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

Ask and you shall receive! As users introduce more and more topics into their realms, it can become cumbersome to sift through them all, especially when in the middle of a game session. This release introduces a solution – custom views.

With this update, all topics are now contained within the World Almanac, and the Story Almanac has been converted to a custom view that contains all the topics it previously held. Additional custom views can be created and assigned topics/articles in any combination you choose, with the option to add a few of the most frequently used views to the ribbon bar. Complete details on custom views can be found here on our forums and within Realm Works. To access the overview within the product, click on one of the small buttons to the right of the Mechanics Reference button on the ribbon bar and select either the Create View or Manage Views options. Within the dialog that appears, click on the help icon in the upper right.

While we’re thrilled to make custom views available, especially as this should improve users’ experience with Realm Works, we were unable to get one last aspect into this release – specifically, the ability to share custom views with players. Once this piece is implemented, GMs will be able to add the topics/articles they choose to shared views and players will be able to see the revealed topics within them.

Unfortunately, a key member of the team is going to be out of the country for the next couple of weeks, and we did not want to delay this update until after his return. We chose to move forward with the release as is, because we know custom views are going to be an invaluable benefit to the vast majority of our users.

Just like for GMs, all revealed topics are grouped under the World Almanac when viewed by players. For GMs with many revealed topics, this means that players may have a long list of topics to navigate through until they determine which topics they consider important enough to place into custom views of their own. If you’re a GM that currently relies on the Story Almanac to keep things filtered for your players, that capability will disappear until we can introduce sharing of custom views. For the time being, you may want to create a list of links to important topics from within your realm’s Starting Point topic. This will allow your players to go to one place to find and navigate to the most important content. They can then add these topics to a custom view of their own very easily.

We understand that this scenario is less than ideal, which is why shared custom views will be included in the next feature release following the team member's return. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing what custom views GMs are finding most useful in their realms.

Additional Enhancements and Changes
In addition to the custom views, we’ve also included a number other enhancements and changes in this new version of Realm Works. To see the full list, please take a look at the Release Notes available within the product. To keep up with the latest Realm Works news, make sure to “like” Realm Works on Facebook, “follow” @lonewolfdevel on Twitter, and/or “follow” Lone Wolf Development on Google+.

(This post was also shared on our website.)

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Realm Works 1.0.31
A new update was released tonight (03/27/15), which should address a number of the issues that users ran into with the last update. If you still have issues following this new update, please update your support ticket by sending a follow-up email or send us a new bug report. To see the full list of fixes, please take a look at the Release Notes available within the product.

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Realm Works 1.0.32
Another new update was released tonight (03/31/15), which addresses a few remaining issues with all the new logic, including a sync problem that a few users have encountered. If you still have issues following this new update, please update your support ticket by sending a follow-up email or send us a new bug report. To see the full list of fixes, please take a look at the Release Notes available within the product.

Can't wait to try out custom views. Upgrading now.

Oh BTW THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for having ALL topics in the World Almanac!!!

:) We hope you like them. Now I'm going to go pass out for the night. Zzzzzzzzzzz...

Nice!

I looked at it last night before I went to bed. Much better. :)

That's one suggestion down!

I'm afraid it keeps crashing the program for me. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or it's a bug but I did send a bug report with full description of what I did before hand.

Actually I wish this was not forced upon me, this is a complete rework of how I designed my entire campaign world and campaign stories within Realm Works.

I actually LOVED the distinction between story and world almanacs, it felt more like the way you buy products and play your RPGs. Everyone owns the "Campaign Setting" or in my case the "World Almanac" was my campaign setting document/book. Everyone of course buys their "modules or adventures", this is how I used my "Story Almanac", now its all bunched up in one great big hellish mess. Its bad enough every time we launch RW we have to take the time to close every single tree, but now my world and story are all crammed together. There goes countless hours of work designing and linking to make it all nice neat and organized. Now it looks like a laundry hamper.

I had all my work distinctly separated, NPCs that were story only (you know that only show up in that particular module), and those that are world based (like Elminister)...Now I have this huge mess of NPCs that are transient in my world almanac? Seriously?

I was very much hoping for different story almanacs, again mirroring real world where we own several modules.

Do not get me wrong, the idea of custom view is very cool, and I will use it, why did you have to cram everything I spent from release working on nicely organized and separate into one great big pile?

There is a reason we have a dinner plate and a dessert bowl, not everything was meant to be crammed together, heck even a buffet has ever dish in its own container.

What was the thought process around this? Am I the only one here that did not want my Story almanac in my world almanac? I Did not ask for this, nor do I want this, and now I actually have no idea how or where to begin, but I guess I am spending the next weeks re-organizing my entire campaign world and story.

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. I'm very glad they made this change. (As you can tell. :)

Thankfully we're the only ones who have to go through the conversion. 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.)

FYI - we have seen this post, and we're looking into crash reports.