Keeping it all organized

[Raptori]

I tried out Free Mind - it's a really nice solution for creating mind maps, but it's not really appropriate when you have blocks of text. Shame really, it'd have been a familiar way to organise. For now I'm going to just adapt a mini website I made for work this week, shouldn't take long - I'll post some screenshots when I'm done, happy to provide the code (though the requirements of understanding html and having a server somewhere might be a bit of a barrier!)

I'll take this opportunity to plug my app which is linked in my sig. I built ViewingDale for exactly this kind of purpose where it can embed and link up sets of maps in a zoom browser way. You can also attach links to the map for text files, video, pictures, music etc as well. So the idea is that you organize your information around the map. I.e. you zoom down to a village then to a house and attach a text file to that to describe it. You can also use the same link for multiple places so that you can link every single horse in the world to the text file containing horse movement rates and carrying capacities etc. Then next time you add a horse into the map you will get the link on it as well.

I have a video of that (alt link to same video) where you can zoom down and get a piccy of a person linked from the map.

Failing that I would recommend a wiki as the next best option but personally I think its a big gap between the usability of having the information directly attached to the map to one where you have to separately navigate to the wiki entry as well.

Watched the vid and read a bit of the site, and I feel a bit ambivalent about it. It looks like it's got great performance and really smooth zooming, and I get the distinct impression it's a very well made piece of software. However, to me it looks more suited to rping itself than worldbuilding (though that could very easily be a false impression); there are a few things that appear to be missing from a worldbuilding point of view.

For example:
• How does it work with distortion due to map projections, and can you project the map onto a 3D globe instead of a flat rectangle?
• Can you use it to measure distances and areas?
• What happens if you rename linked files outside the program?
• Can you link between different text files?
• What about categorisation for ease of editing?

Obviously different people build worlds in completely different ways, so that list of issues is probably irrelevant to most people. I definitely agree with you that it makes a lot of sense to use an interactive map as the central hub for worldbuilding, just wondered how feasible it is. Currently, I have Google Earth for the 3D globe providing distance/area measurements (and G.Projector for exporting projected maps), and a load of disorganised crap for the text information - which I plan to organise asap. It's not ideal that they're separated from each other, but since I can open Google Earth on one screen to fly around the world at speed, and open my textual info on the other screen, it's hard to see a big efficiency gain from switching to ViewingDale.

[Raptori]

That went pretty nicely

It's fully responsive (meaning it resizes and rearranges itself to work on whatever screen size you're viewing it on), and has a couple of buttons to make life easier: two to decrease/increase the size of text and one to invert the colours. The menu slides in and out on smaller screen sizes and is permanently visible on larger ones, and the items within the menu are collapsible.

I'm only linking to things in the menu on the left, which is one file that is inserted for all pages (i.e. no links within the text of each page itself). The text for each page is a .txt file containing html within a subfolder. It's simple and, for now, it works! If and when I develop it further I'll convert it to a database driven app, which would make it a lot more flexible and easy to manage, plus all the titles and the menu would be generated automatically.

Screenshots:

Large Screen (desktop)
Light / Dark
large-light.jpglarge-dark.jpg

Medium Screen (tablet)
Closed / Opened
medium-closed.jpgmedium-opened.jpg

Small Screen (phone)
Closed / Opened
small-closed.jpgsmall-opened.jpg

[vorropohaiah]

that looks pretty cool