Customizable field types

[drusepth]

We've somewhat touched on this with the differentiation between textarea vs link fields (and furthermore with name and universe tags on fields), but it'd be nice to introduce new field types and make them available to users.

Some suggested field types from users:

• [ ] Integer / numeric fields
• [ ] Sliders / ranges
• [ ] Linked (like the old-style fields)
• [ ] Private fields

[thetrumper]

I'd also like to recommend adding the ability to add custom "suggested ideas" for each field. For example, in the Looks tab under a character, hair color, eye color, hair style, race, facial hair, skin tone, and body type all have suggested entries that will automatically pop up as you start typing the letters of that idea. Giving people the ability to add these custom suggestions will make worldbuilding faster and more customizable.

[drusepth]

@thetrumper What do you think about adding peoples' answers to that field on other pages as suggestions to that field on their other pages? Perhaps just answers that are less than X characters long to help differentiate between reuseable answers (colors, locations, pieces of clothing, etc, should be suggested for other pages answering that field) versus longer answers (writing a paragraph about a character's background, for example, shouldn't be suggested).

Providing a place to customize these suggestions in the template editor could technically work, but I worry about 1) cluttering up the editor with more things (it's pretty bad already), and 2) providing a "work sink" that abstracts work away from the actual page (for example, spending time setting up all your suggestions and then having no motivation left to go fill out pages -- IMO it's better to find a way to populate those suggestions as you fill out pages so people don't lose momentum and every small amount of effort directly correlates to worldbuilding productivity). That might be kind of hand-wavy though, and I'm definitely interested in more opinions and/or whether that sort of "do the work in one place first to make work elsewhere easier" approach is worth pursuing. :)

[thetrumper]

I think that's a great idea! Although there are definitely pros and cons to both.

With your idea its definitely helpful in that things like hair color and such would automatically populate as you add them to characters, avoiding that work sink of spending more time writing all your possibilities as suggestions and then having to go back in and adding them to all the pages. With your idea, it would automatically populate and thus would achieve the same effect without spending too much time just creating templates.

The only issue I would imagine is in cases where you have very short responses for fields but don't necessarily want those to auto-populate. Or, less commonly but still possible, having very long entries that are the same (or similar) across different pages.

I imagine solutions may be turning on or off suggestions for certain fields. For example, perhaps for things like hair color and eye color you want to keep suggestions (if I type in like Arctic Blue for eye color it will automatically populate on other pages when I begin to type arctic) so you keep them on but you want to turn off suggestions for other fields like Weight so that it doesn't auto populate (because most characters aren't going to share the same weight).

I know you don't want to clutter up the editor but I wonder if providing a slider for suggestions either on/off, as well as providing a way to remove suggestions (might be cleaner to just have an x when the pop up so you can remove them while typing) would solve the issue of the work sink while hopefully not cluttering up the editor too much and providing users with enough customization to tweak the system for their use case.