That Pesky World Picker Options

[jay]

Here's a common question I get, I thought I'd share the answer with the group.

If you were designing the version 2.0 World Picker, how would you do it?

/jay



The question:

> At 4:13 AM -0400 on 4/26/05, David wrote:

> comments: Trying out your program and noticed that if you use the world
> picker, it doesn't use the save settings that you have save. Is this the way
> it is suppose to work?


And my reply...

David,

Well, it's designed not to save. The World Picker was intended as a quick starting off point for creating a world, once created, it is expected the user would save the world to a document and would then access that world by double-clicking the document from the Finder.

The World Picker is by far the most mis-understood feature of Savitar. I added a dialog saying "Would you like to save this as a document?" in an attempt to make it more understandable. Yet, I still regularly get questions about this.

Savitar 2.0, which is in development, will see a change in the World Picker. Until then, save your world out as a document!

/Jay

[Day]

Will it still include the possibility of using things the way they are now? I really would prefer to just continue using the Open Recent... menu. I don't know how people got so confused abou the World Picker. Maybe my brain works on some shattered frequency far from the one that appears in he minds of normal man, but I seem to've understood it from the start.


->Day<-
Doom-sayer and Pessimist, Extraordinaire

[cooner]

Jay,

I apologize for raining on your parade. But I've never saved worlds as a document ... I just set up an entry in the world picker for each muck and character I use, and create a new document from the World Picker each time I log in. The world picker already incorporates all the settings I need ... address, appearance settings, and the login information can be set as a startup command. I find that much easier than keeping a dozen or two little world files lying around. I don't generally have much need to save any other information about previous sessions.

I can see why saving a world document might be useful for some people, but I hope in any future versions you'll also maintain a way to keep things as they are now ... I just find it much easier to start from a single World Picker panel at launch.