead]

@AgroForg, never thought you were being unreasonable. Sounds like you are using and have looked at the same tools I've looked at for managing historical data. Like you I was getting tired of throwing money at specialized software. I ended up just putting everything in Google Sheets. The exporting issue, I think, *is* a much more understandable reason for not using RW. For me, it makes no difference, but if you were planning on using RW to create publishable material in PDF form—yep, I can see how it is a problem for you.