Everything is switched around. I just have a clickable thing at the bottom for “Accomplishments” which has one thing. Major Laterals no longer display the QLD? Did I miss this in the documentation?
Also - is this working as intended? I have a major lateral that is increased by equippable items. The QLD changes, but not the icon associated with it. The ML is 1 and increased by 2 for an equip, it shows the QLD for level 3 of the ML but the icon does not change and stays at 1. Am I doing something wrong?
Unsure if this is related, but my Progress qualities are now displaying in the Progress section and the upper sidebar. I’ll delete this and file a bug report if it’s inappropriate.
I can confirm that. It must be a bug - it makes perfect sense for them to appear in either of those places, but not both.
From the table in the manual, I think it’s meant to be in the upper sidebar, and that’s what distinguishes it from “Story”. But I don’t completely understand the table, and the exact behaviour of the different Status categories feels like it’s still a bit experimental.
Cheers
Richard
Edit - The original version (“defined by its implementation”) was meant to be humorous, but on reflection sounded like a random sideswipe. My apologies. Now altered to be a more accurate reflection of what I intended to say.
edited by Morton on 1/14/2013
I’m wondering if there’s plans to let us just organise the sidebar by hand in the future? I’m having difficulties getting all the different qualities I have organised properly, displaying properly, and put into not-confusing-named drop-downs.
I have to agree. Categorising the sidebar was a great idea, but I think it’s a mistake to fix category names - it’ll limit creativity.
For example, what you’ve called “Achievement” could equally be used for “Terrible Mistake With Consequences To Come”. (“Achievement: Caused The Death Of An Innocent Bystander” doesn’t sound quite right, does it?) And “Minor Lateral” is behind-the-scenes jargon, not something which will make sense to a player.
It could just be an extra free-text field in the definition of the quality. Everything with the same text in that field is grouped together.
Cheers
Richard
[quote=Richard ]I have to agree. Categorising the sidebar was a great idea, but I think it’s a mistake to fix category names - it’ll limit creativity.
For example, what you’ve called “Achievement” could equally be used for “Terrible Mistake With Consequences To Come”. (“Achievement: Caused The Death Of An Innocent Bystander” doesn’t sound quite right, does it?) And “Minor Lateral” is behind-the-scenes jargon, not something which will make sense to a player.
It could just be an extra free-text field in the definition of the quality. Everything with the same text in that field is grouped together.
Cheers
Richard[/quote]
I would totally third this suggestion.
[color=#009900]Thanks for the feedback, folks.[/color]
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We are planning to add tags to qualities, which’ll work the same way as storylets on the CMS side to begin with.[/color]
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[color=#009900]The problem with creator-definable categories that categories aren’t just labelling conceits - they also affect layout, design and even functionality (eg whether a quality is ‘wordy’ or ‘numbery’). An early iteration of SN allowed for much more customisation, but it was really complicated, and we found that it was easier just to revert to a common set of categories. But there are other worlds than these, as the chap said, and I think where we’ll go in the end is probably creator-customisable categories in addition to the default ones, rather like slots (behind the scenes, they probably will in fact be higher-level qualities, like slots). But that’s not likely to happen until after the FL migration.
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[color=#009900](‘Lateral’ is a not a useful name for a player to see, no… which is why we’ve actually taken that label off the sidebar entirely. It appears in FL at the moment, but that’s just a transitional thing.)[/color]
Many thanks for the reply, especially on a release day.
And I would love to be able to define my own categories. At the moment, I’m really just trying all the categories until I find the one which seems to work right… so being able to choose behaviours a la carte would be a very welcome change for me.
But…
It’s actually much more than I intended to suggest. And plainly it would be a lot of work, hence your comment on possible timing. Is there a risk of letting the great be the enemy of the good?
What I was trying to say was: rather than having the groupings in the front-end unbreakably linked to the categories, why not have them default to the categories, but with the ability to override that and create your own groupings? It would be purely cosmetic (or purely descriptive, if you prefer to think of it that way). Each individual quality would retain its existing behaviour, determined by its existing category. The only change would be the sub-heading it appeared under in the sidebar.
This is complete speculation, but it might solve 50% of the grumbles for 5% of the effort.
Cheers
Richard
It would certainly solve most of my grumblings!
(PS: Also thanks to Alexis for the prompt reply, and I understand that messing with this stuff is probably complicated, so appreciate that it might take a while to do anything.)
edited by mek on 1/17/2013
Richard: So what you’re saying roundaboutly is to allow us to change display names for existing categories.
Not quite. Because then - continuing my earlier example - you could have Achievements or you could have (let’s call them) Shames, but you couldn’t have both.
Or to cook up another one, perhaps a particular world is set mostly in England but partly in France, and it pleases the creator to keep all of the France qualities together - even if they’re in different categories. If that’s what makes most sense, narratively speaking, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be allowed.
So, I’m suggesting that the groupings displayed on the front-end should just be different from the back-end categories which define behaviour.
But, I’ve accidentally become a standard-bearer for this. In the interests of full disclosure… I don’t have an immediate use for it. I can imagine caring about it more in the future.
Cheers
Richard