Events

Papyrus Author Questions & Help
1

Hi, I wanted to post this here to see if anyone thought this would be a worthwhile addition to Papyrus Author.
I love the timeline feature and think it is vital when writing my books. However, there is a shortcoming with it, and it’s this: major events that occur outside the timeline and main story. In other words, things like characters births, deaths, creation of devices and so on.
For example, when I create a character it would be good to have a field in the form showing the character’s date of birth. This field would then create an event, which would then track the age of the character at any stage throughout the book. There could also be another field for the death of a character, or the destruction of an item. Again, this would create an event in the timeline. These events would appear in there own section of the navigator, as they may not specific to an individual chapter or scene.
I have found a workaround, but it’s not perfect.
Do any of you think this would be a worthwhile addition to the software, or is it just me? :grinning:

3 Likes
2

Definitely worthwhile to have!

3

Hi Beninoz,
I think your suggestion of having fields for such events, like dates of birth, death, marriages, creation of devices, destructions of places, buildings etc would be an invaluable asset to the software.
It sounds like you’ve worked out a way to do such a thing but it would be much easier if such fields were available easier.
Thanks for thinking of this. Lets hope some thought is given to it by the powers that be.

4

I realize that this is an old thread and perhaps you’ve moved on. But may I inquire as to whether these items which exist outside the timeline are actually necessary to track on the timeline?

If the answer is no, I have a suggestion that might work for you…

  1. Go to the database section. The only way I know how to do this so far is via the character database… AUTHOR->MY CHARACTERS

  2. From there goto TABLE->CHANGE/ADD TABLES

  3. On the table dialog, push the “New Table” button

  4. On the Table Name dialog, give your table a name (eg. “Events” or whatever)

  5. Enter the various fields that you want

  6. When you’re done, press “Create Table”

Now it will be available in your database. I don’t know of any way to make it show up in a menu like that (maybe the folks at PA do?) But you can at least get to it via the AUTHOR->MY CHARACTERS … TABLE->CHANGE/ADD route.

You can also create forms that work with the table, to make it easier/nicer to enter your data.

Hope this helps!!