Calendar and Time tracker tool

[mosat]

Here are some idea's I first suggested for a GMGen plugin. Unfortunately this is an area of PCGen which does not get much development and no new plugins have been created in quite a while.

I have read on some other threads that the a calendar is being planned for the InitTool, I would prefer to see this as a separate tool or at least have calendars and initiative combats be separate file formats. The reason for this is that I see the tool as a little more than a time tracker, I envision the ability to make entries on the calendar which could be an adventure log, GM notes, GM plans for future events, pretty much anything the GM wants to keep track of when it happened or will happen.

So here's a random list of features:

• Custom Calendar definitions. The ability to define a fictional worlds calendar, set the number of days in a year, in a month, in a week. Set the length of the day, some may even suggest custom lengths for hours and minutes but personally an hour or minute that isn't an hour or minute long is something else. So maybe the ability to define a custom time length measurement. Of coarse you would have Earth normal as a default calendar definition.

• Localized Calendars. The calendar definitions cover the basic facts of life of the world but each civilization on that world may have a different calendar. So while a world will always have the same number of days in a year each culture could have their own names for the days and months and each could have it's own year 0 relative to the rest. The tool should be able to have multiple localized calendars and be able to display and hide each as needed.

• So now you have calendar definitions, when you create a new calendar you should be able to select a definition to use for it. Once you have a new calendar you can save it as it's own file.

• As far as the GUI goes I would envision the calendar to look and feel very similar to how time management apps appear, no sense in reinventing the wheel. You should be able to to change the view from month (or a large collection of days) to week (smaller group of days) to a single day view. Atimeline view would also be cool, one where you could adjust the range so that a vast sweep of history could be displayed.

• Create Entries. You should be able to create entries on the calendar which are associated with a specific time. An entry is a place to put text, as such full formatting and the ability to paste rich text format into and out of it would be great.

• Time Tracker. Real world calendar programs don't need this because they simple get told what time it is by checking the computers clock. For our purposes we are tracking a fictional "now" so it's a bit different. I envision the Time tracker as a special calendar entry that when double clicked opens the Time Tracker window. You can have multiple trackers since this would be useful if the party split up or you wanted to track another party playing parallel to the first or even in another era of your campaign world.

Each Time Tracker window would display the name of the tracker the top and display a large clock showing the date and time (you could select which localized calendar the tracker used with apopup menu). Under that would be several rows each with a segment of time starting with year and proceeding to month, week, day, hour, minute, and round. Each row would have a text field with the current value in it allowing you to manual change it to whatever you wanted it, a second text field which is blank but will add whatever value is typed into it to the current value, and a left and right arrows which would adjust the time segment in increments of one. So you can easily click a day ahead if your party is traversing the wilderness and you are simply doing wandering monster checks of you can advance by minutes or rounds if the action is detailed. This is where it would actually benefit from being part of the InitTool, when you entered combat and start clicking rounds by it would advance the Time Tracker at the same time.

An idea I particularly like is the real-time button, click it and the clock starts counting down the seconds just like a real clock. This can be fun if you have a argumentative party and you want a sense of urgency. say they set off a trap which will collapse the cave they are in one minute, click the real time button and give them that to decide what to do and do it.

There can be a calendar entry button on the tracker window, clicking makes a new calendar entry set to the time the tracker is set to, perfect for GM notes or adventure logs.

There can be an event count-down button, clicking that lets you create a count down, give it a name and duration, perhaps a note field. These would be visible on the calendar and would open or alarm when the Time Tracker which created it reached it. Perfect for spells or time limited abilities.

• Categories, layers or groups. Whatever you want to call it it is a way to separate different sets of entries. This should be customizable so users can create their own and call them what they will. This would allow you to have a set for GM notes and a separate set for the adventure log and yet another for theGM's world history.

• Export entries. Of coarse the point of writing detailed adventure logs would be to share it with the group so you should be able to export the entries into an html or rtf (maybe pdf, though I know that is trickier) document. You should be able to control which categories will be exported and in what order (sequentially or latest entry first). some formatting control over the appearance would be nice too.


A friend of mine inspired this idea for me. He runs really detailed political games with huge back stories. He usually has a timeline wherein if the PC's do nothing stuff still happens and a story unravels anyway, usually bad things happen if the PC's are not fast enough. This would be a great tool for him since he could put his timeline it and give his entries alarms which go off when passed by a tracker telling him that some event has come to pass.

So hopefully there's a few new ideas here, what do you think?

[jay]

I have read on some other threads that the a calendar is being planned for the InitTool, I would prefer to see this as a separate tool or at least have calendars and initiative combats be separate file formats. The reason for this is that I see the tool as a little more than a time tracker, I envision the ability to make entries on the calendar which could be an adventure log, GM notes, GM plans for future events, pretty much anything the GM wants to keep track of when it happened or will happen.

Init tool will eventually evolve into a time tracking tool. The idea is to keep all of the time related functionality in one place. We'll be sure to get requirements from the community so that it will be flexible and work for as many gaming systems as possible.

• Custom Calendar definitions. The ability to define a fictional worlds calendar, set the number of days in a year, in a month, in a week. Set the length of the day, some may even suggest custom lengths for hours and minutes but personally an hour or minute that isn't an hour or minute long is something else. So maybe the ability to define a custom time length measurement. Of coarse you would have Earth normal as a default calendar definition.

I agree that this is the most important part of extending init tool into a time tracking tool. I'll create a new tracker for that now and add all of your comments to it.

• Localized Calendars. The calendar definitions cover the basic facts of life of the world but each civilization on that world may have a different calendar. So while a world will always have the same number of days in a year each culture could have their own names for the days and months and each could have it's own year 0 relative to the rest. The tool should be able to have multiple localized calendars and be able to display and hide each as needed.

Adding two calendar definitions shouldn't be that much harder then defining two of them and attaching them to the same point in 'time'.

• So now you have calendar definitions, when you create a new calendar you should be able to select a definition to use for it. Once you have a new calendar you can save it as it's own file.

They will definitely be placed into a campaign specific data file (not to be confused with the map tool campaign file). This would be separate from the encounter files since the calendar is common to all encounters. It would also be kept separate from the game settings and rules files, since these contain game system specific data common to all campaigns. As an example the game file would be for D&D, the campaign file for Forgotten Realms (which would contain the calendar definitions), and encounter files to keep track of the current date/time and the PC’s and NPC’s associated with that date/time.

• As far as the GUI goes I would envision the calendar to look and feel very similar to how time management apps appear, no sense in reinventing the wheel. You should be able to to change the view from month (or a large collection of days) to week (smaller group of days) to a single day view. Atimeline view would also be cool, one where you could adjust the range so that a vast sweep of history could be displayed.

I agree that a calendar view is a requirement. The timeline view is a good idea, I hadn't thought about adding anything like that. I could see it being useful for time traveling in games.

• Create Entries. You should be able to create entries on the calendar which are associated with a specific time. An entry is a place to put text, as such full formatting and the ability to paste rich text format into and out of it would be great.

This would just be an extended version of the timers that are currently available in init tool. I should even be able to make them show up automatically in an init tool encounter when it gets close to expiring..

• Time Tracker. Real world calendar programs don't need this because they simple get told what time it is by checking the computers clock. For our purposes we are tracking a fictional "now" so it's a bit different. I envision the Time tracker as a special calendar entry that when double clicked opens the Time Tracker window. You can have multiple trackers since this would be useful if the party split up or you wanted to track another party playing parallel to the first or even in another era of your campaign world.

Each Time Tracker window would display the name of the tracker the top and display a large clock showing the date and time (you could select which localized calendar the tracker used with apopup menu). Under that would be several rows each with a segment of time starting with year and proceeding to month, week, day, hour, minute, and round. Each row would have a text field with the current value in it allowing you to manual change it to whatever you wanted it, a second text field which is blank but will add whatever value is typed into it to the current value, and a left and right arrows which would adjust the time segment in increments of one. So you can easily click a day ahead if your party is traversing the wilderness and you are simply doing wandering monster checks of you can advance by minutes or rounds if the action is detailed. This is where it would actually benefit from being part of the InitTool, when you entered combat and start clicking rounds by it would advance the Time Tracker at the same time.

I'm thinking that as more advanced timing capabilities are added to init tool that the encounter will turn into your Time Tracker idea. The current date and time will be made a part of the displayed encounter. The combatants in the encounter would be the PC's and NPC's associated with that time period. There would be a way to advance the time for that encounter that would essentially be the same as your Time Tracker dialog. When it is time to manage an encounter in rounds, the GM would just add the other combatants and start the encounter. As each round is completed, the actual date and time for the encounter would increment that much time. This would allow time tracking to flow back and forth between encounters and the rest of the day but not require a change in view. The timers created in combat will automatically update the calendar and as the GM advances the time outside of the combat those timers can expire. This would be very useful when the PC's start casting those 1/hour per level spells. I'll add this as a requirement to the time of day tracker.

• An idea I particularly like is the real-time button, click it and the clock starts counting down the seconds just like a real clock. This can be fun if you have a argumentative party and you want a sense of urgency. say they set off a trap which will collapse the cave they are in one minute, click the real time button and give them that to decide what to do and do it.

This is a good idea. Init Tool already has a built in timer, it should be fairly simple to make it update the date and time as needed. Added to the time of day tracker.

There can be a calendar entry button on the tracker window, clicking makes a new calendar entry set to the time the tracker is set to, perfect for GM notes or adventure logs.

Another good idea. I'll add it to the calendar tracker.

There can be an event count-down button, clicking that lets you create a count down, give it a name and duration, perhaps a note field. These would be visible on the calendar and would open or alarm when the Time Tracker which created it reached it. Perfect for spells or time limited abilities.

Actually, init tool already does this. It is one of the reasons I would like to combine your Time Tracker with the rest of the encounter display.

• Categories, layers or groups. Whatever you want to call it it is a way to separate different sets of entries. This should be customizable so users can create their own and call them what they will. This would allow you to have a set for GM notes and a separate set for the adventure log and yet another for theGM's world history.

This is also built into the current init tool timers, although it isn't currently used in this way. No reason why it can't be extended to implement this as well.

• Export entries. Of coarse the point of writing detailed adventure logs would be to share it with the group so you should be able to export the entries into an html or rtf (maybe pdf, though I know that is trickier) document. You should be able to control which categories will be exported and in what order (sequentially or latest entry first). some formatting control over the appearance would be nice too.

I see this as a requirement as well. Added to the calendar requirements

So hopefully there's a few new ideas here, what do you think?

There are some very good ideas here, and I've assigned all of them to either a calendar tracker or a time of day tracker. I split them this way since I will probably implement the time of day before the calendar.

[huhlig]

Alot of this manages what I was invisioning in the Timeline Manager from the other thread. Big important thing would be the ability to link to events on the timeline both future or past and access it. List of NPCs future maps etc.

[Phergus]

Good stuff. Wish I had this tool today.

[mosat]

Hi jay
A very quick and comprehensive responce, thanks.

Having just recently discovered you guys I've not played much with InitTool much. I use PCGen (suprised?) for this as it's GMGen plugin has an initiative tracker in it. In fact some forum member stumbled onto any earlier version of it in this thread here. This program was eventually folded into GMGen which was then folded into PCGen. This is the reason that this project looked dead, deveolopment had moved elsewhere.

PCGen's initiative tracker has many advantages and drawbacks. The major advantage is that it has full access to the characters in PCGen and can levarage it to do things like display a stat block in the Initiative tab and put links on things like attacks, skills and saves that when clicked allows the computer to make a roll for you. The drawbacks are due to the nature of being part of PCGen, the program is slow and loading a large encounter can take some time. Since it's function is somewhat secondary to PCGen's primary function (character generation) development on the GMGen side is also slow, reported bugs can take many months to get resolved.

I very much like the design philosophy I see at RPTools which is to develope small focused apps which do the job right. I know I can do without GMGen's bells and whistles if I had a small fast app which tracked everthing needed in combat and I believe InitTool has the potencial to be that. I'll download it and read up on the forums to see what others have suggested and you'll probably get some more suggestions from me

[trevor]

On a related note, InitiativeTool and MapTool are the only tools to have rudimentary integration.

I believe you can drag and drop tokens from the initative tool into maptool, and possible the other way around (not sure about that one though)

[jay]

I very much like the design philosophy I see at RPTools which is to develope small focused apps which do the job right. I know I can do without GMGen's bells and whistles if I had a small fast app which tracked everthing needed in combat and I believe InitTool has the potencial to be that. I'll download it and read up on the forums to see what others have suggested and you'll probably get some more suggestions from me

Good! The more input we get the better init tool will be.

We have some far reaching plans to have a character tool that will let the GM & players run their characters and NPCs. By adding scripting to the tool it should be able to support most games. We just haven't got to that point yet.

[jay]

On a related note, InitiativeTool and MapTool are the only tools to have rudimentary integration.

I believe you can drag and drop tokens from the initative tool into maptool, and possible the other way around (not sure about that one though)

You can drag and drop both ways, although I've not tested recently.

[Phergus]

On a related note, InitiativeTool and MapTool are the only tools to have rudimentary integration.

I believe you can drag and drop tokens from the initative tool into maptool, and possible the other way around (not sure about that one though)

You can drag and drop both ways, although I've not tested recently.

Don't believe the drag from MT to IT is working. (Has it worked since the addition of the Token Tree?)

But you can still drag from IT/Group Tool to the map area of MT.