Realm Works 1.0.30, 1.0.31, and 1.0.32 Now Available – With Custom Views

[AEIOU]

I have to say that I REALLY like the Views by the way. I've set one up for the major campaign city and one for the greater adventure region around it. That leaves me with several more Views for dungeons, work-in-progress and side adventures that I can bring to the forefront quickly. Kudos to everyone on the team!!!

[rob]

Originally Posted by Parody

I agree the conversion should have done this for you, but you can fix it with only some annoying work. Start by showing the World Almanac. Make a third Topic View and put everything in it by checking Add Topics Shown in View. Then switch to the Story view and remove everything there from the new Topic View, one collection of containment at a time.

Afterwards you can use them just like you used the two before, and still be able to browse and search everything. You can also make more Views if you want.

We considered this approach. However, the drawback with this approach is that you still need to maintain two separate views and manually add/remove items to keep them correct. It's a tedious and error-prone process. I believe the solution we came up with will end up being much simpler and cleaner for everyone. <fingers crossed>

Originally Posted by Parody

As they get more things done, I hope we'll see more searching and bulk editing functionality added which would make the assignment operation above trivial. ("Not in (View Name)" and "Only in the World Almanac", for example.)

This is definitely the plan. There are a lot of things on the todo list. Once we get through the big things, we'll be able to start knocking off the lower priority, but still quite useful, items.

[MNBlockHead]

Love the custom views and an all-inclusive world view, love even more how quickly you released a solution to those like Exmortis who didn't want to have everything in the World View. Kudos to the developers!

[Parody]

Just filed a bug report: if you have Invert View turned on and switch back to the World Almanac, you see no Topics. To turn off Invert View, you have to switch to another Topic View because the button has been disabled. Remember to turn it off before switching! :)

Added: One other thing...

Originally Posted by rob

We considered this approach. However, the drawback with this approach is that you still need to maintain two separate views and manually add/remove items to keep them correct. It's a tedious and error-prone process. I believe the solution we came up with will end up being much simpler and cleaner for everyone. <fingers crossed>

I think this only works if you have exactly one custom View. As soon as you have more than one (none of which is a superset of all the others) then your world's background information becomes its own independent subset, something you may want to maintain in its own View for ease of access by your players. It'll be interesting to see how people decide to use it.

In any case, this solves the immediate conversion problem of "How do I recover the old separation I had between Story and World?"

[Exmortis]

@Rob and @Joe,

Thanks very much for your efforts, the addition is rather neat, and it actually led me to another idea, and you can tell me if is doable. I am playing around now, seeing how I will organize for the future to embrace you changes.

If I had to take the old and the new (views really are cool BTW)and meld them together I would rename World Almanac to "Complete Almanac" and just drop story Almanac, or allow us to say no thanks I do not want the default premade view.

This allows me to create my own views. I would create a "World View" a "View by chapter". Maybe its me but world almanac to me screams "Campaign Setting", and that's how I used it. Think "Inner Sea Guide" and related materials by Paizo is what I had in there.

Now your custom View addition allows me to take a massive 24ish month content story all jammed into one Story almanac and "cut it up" into nice chapter by chapter views, that really is nice, and allows me to even better organize when it comes to actual play.

Your change allows for even more flexibility which is a good thing for sure. Allowing us to rename the almanacs would essentially achieve the same view I had before while embracing your great view additions.

Now go enjoy your weekend and have a beer on me, send me the bill

[rob]

Originally Posted by Parody

Just filed a bug report: if you have Invert View turned on and switch back to the World Almanac, you see no Topics. To turn off Invert View, you have to switch to another Topic View because the button has been disabled. Remember to turn it off before switching! :)

Doh! This will be fixed in the next update.

Originally Posted by Parody

I think this only works if you have exactly one custom View. As soon as you have more than one (none of which is a superset of all the others) then your world's background information becomes its own independent subset, something you may want to maintain in its own View for ease of access by your players. It'll be interesting to see how people decide to use it.

In any case, this solves the immediate conversion problem of "How do I recover the old separation I had between Story and World?"

The scenario I outlined applies whenever a user wants to maintain two mutually exclusive views, regardless of how many views the user has. The old model moved a topic between views, removing it from one and adding it to the other. The new custom views model allows topics to be added and removed freely, with duplication in as many views as a user wants. So maintaining mutual exclusion requires manually removing a topic from one view and adding it to the other, which is annoying at best (and error-prone).

The "invert" solution provides instant mutual exclusion for any view, allowing the user to only have to maintain the contents of a single view to achieve the same behavior we used to provide. Users can freely have multiple views, and some of them can be intended for mutual exclusion use while others are not. It's flexible and up to the user.

I hope that makes sense...

[rob]

Originally Posted by Exmortis

@Rob and @Joe,

Thanks very much for your efforts, the addition is rather neat, and it actually led me to another idea, and you can tell me if is doable. I am playing around now, seeing how I will organize for the future to embrace you changes.

If I had to take the old and the new (views really are cool BTW)and meld them together I would rename World Almanac to "Complete Almanac" and just drop story Almanac, or allow us to say no thanks I do not want the default premade view.

This allows me to create my own views. I would create a "World View" a "View by chapter". Maybe its me but world almanac to me screams "Campaign Setting", and that's how I used it. Think "Inner Sea Guide" and related materials by Paizo is what I had in there.

Now your custom View addition allows me to take a massive 24ish month content story all jammed into one Story almanac and "cut it up" into nice chapter by chapter views, that really is nice, and allows me to even better organize when it comes to actual play.

Your change allows for even more flexibility which is a good thing for sure. Allowing us to rename the almanacs would essentially achieve the same view I had before while embracing your great view additions.

Now go enjoy your weekend and have a beer on me, send me the bill

You can delete any custom views at any time. The "Story Almanac" is just another custom view. We auto-created the Story Almanac for you during the upgrade so that it has exactly what it held in previous versions. You can delete it or rename it if you want. You can change the icon used on it. It's just another custom view.

From our perspective, all the topics that comprise your entire realm represent your "world". Everything that takes place is a part of your world, and it's a living, breathing, evolving world. So it made sense to us to call the "Complete" almanac the "World" almanac. We had already established the concept of the "World" within the product, and the term fit perfectly here, so we kept it and applied it to everything.

The only two names you currently cannot rename are "World Almanac" and "Mechanics Reference", since they are "built-in" views. Everything else is a custom view that can be renamed as you see fit. If there's enough demand, we can let users rename the built-in views as well. It just seems like a comparatively low priority item relative to many of the other things on our todo list right now.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by rob

The "invert" solution provides instant mutual exclusion for any view, allowing the user to only have to maintain the contents of a single view to achieve the same behavior we used to provide.

Technically true*, but not...semantically correct? Inverting a custom View does not necessarily give you your world background, which was the (intended) meaning of Story vs. World before now. For example, if you create two Views holding story items, inverting one gives you the other View's story items as well as your world background. If you want to have a View with just the world background info, you have to create a third custom view and manage it.

Hopefully that makes sense as well.

As far as changing the names (and these are off the top of my head): for World Almanac I'd suggest "All Topics", "Almanac", "Realm". For the Mechanics Reference I'd suggest "All Articles", "Mechanics", "Rules". Letting us rename them would be nice, but would make it even harder to write a manual or other guide. Probably need to think more about these.


* The best kind of true!

[Exmortis]

Originally Posted by rob

You can delete any custom views at any time. The "Story Almanac" is just another custom view. We auto-created the Story Almanac for you during the upgrade so that it has exactly what it held in previous versions. You can delete it or rename it if you want. You can change the icon used on it. It's just another custom view.

From our perspective, all the topics that comprise your entire realm represent your "world". Everything that takes place is a part of your world, and it's a living, breathing, evolving world. So it made sense to us to call the "Complete" almanac the "World" almanac. We had already established the concept of the "World" within the product, and the term fit perfectly here, so we kept it and applied it to everything.

The only two names you currently cannot rename are "World Almanac" and "Mechanics Reference", since they are "built-in" views. Everything else is a custom view that can be renamed as you see fit. If there's enough demand, we can let users rename the built-in views as well. It just seems like a comparatively low priority item relative to many of the other things on our todo list right now.

I do very much see where your coming from, and its a semantics difference, you say Tomato I say Tomaato kind of thing. So don't fret, I can deal with a simple word change....I think......OK maybe I can

I very much love the mechanics reference, for custom world designers like me I have this FULL of information. I also use it for all the hard to find fiddly rules in PF like Damage to Items which is spread all over the book. I also culminated all the environmental rules for the players, because that plays a massive part in my campaign, no more summer for ever in a temperate world, no sireebob, not in Daede, they will have to contend with a massive desert that makes the Gobi look like paradise, tropical jungle that is akin to the deepest Amazon, and a northern climate to which hardy Canadians would find cold.

I also have a massive section on the character creation rules from day 1 to later in game should the worst happen. Again custom world comes with some custom information, but its all based on PF rules.

Now once the parents leave I will have to sit down and redesign my layout, as much as it is annoying, it will enhance my campaign, my development and I am sure have a profound effect on gameplay for the better once we start.

In future I would ask you post and let us know what is coming, and few screenies and explanations would have been really nice. I am human, I am adverse to change, however with the right poke here and prod there I can embrace the new. But sometimes I just need to be told before, so I can digest it. get used to it, whine a bit, then get to the embrace part before it is reality.

As an aside Rob, for as little pat on the back to your team, I just made yet another pass at my Hero Lab work on my custom races, and now I am going through and creating every single ability they have custom, so the text matches the race. So in the case of an ability the Hominex have, instead of the player reading "this race has or members of this race have" in my race they read "The Hominex are a strange offshoot of the Draconic Races of Daede, though it is not remembered even by the eldest, they share so deep a kinship with the White Dragons of the Northern lands of Daedrea, they too have a racial tolerance to Cold and its effects both mundane and magical, thus they have Cold Resistance 5."

A simple little thing, but to me it helps immerse the player in their character in my world, I can't tell you how much this means to me and my labor of love.

What I also can't I tell you is, how the hell I did this before Hero Lab and Realm Works, nor do I want to remember.

Ever.

[JustinThomason]

Just downloaded the update this morning, and I'm really digging the custom views. I'm running a big hexploration adventure path (Paizo's Kingmaker) and now I have a "Geography" view with for all the physical locations, and a view for each of the six books in the adventure path for NPCs, side quests, and the like. Very cool. Good work!