Player Edition Look

[Parody]

I believe this would be relatively easy and I've been considering it for some time. However, there are some bigger fish for us to fry right now. I'm also lurking and watching this thread to see others' ideas about what they'd like to see.

I'd point you to these threads about the almanacs:

Custom Almanacs
Story Almanac vs. World Almanac

To summarize my view: there should be an "almanac" that shows everything, and then zero or more "almanacs" that form subsets for quick filtering. The fixed almanacs (everything must be in one or the other) aren't that useful.

We can fake this by leaving everything in one of the two Almanacs and filtering on tags, but having better support in the UI would be nice.

 

[MaxSupernova]

^^^ What Parody said. ^^^

 

[AEIOU]

Ohhhhh, Parody....

One all-seeing, almighty almanac to rule them all. And baby almanacs that slice the data into different views.

Use filters to create the baby views. Make each of the views a tab (with a second row of tabs for open categories within the current view).

 

[Joe]

Joe, since you're lurking I have a question for you or anyone else who might know. Initially I thought player edition would show what the GM revealed at the time something was revealed. Now I've heard that it's more a reference for players to review what has been revealed in past sessions. In order to see what has been revealed in a current session the GM has to sync the realm. Obviously not a quick task for a large realm nor would everyone want to take time out with each reveal to do a sync.

Is there any plan to have the player edition do live reveals? Or will GMs have to invest in a projector/second monitor or rotate their monitor for the players to see? ... I thought the player edition would take care of the issue but now I don't think it will.

Player Edition doesn't currently support live reveal. Its possible that we may look into making it an option at some point in the future, but it would take some significant work both on the player and GM side. The current intended way for GMs to share information live at the table is through Player View.

Remember, one of our major use-cases is people who want (or need) to be able to game completely offline. Think spotty basement wifi or convention/game store play. We don't want to require a constant, reliable internet connection in order to use Realm Works effectively. I'm sure you can think of some video games that have been burned by that approach, if you're into that sort of thing.

 

[Exmortis]

Player Edition doesn't currently support live reveal. Its possible that we may look into making it an option at some point in the future, but it would take some significant work both on the player and GM side. The current intended way for GMs to share information live at the table is through Player View.

Remember, one of our major use-cases is people who want (or need) to be able to game completely offline. Think spotty basement wifi or convention/game store play. We don't want to require a constant, reliable internet connection in order to use Realm Works effectively. I'm sure you can think of some video games that have been burned by that approach, if you're into that sort of thing.

While I agree, there are games that support both, I am rather mystified why you create something as grand as RW, and I am loving it BTW. But then fail to have a fundamental feature as live reveal via a player edition connected up to the realm?

That's a kin to designing a VTT that does not support anyone else from connecting to the host in and seeing the VT from their players view....On the off chance that maybe not everyone has a network?

on a side note, why not support sync via local player to host connection? That is about as common a feature as it gets for sharing.

I get it, you had to decide what's in and whats not, but it is really hard to understand the thought process of RW with its amazing cloud feature, but not have live reveal?

 

[Joe]

I'd point you to these threads about the almanacs:

Custom Almanacs
Story Almanac vs. World Almanac

To summarize my view: there should be an "almanac" that shows everything, and then zero or more "almanacs" that form subsets for quick filtering. The fixed almanacs (everything must be in one or the other) aren't that useful.

We can fake this by leaving everything in one of the two Almanacs and filtering on tags, but having better support in the UI would be nice.

Thanks for the links. I'll take a look.

The main purpose of the split almanac is to make it simple and easy for novice users to have a logical division between what's "in focus" in the story right now and what is backstory, history, or far off kingdoms that won't be visited anytime soon. Originally, we were going to handle this with tags and filtering, but those are more advanced concepts that we didn't want to require novices to learn.

That said, we want to keep the Story Almanac/World Almanac "system" as simple as possible. It is intended to provide very basic but very useful functionality to the majority of users. Adding complexity to this system caters to a smaller cadre of advanced users at the expense of more basic users.

For advanced users, tags and filtering are much more powerful and customizable for this purpose. A topic can have multiple tags on it, while it can only be in a single almanac at a time. This also means that you can search and filter across tags quite easily, while the same is not possible for multiple almanacs. Tags can be concealed from the player so that the GM can use it for their purposes only if desired. Making the almanac system as flexible as the tag system would also make it just as complex, not to mention duplicating functionality (and likely code). We want to avoid both of these things.

What I'm hearing though is that you like the ease of using the Almanacs. Right now, tags and filtering are unfinished. What is needed is a way to easily save and recall sets of tags and filters. This would be the holy grail for advanced users, who are looking for both power and flexibility, but also ease of use. It also satisfies the needs of novice users, who won't need to dive into that system until they are comfortable, and can continue to use a simpler approach for as long as it suits them.

 

[AEIOU]

Yes. Saved and easy to access tags and filters would definitely be useful and very appreciated. And I agree that the story/world almanacs are truly quite useful as the number of categories increases.

 

[Joe]

@Exmortis

Like I said, we may look into doing something like that at some point in the future. We didn't tackle it first because we're a small team and can't do everything at once, so we prioritize and focus on our initial vision.

There's a lot of cool stuff that could be done if players had full, live access to the realm at their fingertips, but there's also some challenges. Philosophically, we want to preserve the unique magic that RPGs have. That's why the initial model for a GM using realm works at the table has a central, public presentation (Player View). This keeps the players directly engaged with the GM and each other, changing the "normal" interaction model as little as possible.

It's harder to do that with 6 people at a table who all have their heads buried in their laptops. It's a fundamental change to the interaction model. Instead of all the players focusing on a shared presentation of the content, they are focusing on their own personal presentation. Instead engaging the GM with questions about the game world, they are typing in searches. That's not to say that it isn't worth exploring (it might be nice to get a few less "What was that guy's name again?" questions!), but that's why we didn't go there first.

 

[rob]

BUT this does lead me to a question...

Is your statement implying that Items Identified in the story side (checked green), then moved to the world side are no longer visible even if still checked on (ie Green)?
or
Are you removing the "flag" (toggling back to an off position) and relocating it back to the World to be "reallocated" and switched on at a later time?

I would leave everything revealed. I would simply move the topic back to the World side to reflect its nature as "historical reference" for the players. At the point that the villain suddenly reappeared in the story, I would then move the topic to the Story side again. Does that help???

 

[rob]

Perhaps the Player Client could give the players the ability to categorize information in their own view as either "Currently relevant" or "Not currently relevant". This would allow them to organize information in a way that will be useful to them (or at least, that they think will be useful to them...), independently of the way that the GM has categorized it. This will give them some organizational ability, without tipping the GM's hand.

Long-term, this is something worth pursuing. However, now we have the players directly making attribute changes on your content. That makes things more complicated, since we now have to split that state out from the topics and track it separately for each player. It also requires that players now have to fiddle with this stuff and track it all themselves for everything, which diminishes the likelihood of them using Player Edition - or, at the very least, that feature. As Joe indicated above, our goal is to make Realm Works incredibly useful for the average user and the typical player. If we cater solely to the super-users out there, we'll have a product that is way too daunting for 80+% of gamers, and the product will commercially fail as a result. Nobody wants that.

 

[rob]

While I agree, there are games that support both, I am rather mystified why you create something as grand as RW, and I am loving it BTW. But then fail to have a fundamental feature as live reveal via a player edition connected up to the realm?

That's a kin to designing a VTT that does not support anyone else from connecting to the host in and seeing the VT from their players view....On the off chance that maybe not everyone has a network?

on a side note, why not support sync via local player to host connection? That is about as common a feature as it gets for sharing.

I get it, you had to decide what's in and whats not, but it is really hard to understand the thought process of RW with its amazing cloud feature, but not have live reveal?

First of all, Joe's statement that we "might" support "live reveal" is him just being cautious. He's trying to hedge on things, because he's not sure what he is or isn't allowed to share about the evolution plan for Realm Works. That responsibility falls to me.

So...

What you call "live reveal" is something we think of as "continuous syncing". And continuous sync is definitely part of the evolution plan for Realm Works. It has been from the start. However, doing continuous sync is significantly more complicated than what we're currently doing. There's a long list of nasty considerations that need to be handled for continuous sync, and many of them are going to be non-obvious until you look closely at the problem. So we started with something that's less complicated yet still highly useful, with syncing being performed when a realm is unloaded. We'll be looking at continuous sync in 2015.

As for local syncing, I believe you're overlooking two very important details. First, a large number of GMs do not trust their players. That means player syncing has to identify only the material revealed (in the future, only to that one player) and send only that information to the players. On top of that, it needs to track what information has already been sent so that it only sends the subset that has actually changed. That's a LOT of complexity that would entail vast amounts of extra work to support. Not just that, but now we have to deal with fun issues like communications failures during the syncing that result in everything being messed up. It's just not realistic to try to do that. You "common" reference seems to conflate what's done for extremely simple tasks (e.g. a simple VTT client) with something having the complexity of Realm Works.

The above concerns are overshadowed by something even more critical and non-obvious. How do we handle users syncing between themselves and now having multiple different computers - GMs and players combined - all possessing differing sets of data? Let's assume you have a desktop and a laptop. Let's further assume your players each have a desktop and laptop on which they will want to use Player Edition. You run your game and the players sync directly to you, but you don't sync to the server. You're playing at your friend's house and he's a player, so that player now wants to sync everything to his desktop after the game - but you're still driving home. So now his desktop is not in sync with his laptop unless he syncs the two directly, which means we also have to support player-to-player syncing or your players are stuck until you've finally synced.

More concerning, let's say you spend a few minutes after the game to update some information in your realm before you go home and those changes involve the content you've already synced to your players, then you sync to the cloud. When your players next try to cloud sync, their content is now at odds with what's on the server (just like if you make changes both on your desktop and laptop), so their only choice is to download everything again. If a player goes home early from the game, he's in the exact same boat. I could go on with further examples, but the bottom line is that it all gets very convoluted unless everything routes through a single sharepoint, which is the cloud.

For tools like a VTT, the GM's computer is the single sharepoint, so everything is nice and easy. It's easy to conflate aspects of the two tools, but they are hugely different in very fundamental ways.

 

[AEIOU]

Your poor beta team has a lot of work ahead of it. I hope you are sending them cookies and beer....

 

[Farling]

While I agree, there are games that support both, I am rather mystified why you create something as grand as RW, and I am loving it BTW. But then fail to have a fundamental feature as live reveal via a player edition connected up to the realm?

It isn't "fundamental" for my requirements.

I would say it is "fundamental" for a VTT, but not for a campaign information manager.

 

[Exmortis]

First of all, Joe's statement that we "might" support "live reveal" is him just being cautious. He's trying to hedge on things, because he's not sure what he is or isn't allowed to share about the evolution plan for Realm Works. That responsibility falls to me.

So...

What you call "live reveal" is something we think of as "continuous syncing". And continuous sync is definitely part of the evolution plan for Realm Works. It has been from the start. However, doing continuous sync is significantly more complicated than what we're currently doing. There's a long list of nasty considerations that need to be handled for continuous sync, and many of them are going to be non-obvious until you look closely at the problem. So we started with something that's less complicated yet still highly useful, with syncing being performed when a realm is unloaded. We'll be looking at continuous sync in 2015.

As for local syncing, I believe you're overlooking two very important details. First, a large number of GMs do not trust their players. That means player syncing has to identify only the material revealed (in the future, only to that one player) and send only that information to the players. On top of that, it needs to track what information has already been sent so that it only sends the subset that has actually changed. That's a LOT of complexity that would entail vast amounts of extra work to support. Not just that, but now we have to deal with fun issues like communications failures during the syncing that result in everything being messed up. It's just not realistic to try to do that. You "common" reference seems to conflate what's done for extremely simple tasks (e.g. a simple VTT client) with something having the complexity of Realm Works.

The above concerns are overshadowed by something even more critical and non-obvious. How do we handle users syncing between themselves and now having multiple different computers - GMs and players combined - all possessing differing sets of data? Let's assume you have a desktop and a laptop. Let's further assume your players each have a desktop and laptop on which they will want to use Player Edition. You run your game and the players sync directly to you, but you don't sync to the server. You're playing at your friend's house and he's a player, so that player now wants to sync everything to his desktop after the game - but you're still driving home. So now his desktop is not in sync with his laptop unless he syncs the two directly, which means we also have to support player-to-player syncing or your players are stuck until you've finally synced.

More concerning, let's say you spend a few minutes after the game to update some information in your realm before you go home and those changes involve the content you've already synced to your players, then you sync to the cloud. When your players next try to cloud sync, their content is now at odds with what's on the server (just like if you make changes both on your desktop and laptop), so their only choice is to download everything again. If a player goes home early from the game, he's in the exact same boat. I could go on with further examples, but the bottom line is that it all gets very convoluted unless everything routes through a single sharepoint, which is the cloud.

For tools like a VTT, the GM's computer is the single sharepoint, so everything is nice and easy. It's easy to conflate aspects of the two tools, but they are hugely different in very fundamental ways.

Thanks Rob thats a fantastic run down of the issues faced when working with such a feature, and I very much appreciate the time you took to provide it.

I am master slave kind of guy, so I was only thinking GM to player(s), and player to GM as a sharepoint.

AS I stated I am loving Realm Works, and a little tip of the hat to you rteam, as complex and all encompasing as RW is? It is not that hard to delve into, I watched a few tutorials then just head long began to work, and so far it does not seem to have a "wrong" way to do anything. I am sure there are better ways, but even though my current Realm is being archived in favour of a new one, which is my own IP ground up, I so far am extremely happy with what has been delivered.

I look forward to growing with RW and HL.