Realm Works Feature Survey – Charting the Future

[Exmortis]

Originally Posted by mirtos

Well, especially not when it comes to printing. All you have to do is go back to the kickstarter Q&A to find that.

I have heard this over and over, yet no one has put forth this statement of promise, I just scanned the entire Kickstarter site for RW, best I can come up with is the FAQ that states Export will be a future feature they hope to have.

There is no explicit promise made.

So can you provide this?

[AEIOU]

@Exmortis: Look for questions from Steven Wells and responded to by Rob. Basic printing was absolutely confirmed as a short term goal with export being a little longer. I don't have the energy to search for it again but it was black-and-white and straight from the horse's mouth.

Another fun one to look for would the start time for the cloud timer. Lots of things were stated in the heat of the Kickstarter and if people want to look through the old posts, this one gives them a goodie to find while they dredge up others.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by mirtos

Well, to be honest, you cant expect everyone to be in that camp, and the definition of "promises never made" is also not entirely true... especially not when it comes to printing. ...

Originally Posted by Exmortis

I have heard this over and over, yet no one has put forth this statement of promise, ...

I guess it depends on what you mean by promise. Going back to the Kickstarter Comments:

Originally Posted by LWD in the RW Kickstarter

Printing support will be provided, but that's not the primary focus of Realm Works, so it won't be highly sophisticated in the initial release.

We'll definitely have printing, as has been outlined in response to previous questions.

There's no feature to export all maps en masse. However, you can export individual elements. You will also be able to select multiple content elements for printing.

Plans change.

[mirtos]

no argument, that plans change, i just know that multiple people saw the print as far back as two years ago.

There is also this one.

first this:

Hi, am a backer at $1 but may increase that amount. I have two concerns, the ability to print the contents of my personal RW database, and whether Lone Wolf Development will claim and rights to whatever personal, original content I create and upload to RW. I think the "can I print everything" question has been answered in a previous reply from LDW: "You will also be able to select multiple content elements for printing. So if you're just trying to generate a PDF, you could select multiple elements and print them, outputting them as PDF instead." I want to be able to print everything in case the RW cloud goes down or is corrupted, and a personal printed backup would be best. So it sound like I'll be able to print everything hardcopy? And what kind of rights will LWD have to any personal, original content that I create and upload to LWD or the RW servers? I just don't want to face a situation down the road where I create something, have it backed up to the RW cloud, then later have LWD say "we own that" or "you have to get our permission to use whatever you stored on our cloud, even if it is your own original content".

and this was the response... while it was mostly about content ownership, it was also about printing.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...omment-2304439

im just trying to explain why some people might be frustrated.... im happy to wait. not everyone is,and thats also understandable.

[Dervish]

Thank you Mirtos I knew i had seen the comment somewhere

[rob]

Prompted by some of the above posts, I just finished going through everything from the Kickstarter today. And it seems that I have some crow to eat.

There were a wide range of discussions about printing in direct messages to backers, in the general comments, here on our forums, and even via emails in some cases. Some of the things I remember outlining in detail actually occurred through one-on-one channels and not in the general comments. And all of it just became blurred together in my brain.

From a closer look at exactly what I said in the general comments, I can now see how printing could be readily construed as an intended part of the product (but definitely NOT export). In my brain, I conflated discussions from assorted places and did not keep clear about what was said where. For those of you who have run a Kickstarter, I'm sure you're nodding your heads about how easy that is. In any case, I owe everyone here an apology for that! Sorry!

Going back through every post from the Beta team prior to the Kickstarter, the ability to print content was actually brought up once. I obviously forgot about that instance as well, but its statistical significance is still quite important. Printing was mentioned a single time out of a Beta team of about 100 GMs over the span of a year. We went into the Kickstarter with Realm Works focused squarely on electronic delivery and printing was not something we felt was important. This lack of importance was basically echoed by the Beta team.

When the Kickstarter began, some people wanted printing, so we came up with what we thought was a viable solution for simple printing. The fact that printing would be simple was stated on multiple occasions, with anything more being something that would be determined by user demand after V1.0 came out, but I can definitely see how I conveyed that simple printing WOULD be included. The details about printing being dependent on some assumptions was communicated to some people, but I clearly failed to do so widely in the general comments. After the Kickstarter, when we realized a critical assumption for printing was not valid, the idea for simple printing fell apart. I haven't spent the time to dig through all of that stuff, but I'm pretty certain that discovery WAS communicated to backers.

So where does that leave us? As was stated in the Survey Update last week, we recognize that printing is important to a meaningful number of users, even though the survey results put it smack in the middle overall. We further said that we were looking for ideas on how to provide some basic printing relatively soon, and that was no joke. I've already spent time brainstorming creative solutions that would allow us to provide simple printing with a comparatively small amount of work. I actually have one promising idea, but it's just that - an idea. It still needs to be thought through before it gets discussed publicly. I intend to spend that time after we get the upcoming release out the door. If, and that's a BIG if, the idea is sound, we might be able to get some basic printing into place by summer. And we'll let everyone know if it's going to happen.

Every GM runs their games differently. So every GM has different wants and priorities for a tool like Realm Works. And every GM believes their priorities are the absolute #1 thing we should be working on. As much as we'd love to be able to do that, it's just not possible. So we're doing the best we can with the limited resources we have available.

Beyond that, the time I spend here on the forums (and researching everything from the past) is time that isn't spent on development. That delays everything a little bit further. Pretty soon, it starts to add up to multiple days lost, which means multiple days of delays. Then the days add up to weeks. So I'm really caught between a rock and a hard place here. I want to engage in discussions with you all here. I want to make you all happy. And I need to focus on writing software in order to deliver any new capabilities. All I can really do is let you guys dictate how much time I need to spend here and make sure you know the very real costs of my time here – i.e. how quickly we get new features into the product, which means how quickly we get to the features YOU want.

Thanks!

[AEIOU]

Punt to Liz. We'll behave.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by rob

Beyond that, the time I spend here on the forums (and researching everything from the past) is time that isn't spent on development. That delays everything a little bit further. Pretty soon, it starts to add up to multiple days lost, which means multiple days of delays. Then the days add up to weeks. So I'm really caught between a rock and a hard place here. I want to engage in discussions with you all here. I want to make you all happy. And I need to focus on writing software in order to deliver any new capabilities. All I can really do is let you guys dictate how much time I need to spend here and make sure you know the very real costs of my time here – i.e. how quickly we get new features into the product, which means how quickly we get to the features YOU want.

I think RW has stated its position and reasoning clearly enough. Not everyone is going to be happy with the resulting priorities—including myself. But I would rather see you spending time on developing the product and not on arguing with the long tail of minority discontent. Any further engagement on this issue is going to lead to diminishing returns as anyone still upset enough to continue arguing this is not going to be happy unless you change your development priorities. You've made and explained your decisions; best now to put all your energies into successfully executing them.

We'll still be here to argue with you about the need for calendars, exporting, and printing after the next release.

[weogarth]

Rob, you've done your due diligence and more on this. Please go back to coding; we'll be nice for Liz.

[liz]

Originally Posted by AEIOU

Punt to Liz. We'll behave.

Originally Posted by weogarth

Rob, you've done your due diligence and more on this. Please go back to coding; we'll be nice for Liz.

Hehe.

Separately, a bit of an update on the more immediate release mentioned in this update. Our plan was to release an update this week with some of the enhancements mentioned at the start of the survey, but it's now being pushed into next week. Unfortunately, one of the developers was ill and that put us behind by a number of days.