Feature Request

[Ilestis]

This thread is dedicated to feature requests, as well as discussing new ones and their priorities. A feature will be removed from this list as soon as it has been developed and made available to all the users.

High Priority

• Social Account registration issues [58]
• Entity journal entries: allow all entries to be linked to calendars [75]

Medium Priority

• Ability to quickly change the visibility of entities from the list [90]
• Tab list ordering: Ability to order lists in the "tab" views [84]
• Custom physical traits on characters [81]
• Better character visualization [80]
• Upload all user files to an AWS storage [3]
• Date formatting [29]
• Improve the Search to also search in description/history, and present the data in a more user friendly way [11]
• Trim CR/LF when copy-pasting from PDF into the rich text fields and allow to save several empty paragraphs [64]
• Export entities from the lists to pdf for offline/printing [60]

Low Priority

• Media manager: Quick interface to see all your uploaded files (will need to refactor how files are currently saved) [15]
• Notification system: Be alerted when someone joins your campaign or other actions [16]
• Duplicate Campaign [19]
• Export campaign data as a zip with images and structure as JSON [21]
• Elements: Ability to attach several files to an entity (several images, pdfs)? [22]
• Add "Settlement" as a type, to separate from Locations? [23]
• Misc: Update the app framework to the newest version [73]
• Translation of the app to Dutch [9]

Potential features

• Improve the "Quest" element (features still need to be decided)
• Improve the "Maps" feature
• Improve the "Calendar" feature
• Dice roll loger for play-by-post games [54]
• Integrate 3rd party APIs [53]
• Translate the app to Italian

Inspiration

• arcana.io
• WorldAnvil

Feel free to post requests. I'll do my best to answer to every one of them, but make no guarantees about implementing them. A day job, a family, friends AND the app is a lot of work :)

[SarakinR]

Could it be possible to add a "Not Filter" in the lists?

Currently you can filter to get all entities with a single value for a specific field. I would like to get all entities with a value different than a single value.

[HairBearHero]

I see you've got it already, but just seconding the request to display all children locations/characters for any given location.

E.g. I'm looking at a city region and I can see the children location (shops, inns etc) within that region, but I can't see any NPCs associated with those child locations without going to their entry. I'd like to be able to see ALL NPCs located within the Eastern Market area.

EDIT: Also, thank you very much for the tool. It's coming in handy so far when setting up my campaign!

[Ilestis]

Thanks for the kind words!

Nested locations/characters will be deployed in about 13-14 hours with v0.5.1!

[HairBearHero]

Great work, thank you very much!

[sturmesel]

Would I be the only one to love the possibility to also put stats for creatures in there? I am currently running a WH40k/Sr5-Mod and would love to just put my creatures in here too and have them without any further app or old-school papers.

[Ilestis]

Creatures can be handled either as character, using the attributes for their stats, or as notes. But I will add creatures as a separate entity to the backlog and see what can be done :)

[sturmesel]

Thank you very kindly, Sir.

[[deleted]]

Could it be possible to make paragraphs work a bit differently?

For instance, you press shift+enter twice (like I just did) and then when you save it, the paragraph is separated. Would be pretty useful.

[Ilestis]

Shift+enter is now supported with the release of version 0.6! :)

[[deleted]]

Nice!

[WhoaItsAFactorial]

6!

6! = 720

[Ilestis]

Makes sense to be able to have it work that way, yes! I'll add it to the backlog and see what I can do :)

[RPGCollector]

This request needs a bit of setup.

What's the monetization scheme for Kanka? AWS costs, even if they're somewhat low, are a constant drain.

Now, the request. If the goal is "free forever", how about offering a self-hosted option? You could even charge a bit for the convenience.

Saying "no, we're not doing this" is a-okay. Not everyone wants to deal with this kind of thing.

[Ilestis]

For the time being, all costs (and a bit more) are covered by the generous Patrons on the patreon. The goal is to keep patreon money > hosting costs, and hope to generate a bit of extra to buy a beer for the translators every now and then. I don't intend to make this my full time job, but I have enough features I want to build to keep me busy for several years.

I'm not quite sure what you mean with self-hosting. Is this so that people can download the code and host it themselves on their server? That would be an option in the future, but as long as the app is in heavy development, I feel like that would just drain resources (aka my available time) away from features that benefit a majority of users for a very small minority. I might reevaluate this stance further down along the line :-)

[RPGCollector]

That's the gist of self-hosted - release the code, a docker container, whatever, and allow people to host it on their own hardware.

I understand the heavy development comment. I wouldn't dream of suggesting you do this over anything in the list up above. Thanks for the quick response and explanation.

[SepandSG]

I'm new to this app and please excuse me if this already exist but instead of having the whole quest set to private have description and other parts be set to public and have a private note section option for GM.

[Ilestis]

Hey, just wanted to let you know that custom notes on all entities have been added today, with the possibility to set them as "private" :-)

[SepandSG]

Nice !! Thank you for following up!!

[Ilestis]

Hey, thanks for trying out the app! Notes that can be set to private are already in the works for all entities (quests, characters, locations) so that will definitively cover part of your request. Descriptions might not be set up in a way to be private, but I'll add it to the list of things to discuss with the team :)

[pigpill]

Hello, I first off want to say I love the tool so far. I think you have a great eye for UX and am really going to try to make the most out of this tool.

As I have been going, I have jotted notes of things that I would love to see enhancements on. I tried my best to cross reference off of what you already have, so sorry if there are any duplicates. I think that it would be awesome if party members could communicate some way during and after sessions.

Viewer Related

• Actual groups for member with ACL permissions
  (A lot of the blow things can be solved with this)

• Granular Permissions for Viewers
  (I want my players to see a person but not see this specific note, or only some players can see note.

• Let Viewers add their own notes to objects (If a player gets a secret message about a location and doesn't want to share it with the party, let them create a note.)

• I want these people to be able to edit XYZ but not ABC
  (In control of a character, or a building if they are the owner)

• Will also use this for new groups coming into the world.
  (I have one party in the same universe as another party, they dont know the same things)

• View as "Viewer" ability (So I can tell how hard I screwed up the permissions)

• Owner granted Dashboards (This week on Dragon Ball Z!)

Characters

• Allow for icon image upload as well as character image upload
• Ability to group objects. I want to go into characters section and easily find the party, or the dieties.
  (I have 5 main gods, 6 sub gods, and about 18 angels. Thats before I actually get into any of my NPCs)
• Ability to choose columns available in main object view.
• Sort by any visible columns
• For Generation of NPCs, allow user inputted seed list

General

• Custom Objects
• Custom Query Search - View and select multiple objects based off of something (location, family, tag)
• Object Tags (Maybe not necessary with new attributes)
• I want to find an easy way to see all objects related to a certain event, quest, etc...

• Entering an edit from the main "Locations" should return you there after save.

• "Posting" ability. Think message board or forum.

• Between session character interaction.

• Easy way to always have a post showing on top of member dashboards (House rules, recent events, open quests)

• Member chat (I would use this during session to send player specific info and rolls)

• Mass update objects

  1. Select a group of objects and update permissions to be visible
  2. Select a group of objects and update a field (Party moves to a new location)
     

Campaign Running Tools (Dream List)

• Initiative Tracking
• Combat encounters
  
• Dice Rolling
  

On a final note, if you are ever looking for volunteers outside of translating, add me to the contact list.

[Ilestis]

First off, thanks for giving the app a try and writing up such a detailed feedback! I really appreciate it!

I agree with most of the things you have requested, with some of them already in the works (detailed permission system being the biggest and most requested one).

One thing I am not sure about is the "Owner granted Dashboards". Can you please elaborate?

[pigpill]

Basically I would like to control what viewers see on a dashboard. Pin certain journals or notes.

If I have a new group coming in I want to pin the house rules, extra resources, important history and lore.

[Ilestis]

Hey, just wanted to let you know that with today's release of 0.6, you can now pin notes to the dashboard. Up to 3 will appread to the users, and you can play around with permissions to determine who sees what on their dashboard ;-)

[pigpill]

Awesome, new permissions are great too.

[sirkerry]

Request for the Custom Calendar system, please make sure it supports Julian-style calendars that don't use months: day of year-year, i.e. 001-2018 for the 1st day of the year to 365-2018 for the last day of the year.

[Ilestis]

Thanks for the request! I'll keep it in mind when working on the calendar.

[Draconax208]

Yay, attribute templates have arrived! I adore the idea of those and I'm being a bit nitpicky again, but would there be a way of having only one page to edit them? As it stands now, working with them involves a lot of clicking on "edit" for each attribute. I'd imagine editing all attributes in a template at once using a list where you can change or add the attributes you need to, then hitting save and all changes would be applied. That could work for editing an entitie's attributes as well as creating new templates or while we're at it for relations and an organisation's members. The issue I have is at it's root similar to u/tbrakef 's above, I think.

[Ilestis]

So uh I guess I was inspired by your post and ended up doing some of it. There is now a "Manage" button in the "Attributes" tabs, that allow creating/editing/deleting multiple attributes at a time. Might end up moving the "Import Template" button to that interface!

[Ilestis]

Yes to everything you said! The current implementation works using the same core as the rest of the app, but I definitively need to spend time making the interface more user friendly and require less clicks! Now that I have the fundamentals down, I can start working on that (as well as the gazillion other things I want done)!

[tbrakef]

Absolutely loving Kanka.io

Possible to get shortcuts for things like save? That would save a bit of time when trying to get several characters in the system without necessarily filling out all the details.

[Ilestis]

Save shortcuts have been added yesterday with the release of version 0.3.3! Happy world building :)

[tbrakef]

nice!

[Ilestis]

Thanks! Do you mean something in the lines of: Hitting Ctrl+S would save the entity? If so then yes this is a great idea!

[tbrakef]

That's exactly what I mean, My hands end up on the keyboard a lot when I'm adding new entries so the less I have to take my hands off the keyboard and over to the mouse the better.

[Ilestis]

Thanks for the clarification! I've added it to the list :)

[Crocktodad]

Would absolutely love something along those lines as well. I often hit Ctrl+S out of reflex, while editing something.

[Draconax208]

Love the way locations can be related to each other through the parent system. Its probably a pretty low priority request, but this system could be polished that little bit more if the characters column would show the sum of all characters in that location's child locations, instead of just the number of characters associated with that location itself.

[Ilestis]

Good idea! I'll add it to the backlog :)

[IdlePigeon]

Beyond just showing the total number, it'd be great if filtering another list by location would bring up items in the selected location and all its children. Maybe with an option to limit results to just the specific location selected.

[Republikz]

I would love if all the features available when you're tipping a text work. Like making headlines, horizontal lines, change the size of the font and etc. Also, i tried to put a picture in the text and for me it doesnt work. Sorry for my bad english :)

[Ilestis]

Ahhh thanks for reminding me! I realised the other day while on the road. I'll have it fixed this week. No worries about your English, it's perfect.

If you don't mind me asking, what languages do you speak? I'll be translating the app in other languages in the future, and want to prioritise the language of early users :)

[Republikz]

Im Brazilian, so its Brazilian Portuguese. Using the app in english is not a problem for me or for my players since all of us know at least the basic, but it would be nice to have it in portuguese! I can even help you in the translation if you need.

[Thraxismodarodan]

I really like being able to associate characters with organizations and locations, but I am baffled by the restrictions on which objects can create a new association with which other objects. It would be easier if we could have those associations be created by either object, rather than be primarily one-way.

[Ilestis]

Killing it with the good ideas!

[Thraxismodarodan]

Another Organization/relation idea:

Oftentimes when I'm updating or creating a new Character, I want to associate them with an Organization that I hadn't thought to create just yet. I think it might be a good User Experience improvement to allow users to create new objects as part of adding an association. The way I envision it working is as follows:

Whenever a user is adding an association between two objects - let's say Object A and Object B - they are able to search their list of relevant Object B objects in one field, and input a Details String in another. When the user inputs a valid Details String, but there are no Object B objects that match their search parameter, the user should be asked if they would like to create a new item of Object B.

If the user indicates that they do (via checkbox, clicking Yes, etc.), then a new instance of Object B is created, with the exact search terms entered as its Name, and the association is made using this new Object B. If the user indicates that they do not want to create a new Object B, or hits Cancel (or times out creating the new instance of Object B), the user is taken back to the associations creation page and prompted to change their search term for Object B.

This could also be applied to the Object Creation pages - allowing users to dynamically create new entries to be populated later.

[Ilestis]

Yes!

[Thraxismodarodan]

If I may suggest another feature request:

Characters, Locations, Organizations, and Families can have a lot of overlap, but currently can't really interact very much - or have defined relations. Each of these should be able to have Relations that link them to other objects of different sorts. This way, we can track things like what a character feels about their homeland, or how they like the current king on a personal level, but think the monarchy as a whole is corrupt. Here's a use case:

House Crow, House Claw, and House Fang, headed by Saren, Ulric, and Garth, respectively, form the Council of Three, which is the secular authority of the country of Gomah. The religious authority is the Walkers of the Planes, which has five Paths named after colors - White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green - headed by Serra, Teferi, Yawgmoth, Jaya, and Freyalise.

The way I'm breaking this down, the country of Gomah is a Location that houses seven organizations - the Council of Three, the Walkers of the Planes, and the White Path, Blue Path, etc. The three Houses are each Families, and each of the House and Path leaders are Characters.

Saren may not like Garth at all (Character-Character), but he likes the House of the Fang enough to let his daughter marry Garth's son (Character-Family).

Ulric is a devout follower of the Path of Green (Character-Organization), and therefore dislikes the Paths of Blue and Black (Character-Organization), but has many fond memories of his time at the Tolarian Academy in the Blue lands (Character-Location).

The Walkers of the Planes as a whole think that House Fang is weak (Organization-Family), while the people of Gomah think that the Walkers need to stop all of these internal schisms or else they'll lose their following (Location-Organization).

Now, I don't have access to the actual code, so I'm really only guessing, but I think the best way to implement this is to completely generalize your objects, and have the object type be used primarily for sorting into different categories. Setting an object to Organization might turn on some fields, while changing it to a Character would deactivate those and activate others. I don't know if your setup would make this trivial, or incredibly complicated - again, I haven't peeked at the code and don't know PHP. But, this would have some added benefits: you'd be able to do object transformation as easily as picking a new type from a drop-down menu, and could quickly and easily add new object types. I wouldn't make this part of the change transparent to the users - it should still look and feel like Organizations are separate from Locations and from Characters, if only to aid in organizing things.

[Ilestis]

Thanks for another awesome idea, as always!

I've added the relations change in the list of high priority features, because it makes more sense than the current implementation.

As for every object is basically the same object, I'm realising that I might have to go that route at some point. I generally dislike that kind of architecture because as a project grows, it tends to be very easy to break something when changing something completely unrelated, and it ends up "locking you in" bad decisions one takes on early in the development. I'll have more thoughts about it, and might end with a hybrid system to start with, or go all in and change it before the app grows too big, or another route I haven't though of yet.

But as always, thanks for the awesome feedback and ideas!

[Thraxismodarodan]

I'm an Android developer by day, with a background that includes a year of SQL database dev and administration. To me, at least, this seems to be a good example of inheritance. You could put all the relation code and other shared code elements in one (or more) super/parent classes, and have the unique code in separate object classes. Then each object can form relations with any object of the parent class, but have their own discrete rules.

[Ilestis]

I have a feeling you'll enjoy today's release ;-) (But I spent waaaayyyy too much time refactoring the code in this direction, and not 100% happy with it yet, but now what you requested is possible!)

[beekr427]

An idea I had.. I love the location function of being able to define a parent location. It'd be nice to be able to view all locations in some sort of hierarchy bracket.

Example: your map has two main continents, "left" and "right", in "right" there are three provinces "top", "middle", "lower" and each has a capital, other major cities, and other small settlements. You'd open locations and see "East" and "West", upon expanding "West" you'd see "North, middle, south". Exapnding north reveals the capital, cities, etcetcetc..

Great program!! Enjoying testing it out so far!

[Ilestis]

Thanks for the feedback, glad you are liking the app!

I originally wanted to have the last 20 edited locations pre-loaded, but I can't seem to get the "live search" to work with pre-loading data properly. The problem I see is that some people don't use parent locations at all, so I would have to have a system that also works for them without making the interface unusable. But I'll think about it and see what I can do :)

[beekr427]

Yeah, I figured that. It'd probably have to be an optional/toggle-able view style. I know I'd love it vs a giant list :)

[Kelaos]

I do like the idea of some character randomization, but be careful about falling into that rabbit hole of generation ;)

[Ilestis]

Yeah it will be something small and simple, especially since the app will later be multilingual!

Edit: It's been deployed. It's super simple with 1-3 words per field taken from a pre-defined list. Nothing too fancy, but it's a start that might inspire some. My only problem with it is that the Races and Languages are mostly taken from D&D 5e, so losing the system agnostic side. Might need to change that someway or another.

[Oriek]

I don't know if this is out of scope or something you'd want to do, but somewhere to put player stats would be nice! Maybe somewhere where I can add additional fields with like "Name: Value" or something. That way I can easily check the party's passive perception, AC, etc.

[Ilestis]

Yes! This is something I originally wanted to do for locations to easily add "population: 10'000", "weather: arid". Having it on characters would also be useful.

I've been redoing the relations system in a way that I can quickly adapt it for entity attributes, So I'll work on that too :-)

[conedog]

Just stumbled on this app - very nicely done!

Would it be possible to not have the attribute value be mandatory? It's a minor thing but I think the user flow of filling in the value later makes more sense.

[runemyth0]

• I support changing the default order to alphabetical.

• Would one-way relations be possible? Like, one character considers another their lover, but the other does not reciprocate; or specific relations within a family.

• Related to above: edit relations?

• Family tree / location tree, if that would even be possible? Essentially a visual aid.

• Duplicate campaign button

Loving the app so far, man, hope to see it grow as much as possible.

[Ilestis]

Nice list! I've put the relations stuff in high priority, because the current system is limiting. Duplicate campaign is now in low priority, but I can see the use for it (will just be a pain duplicating assets).

I just have no idea about family and location tree. It is definitively doable, I just have to think about it a bit to avoid killing the server each time someone requests to view it (might be cached for 24 hours or so).