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- The Lone Wolf Development Team
Add new simple grouping categories
- Thread starter CNYGamer
- Start date
I'm presently in the process of adding the languages for my campaign world into RW. Languages play a primary role in my campaign, and I would prefer if I could have them in their own simple grouping.
It's not a huge deal. I'm putting them in the Other simple grouping, which works fine.
It's not a huge deal. I'm putting them in the Other simple grouping, which works fine.
Interesting. I'd normally put languages in the Mechanics section as I treat them as background material in the same way I do religions and nationalities. But it sounds like you are treating languages more along the lines of "political entities" or nations to group people, places and things under?
I love seeing how different people approach their gaming.
I love seeing how different people approach their gaming.
Even just starting out, I've wished to be able to create a Simple Grouping. I'd have a Cultures grouping to describe those setting features.
Cultures
- Culture A, B, C...
-- Language
Languages(s) and dialects of the culture
-- Thought
Religion, philosophy, ethos, codes, laws
-- Food
Typical diet; interesting or unique food items
-- Art
Common art forms and famous works
-- Leisure
Sports, games, etc
-- Artifacts
Ethnic cool weapons, characteristic items of manufacture, "tech level"
It seems pretty common in setting materials to have any number of nations, races, polities, subcultures, and so on. This would give a place to put all these kinds of topics.
You could make all cultures "Groups", but then broad cultures of the world get mixed in with story-specific organizations and small bands -- this Mafia, that wizard guild, those adventurers. It seems like it will get hard to sort out. You'll need a lot of scoping tags.
(There's usually a bit of conflict between a hierarchical scheme like the topics, and a tag facility. Anything you can do with the hierarchy you can also do with carefully assigned and scoped tags. But it's usually easier to get it right and to browse if you have a hierarchy. The chief problem with a hierarchy is that complex data rarely falls neatly into one exclusive tree. You usually wind up wanting something to appear in multiple categories and sometimes multiple levels of the tree. Browsing by tags is hard if you don't know the tag ahead of time; the tag list is flat, so they're all equally useful and applicable as far as the UI is concerned -- but not so for someone searching for some information.)
Cultures
- Culture A, B, C...
-- Language
Languages(s) and dialects of the culture
-- Thought
Religion, philosophy, ethos, codes, laws
-- Food
Typical diet; interesting or unique food items
-- Art
Common art forms and famous works
-- Leisure
Sports, games, etc
-- Artifacts
Ethnic cool weapons, characteristic items of manufacture, "tech level"
It seems pretty common in setting materials to have any number of nations, races, polities, subcultures, and so on. This would give a place to put all these kinds of topics.
You could make all cultures "Groups", but then broad cultures of the world get mixed in with story-specific organizations and small bands -- this Mafia, that wizard guild, those adventurers. It seems like it will get hard to sort out. You'll need a lot of scoping tags.
(There's usually a bit of conflict between a hierarchical scheme like the topics, and a tag facility. Anything you can do with the hierarchy you can also do with carefully assigned and scoped tags. But it's usually easier to get it right and to browse if you have a hierarchy. The chief problem with a hierarchy is that complex data rarely falls neatly into one exclusive tree. You usually wind up wanting something to appear in multiple categories and sometimes multiple levels of the tree. Browsing by tags is hard if you don't know the tag ahead of time; the tag list is flat, so they're all equally useful and applicable as far as the UI is concerned -- but not so for someone searching for some information.)
MaxSupernova
Well-known member
Can you not just containerize?
So under THINGS you create a container topic of LANGUAGES and under that you can add subcontainers and subsubcontainers as far as you want and put your various languages in them.
So under THINGS you create a container topic of LANGUAGES and under that you can add subcontainers and subsubcontainers as far as you want and put your various languages in them.
It appears that this is where they intended you to switch to the "advanced" view that uses Categories instead of Simple Groupings. It doesn't change much for me given how I'm organizing things, but it might work for others.
You can hide all the empty categories in the Navigation Pane Options menu under Empty Group Visibility.
You can hide all the empty categories in the Navigation Pane Options menu under Empty Group Visibility.
This is my recommendation. It allows you to structure anything however you want, as many levels deep as you want.
[SIZE="+2"]Advantages[/SIZE]
One reason I'd like to be able to make Simple Groupings: big headers make it easy to spot separations. It could be very nice to make custom big headers for browsing purposes.
[SIZE="+2"]Disadvantages[/SIZE]
The Category preference is less useful for this because you might have multiple Categories that logically fit together. For example, I'm using three different "People" categories that I don't want separated and don't have contained in anything. Their instances are just People.
Also the Category headers are smaller.
[SIZE="+2"]Other[/SIZE]
And yeah, I probably should have just edited this into my response from two hours ago. :)
One reason I'd like to be able to make Simple Groupings: big headers make it easy to spot separations. It could be very nice to make custom big headers for browsing purposes.
[SIZE="+2"]Disadvantages[/SIZE]
The Category preference is less useful for this because you might have multiple Categories that logically fit together. For example, I'm using three different "People" categories that I don't want separated and don't have contained in anything. Their instances are just People.
Also the Category headers are smaller.
[SIZE="+2"]Other[/SIZE]
And yeah, I probably should have just edited this into my response from two hours ago. :)
Last edited:
Yes. But by that argument, why are there the six special, privileged top-level containers by default? We could have done without them just by containerizing, too.
Filing all containers under "Other" costs you one level of potential description, having to drill down one extra layer for no benefit. The top level categories are valuable real estate for quickly getting to a collection of topics important to the game -- and there's plenty of room on that left hand bar for more such top-level categories. Why not be able to create those, and then the usual hierarchy underneath?
Yes you certainly can. However, you're thinking about it from the perspective of an experienced (and probably technically savvy) user.
One of the reasons the simple groupings were added were to make Realm Works seem simpler to approach for new users, or those who don't feel comfortable heavily customizing the software they use. Having a handful of familiar looking groupings (People, Places, Equipment, etc) is far less intimidating to work directly with than nearly 70 different (sometimes oddly specific) categories.
That said, the state of categories, grouping, and hierarchy in Realm Works has morphed over time. This happens with any good, modern software product, especially as we come up with better ways to display complex information, and as we see how people actually use the product. This means our current approach isn't set in stone and we'll of course be taking feedback like this into account as we plan future evolution.
I would also like to see the ability to customize simple grouping categories.
Honestly, as a new user (purchased today), I've spent the last hour and a half trying to figure out how to do it before stumbling across this thread telling me that it's not possible. I find it completely unintuitive; the documentation makes a point of telling me that one of the selling points for this software is that the structure is very customizable, yet the top level of organization for that structure is set in stone.
On a related note, I really feel like the Navigation View setting should be specific to e.g. the World Almanac and Mechanics Reference, rather than being global. I'm generally happy with the simple groups for the Almanacs, but not so much with the Mechanics Reference. From this thread, it sounds like the current workaround is to switch to purely Category grouping and use that to create my desired top level groups. However, since the Navigation View setting is global, not only do I need to set up the top level categories for the Mechanics Reference like I want, but I also need to create containing categories for the Almanacs to retain the top level organization that is already provided by the existing simple groupings.
Honestly, as a new user (purchased today), I've spent the last hour and a half trying to figure out how to do it before stumbling across this thread telling me that it's not possible. I find it completely unintuitive; the documentation makes a point of telling me that one of the selling points for this software is that the structure is very customizable, yet the top level of organization for that structure is set in stone.
On a related note, I really feel like the Navigation View setting should be specific to e.g. the World Almanac and Mechanics Reference, rather than being global. I'm generally happy with the simple groups for the Almanacs, but not so much with the Mechanics Reference. From this thread, it sounds like the current workaround is to switch to purely Category grouping and use that to create my desired top level groups. However, since the Navigation View setting is global, not only do I need to set up the top level categories for the Mechanics Reference like I want, but I also need to create containing categories for the Almanacs to retain the top level organization that is already provided by the existing simple groupings.