Reveal to a single player not all

[lfseeney]

Gave it awhile to get updated.

Checking to see if the reveal to 1 or more char, not whole party, is in yet?

Our games get a bit deep and knowing who knows what or at least what they think they know would help keep things straight.

Thanks
Lee

 

[Parody]

Nope. The big project is still the Player version.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Not likely to occur soon either.
Multiple hurtles to over come ( multiple user sync being just one major one)
I would expect seeing importing/ exporting data, print functions , & custom calendars to be next likely candidates (no particular order) since some ground work / beta testing has already been done

 

[rob]

Not likely to occur soon either.
Multiple hurtles to over come ( multiple user sync being just one major one)
I would expect seeing importing/ exporting data, print functions , & custom calendars to be next likely candidates (no particular order) since some ground work / beta testing has already been done

I don't believe that's accurate. The bulk of the internal work to support individual player reveal was done last year. In fact, one of the delays we've experienced with Player Edition involves making sure the internals for managing individual player reveal all work cleanly. There is still some internal work left to do, but it would be less than some of the other big tasks on our todo list. The biggest remaining chunk of work with individual player reveal is weaving it cleanly into the user-interface.

I would say that the overall amount of work involved for adding individual player reveal is comparable to some of the tasks you listed above. The question then becomes which features are in higher demand by users, as that will be a significant component in our prioritization of tasks after Player Edition finally goes out. I'm not sure if there's a thread for this in the Feature Request forum, but there definitely should be, as the votes there will be important to that prioritization.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

I don't believe that's accurate. The bulk of the internal work to support individual player reveal was done last year. In fact, one of the delays we've experienced with Player Edition involves making sure the internals for managing individual player reveal all work cleanly. There is still some internal work left to do, but it would be less than some of the other big tasks on our todo list. The biggest remaining chunk of work with individual player reveal is weaving it cleanly into the user-interface.

I would say that the overall amount of work involved for adding individual player reveal is comparable to some of the tasks you listed above.

I was making that determination based on your supposition below ....I was reading into this that if there are multiple changes of varied types (reveal among them) makes the sync and the "custom reveal" more complex.

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.

Glad to hear its not as extensive as first thought... this leads me to believe, (combining the two posts) that the only "hard part yet to be visited" would be the "live portion"?

"Live" would be a bonus (been hoping for that in hero lab for years), its not a deal breaker for me either. As others have posted .. I utilize RW as a management tool, not a VTT.

The question then becomes which features are in higher demand by users, as that will be a significant component in our prioritization of tasks after Player Edition finally goes out. I'm not sure if there's a thread for this in the Feature Request forum, but there definitely should be, as the votes there will be important to that prioritization.

I'm sure there are varied +1 listings for features.. and I assume Liz / Colen (I know assume is dangerous) may have better insight as to where those "counts are" or the ability to develop polls (I have that on another forum I write for)
So per Rob's Request,
Here is my attempt.

http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=50809

 

[kate]

Well, I'd like to +1 individual player reveal. Not just for secrets, either - I want to be able to show players background information particular to their origins and skills.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Well, I'd like to +1 individual player reveal. Not just for secrets, either - I want to be able to show players background information particular to their origins and skills.

+1 to this I agree Kate..... empower the player with there own back histories

 

[rob]

One of the things we ended up having to do for Player Edition over recent past weeks was implement a chunk of the logic involved in individual player reveal on the server. So more of the groundwork is now in place than before. However, all of that logic has been implemented exclusively on the server where it's needed. Support individual player reveal is still a sizable task, but it's on the same general level as custom calendars, printing, and default font size control for snippets. Consequently, you'll find it on the upcoming survey as an option that users can vote for.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

Good info thanks for detail Rob

 

[pyremius]

Are you still looking at doing per-character reveal (for instances where one player has two characters), or only per-player reveal?

 

[rob]

Are you still looking at doing per-character reveal (for instances where one player has two characters), or only per-player reveal?

It would be the former. You would create a number of personae for your realm, with each player having one by default. If a player has two different characters, or if you want to track what a particular NPC knows, you could create additional personae for those situations. Then you could control what's revealed to those individual personae.

 

[Ladyofdragons]

It would be the former. You would create a number of personae for your realm, with each player having one by default. If a player has two different characters, or if you want to track what a particular NPC knows, you could create additional personae for those situations. Then you could control what's revealed to those individual personae.

That is...awesome. I look forward to this, I'm glad you guys are taking the time to do it this way, it seems uber-flexible.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

+1to this,as my players have multiple characters they are managing at times. Would this allow the player to have multiple characters open (like hero lab allows?) or simply have multiple characters residing in on realm?

 

[rob]

+1to this,as my players have multiple characters they are managing at times. Would this allow the player to have multiple characters open (like hero lab allows?) or simply have multiple characters residing in on realm?

That's unknown at this point in time. Letting players view what's know from the perspective of multiple characters at the same time will likely introduce an extra level of complexity for us. Depending on how much complexity that is, we may or may not support that in the first release of the functionality. Players may need to switch between personae and view each one independently, at least in the first iteration. We may also be able to leverage functionality we'll already need for GMs to provide the capability for players. I can't commit on this until we're looking more closely at what's involved.

 

[Dark Lord Galen]

@Rob..
that works.. thanks for clarified response....could the ability to open multiple sessions (aka like Herolab) be an approach? then you would not have a lot of internal coding would you?
Though would this approach would require multiple cloud links for players thus multiple accounts?