First Impressions/Questions about Categories and Tagging

[jerrycnh]

First of all, congratulations everyone! The long wait is over, and we can sink our teeth into the delicious steak that is the Realm Works product. Yummy!

Kinda wish the timer on the cloud service didn't start until I knew what I was doing, probably going to lose 1-2 months over that, but meh, such is life.

Also, I installed my first copy on a Windows 8 machine, with plans to put it on my Windows 7 desktop later and kinda work between the two, but it said something scary about binding my key to a Microsoft account or something. What's up with that? Will it get in the way when I go to put this on 7?

Anyway, on to the program itself. At first glance it's definitely got a lot of potential, the interface is mostly intuitive and there seems to be unlimited potential for customization. Also, whoever set up the Hero Lab integration needs a HUGE kudos, that's the most seamless transition to another program's data I've EVER seen, it's outstanding, loads fast, and I'm starting to suspect you don't even need to have Hero Lab installed on the computer running Realm Works to read the files! The only thing that would make it better would be the ability to target a single hero inside the portfolio rather than loading the whole thing, but honestly, wicked small price to pay, especially if you're like me and just make one hero per portfolio most of the time anyway. I was strongly considering the back breaking task of redundantly loading stat blocks and skill bonuses and such into the Realm Works program, but the speed and power of that integration makes it completely unnecessary, saving me tons of time AND validating my purchase of Hero Lab even though I GM a heck of a lot more than I PC.

Now, some concerns:

1) There doesn't seem to be any obvious choices to display an item's truth level, nor is there a seperate spot to reveal the truth later on. Take, for example, a demon disguised as a young boy attempting to trick adventurers into committing evil acts. I can mark his race and age as "Untrue" but unless I know to look in there later, there seems to be no place to clearly see on my screen that they're untrue. And short of making new snippets with the truth, there's no spot for the reveal.

In my pipe dreams, the Green dot you see on a reveal would change to Red for false and Yellow for partially true, and there'd be a "sub snippet" to put the truth into whenever you set something untrue/part true. Just for the suggestion box.

2) Working with Categories: Despite the advertisement in the tutorial that says it would be easy to switch approaches midstream, it seems like a TON of thought has to go into customizing the categories before any work can be done on the world. I got scared away from removing the protection on the pre-created categories by the warning message, so I made duplicates of a few for the changes I wanted.

First example, in this case: For Region: Political, I wanted a snippet "Government Style", for which I made tags for Monarchy, Theocracy, Oligarchy, etc... so I made them, then made my first country for a minute or so, nothing too heavy yet cause I'm still experimenting/exploring. Then I decided, "Hey, I want to include the date the country was founded in that section" so I went to add another snippet... only to find that spot now greyed out on my duplicate, warning me that I could no longer edit the template once it was in play on an entry.

Now, there's nothing to stop me from adding the snippet on the fly, but I don't want to have to do that for every single country I make from now on, that would get tedious.

Pipe dream: It would be awesome if, when adding a snippet to an entry, a dialogue popped up asking if you wanted to add it to all other entries of that type and the template as well (except of course not for the protected ones because of warning yadda yadda).

Also, there definitely needs to be a "export to realm/import from realm", because I got very sad when I realized that any custom categories and entries I made would have to be done over again from scratch if I ran a second world.

Side note: While I was experimenting and writing this, I actually managed to crash the program. Not criticizing that - I expected a few bugs since we kinda rushed you all, and I /am/ experimenting heavily with it. I actually want to compliment you on the error reporting procedure, because it was a lot cleaner than what I see on most programs.

Couple of random questions and thoughts (and yes, I know I could probably find some of these answers in the manual, but hey, isn't it useful to know what people who are too lazy to read manuals might need a video for? ):

- What's the difference between story almanac and world almanac?
- After my crash, it said I was already in under another session and asked if I wanted to kick the old me. Does that mean I was eating up a connection on your server for the last 29 hours straight while I had the program running idle? Would it be better for you guys if I made "Work Offline" the SOP until I was ready to sync stuff?
- This space used to encourage the Dev Team to prioritize the calendar. Soooo eager for this.

Think I'm definitely gonna do some "Let's Play" style videos as I explore more, I think it might be fun.

Sorry for all the rambling, can you tell I'm excited to have the program?

[darloth]

At least with text snippets, untrue stuff is outlined in a faint pink colour.

Partially true is outlined in that same faint pink, but it's a dashed outline.

[Farling]

Account is linked to username for cloud, not individual computer.

Truth level is supported for each snippet, look in menu on right side of each snippet.

[davidp]

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

Also, I installed my first copy on a Windows 8 machine, with plans to put it on my Windows 7 desktop later and kinda work between the two, but it said something scary about binding my key to a Microsoft account or something. What's up with that? Will it get in the way when I go to put this on 7?

What we are trying to convey is that on a single computer you associate a particular Windows account to a particular Realm Works account. So you cannot change the Realm Works user once you have set it up on that particular Windows machine/account. If you have two Realm Works accounts and want to use them on the same machine, you would only be able to do that by having two Windows accounts, one for each Realm Works user.

On another computer, it can be a completely separate Windows account that you use, but it would still be limited to a single Realm Works account.

In the future, we may look at changing that limitation, but for now, it is in place.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

Also, there definitely needs to be a "export to realm/import from realm", because I got very sad when I realized that any custom categories and entries I made would have to be done over again from scratch if I ran a second world.

This is planned for a future release to be able to make realm data available to other realms. It will come in time.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

Side note: While I was experimenting and writing this, I actually managed to crash the program. Not criticizing that - I expected a few bugs since we kinda rushed you all, and I /am/ experimenting heavily with it. I actually want to compliment you on the error reporting procedure, because it was a lot cleaner than what I see on most programs.

We are using a third party library providing this functionality for us and it helps us to fix the crashes due to the detail it can provide. I would like to ask for you and anyone else who gets a crash, please feel free to add as much detail as possible to the notes of the crash report as every little bit of information can help us find and fix the errors faster. It also can help if you include your e-mail address so we can contact you with further questions, if needed. But it is fine if you prefer to submit things anonymously but please do submit the reports as it does help quite a bit.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

- After my crash, it said I was already in under another session and asked if I wanted to kick the old me. Does that mean I was eating up a connection on your server for the last 29 hours straight while I had the program running idle? Would it be better for you guys if I made "Work Offline" the SOP until I was ready to sync stuff?

We don't maintain active connections for the whole period. They will timeout and get re-established as needed, so don't worry about keeping logged in when idle. Also, if there is a crash or it otherwise terminates abnormally, we end up still having a "logged in" state from the server. If you are using Realm Works on a single computer, it is always safe to re-login if you get that message. It can kick off sessions on other computers if you are using Realm Works from multiple computers.

[rob]

Below are answers to assorted questions that haven't been fully answered by others yet...

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

2) Working with Categories: Despite the advertisement in the tutorial that says it would be easy to switch approaches midstream, it seems like a TON of thought has to go into customizing the categories before any work can be done on the world. I got scared away from removing the protection on the pre-created categories by the warning message, so I made duplicates of a few for the changes I wanted.

It's actually quite easy to change things, but there ARE some caveats to the process that you should ideally be aware of. I'll address the big one in response to the specific situation you describe below. With regard to the basic philosophy behind modifying categories vis-a-vis protection, I address this issue somewhat for another user in a separate thread. So I recommend that you take a look in that thread for some hopefully useful guidance. You'll find the thread here:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=48756

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

First example, in this case: For Region: Political, I wanted a snippet "Government Style", for which I made tags for Monarchy, Theocracy, Oligarchy, etc... so I made them, then made my first country for a minute or so, nothing too heavy yet cause I'm still experimenting/exploring. Then I decided, "Hey, I want to include the date the country was founded in that section" so I went to add another snippet... only to find that spot now greyed out on my duplicate, warning me that I could no longer edit the template once it was in play on an entry.

I believe the issue here is that you tried to fundamentally CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR of the snippet type. When you define a snippet type, any snippets created that are based on that type are fully configured to behave the you define the type. So you can make simple changes to the snippet type (e.g. rename it), but you can't change it's fundamental behavior. In this particular case, it sounds like you were attempting to CHANGE the tag-based snippet type to be a date. That's not allowed. However, you should have been allowed to ADD a NEW snippet type that would hold the date. Please give this another try and attempt to add a new snippet type. If you continue to have difficulties, let us know and we'll do our best to try and figure out where the difficulties are arising.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

Now, there's nothing to stop me from adding the snippet on the fly, but I don't want to have to do that for every single country I make from now on, that would get tedious.

Absolutely! You should be able to add new snippet types at any time. Deleting or changing existing snippet types is more limited, since you can't change something that other content has been built upon. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that everything works as it should when you go back and give this another try.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

Pipe dream: It would be awesome if, when adding a snippet to an entry, a dialogue popped up asking if you wanted to add it to all other entries of that type and the template as well (except of course not for the protected ones because of warning yadda yadda).

This is on the todo list. However, there's some definite complexity in accomplishing it. This is one of those things that seems simple on the surface, but it has some nasty issues when you look at all the factors involved that we're striving to ultimately achieve with Realm Works.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

Also, there definitely needs to be a "export to realm/import from realm", because I got very sad when I realized that any custom categories and entries I made would have to be done over again from scratch if I ran a second world.

This is on the todo list. It's part of the content sharing functionality. You'll essentially be able to "share" content with yourself, allowing you to create a master realm from which other realms can inherit. But we don't have this implemented yet.

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

- What's the difference between story almanac and world almanac?

There's a FAQ entry that explains this - the FAQ page is here (near the bottom of the Technical section):
http://www.wolflair.com/realmworks/s...ked-questions/

In addition, there's a thread about this with more information that you might find helpful:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=48713

Originally Posted by jerrycnh

- This space used to encourage the Dev Team to prioritize the calendar. Soooo eager for this.

The best way to get your vote heard on this subject is by posting a "me too" post in the thread on the Feature Requests forum. You'll find the thread here:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=45442

Hope this helps!