Causality 3.0 Alpha

Hi, I just discovered a big bug on latest Causality release on Mac OS latest version. I sent an email to support.

I'd like to know if I'm the only one : some beats content disappears and some other get duplicated. The file becomes corrupted and part of work is lost. I work with my partner, who uses Windows and the version before Alpha (2 and I don’t remember the number), and she doesn’t seem to be affected.

What version should I download to have things back in order ? Thanks !

But that's it, it's not even a node graph. It's nothing, it's boxes and lines that move along with each other if they're close to each other. And it doesn't express a fraction of the relationship components that are possible in Causality.

This is why I call it a conceptual failure, because this does not in fact describe relationships, and digs a hole that prevents us from properly describing relationships. It makes no effort at to fit together with a future dependency graph which is where character arcs happen, it doesn't give relationships their own folders forcing a weird choice about which character "owns" the relationship, and it has no clear way to interact with emotions, which is where the progress or balance of power in a relationship reside. So in my view, and I'm the one who came up with it, it's kind of more like a Star Trek UI that only works if you squint. It's a movie prop.

It's not that it's per-se wrong to organize things visually in some way. The current implementation is just the tail wagging the dog by allowing this concept to deny many other more important concepts.

The right solution will likely be integrated with the coming dependency graph, and then maybe this kind of layout can exist as a separate navigator that summarizes the relationships from the data we have. But as a drawing program, it solves 10% of the problem and the blocks solving all the other aspects. So it needs to be rebooted and based on a proper understanding of what relationships are in a Causality context. I feel that we need emotions and a dependency graph before we can really say for sure if this captures it.

That would be a shame. Sometimes being able to quickly visualize a node graph can be pretty handy. Hopefully you'll keep it going for a while until it really has to go. Final Draft 12 seems to have implemented a node graph / relationship canvas approach. I wonder where that idea came from?

Indeed, that doesn't happen in that file. I've created a ticket.

You should now that we're not in love with the relationship canvas. It was a loose idea that was implemented prematurely, without answering what relationships really are in terms of the rest of the app, especially emotion tracking, and treating relationships as separate from the characters. While it might be fun to arrange things visually, this canvas is just a micro drawing program bolted in, and I think that it's conceptually a failure, and an example of how not to design software. I don't fully expect the relationship canvas to survive in the long run, at least not in its current form.

Sent to support@hollywoodcamerawork.com

I can't really explain that. The same thing works here. Can you email the file?

Moving Clarisse would move all the white labels on the lines. Moving Maya or any of the other single connections will not.

I tested, and it works here. Can I see a screenshot of your exact situation?

Yes. That's what I was doing. Doesn't seem to stick to the line anymore. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

edit:

Ok, it seems to only stick to the line when I move the object on one side of the line only, when you have multiple connections to the object on that side.

It hasn't been removed. However, what you stick isn't labels, it's simply other folders. So just drag other folders in and stick them to the line.

Has the ability to stick a label to a relationship line been removed in version 3?

There will also be mobile apps, but they'll be after collaboration. Our logic is that mobile apps don't really work without a smooth way for the data to move around and not accidentally forking your document.

Causality is built in a cross-platform UI framework from the get-go, so making mobile apps doesn't mean starting over. We even mostly know how the UI will be laid out, basically going back and forth between screens, like E.T. on Atari 2600 with portals out the sides of the screen so you can easily drag things between areas.

The main work that needs to be done is that a lot of things are very formatted for desktop. And we need to basically rewrite the mouse-handling across the app to use more modern types of events that include multi-finger touch and gestures. While this isn't no work at all, it's much more repurposing UI than rewriting things from scratch.

It'll be some time, only because the main pressure is around collaboration, for which we've now come a very long way and are ready to go into a home stretch. And then there are some novelist / printing features that are overdue. So right now, it's mostly about getting 3.0 properly out of the gate (releasing confronts a lot of things), and then concentrating on the biggest ticket feature, which is multi-user. This is a major pain point. We're losing TV shows that want to work in it, and lots of small writing teams that are dying to use Causality but just can't. We have to concentrate on a major deal-breaker feature first.

Hi!

It's true that tags themselves now can't be put into the whiteboard, like subtext beats could. But since they never had any time-base, and their place in the whiteboard didn't relate to their place in the script, it was always a bit wrong to have them in the whiteboard at all.

Instead, their ultimate graphical location will be a dependency graph, which is coming, but we didn't want to hold 3.x back purely over this, because it's a rather large task. Way back when, the whiteboard was actually a dependency graph and not a timeline, and it was from this logic that you could have subtext beats scattered where you felt like it. But as it slowly became a timeline, this became more and more wrong, because it never represented where they actually happened. You were using it to side-load something completely different in the whiteboard that was truly not happening on the same timeline as the whiteboard.

In this dependency graph, you'll have what the whiteboard was original designed for, which is the ability to say that "this bank robbery sequence in act 3 is only allowed to happen when the character's mojo is above 90% and we've already established his childhood trauma". Then you'll basically make the bank robbery block dependent on the Childhood Trauma tag, and dependent on a target on the Mojo tag set to >90%.

This doesn't exist yet, and there's no middle ground in terms of getting tags into the whiteboard.

In the meanwhile, you can achieve partly the same cognitive benefit in research by making a subfolder under a character called "Michael's Journey", where you create 3-4 subfolders called something like "The Beginning", "It Gets Worse", "Shit Hits the Fan", "Transformation", and then you put all the tags for each phase into each subfolder.

This will give you much the same impression of which order things happen, just without any enforcement. There actually is a little bit of enforcement available, that you can enable "In A Sequence" on the "Michael's Journey" folder. But this feature will go away, because it's kind of a poor attempt at getting what a dependency graph does naturally, and I regret that we put the feature in.

Hi @Per Holmes ! The 3.0 is a great version. But I have a regret: i was using the lanes to visually see the journey of my characters, using the SUBTEXT items. It was very simple a true help for me. For exemple, i could track when the hero has his desire, his revelations, etc...

I could do it with the TAGS, but it's not visually represented in the whiteboard...

Is there a way to do this in the 3.0 version ? Thanks !

@Per Holmes, first thanks for taking the time to get into the detail.

I'd be one of your "tracking which things need to come up with a cause for" clients. I did get excited with the "... and not only that, but this will be simultaneously significant in the secondary story!" prospect -- which of course need not be the case and was a bit artificial.

I am already using tags with bright colours for weak points in my script. I could use one new phosphorescent tag just for that.

I do like the idea of Causality reporting an error unless something is addressed, so I'm curious about your tracking system, but, tbh, that could be achieved with good tag hygiene.

I'm all up for a minimalist approach and not having tens of sublty different concepts. But I'm glad I asked! And I appreciate the general best-practice advise of keeping the stack of lanes shallow.

Hi @Per Holmes , what happened with "Create Cause"? Are you coming up with an alternative workflow? I miss it, I have to say. I can tag, but it gets lost on a large board.

I would as Per, I have no idea.

Is it possible in the Pro version for multiple writers to collaborate on a single project.? Able to watch changes and editing?