Naive suggestion re realtime shared collaboration

Scrivener Wish List
1

I don’t pretend to know if supporting realtime shared collaboration is worth the investment.

One approach would presumably be to split Scrivener into two pieces, client and server, as is done for most first person shooter games (Doom, Unreal, HalfLife, Halo, …) to support realtime multiplayer. For traditional standalone use, both pieces would reside and run on the same machine and the client/server nature would not be obvious (same as standalone singleplayer play of FPS games). For collaborative use, the server component would probably usually run on one of the collaborator’s machines… though it could presumably be run elsewhere on more of a dedicated server. Such might also enable providing full robust Scrivener capability via “thin” clients on lower end/mobile devices not up to running the whole thing (although what such devices can handle is growing rapidly by leaps and bounds).

By now, such client/server architecture design and use is widespread enough (he said blithely) and open source code versions of some exist that reference materials and programmers experienced with such exist such that might be able to draw on the game and other industries in order to build such.

Less ambitiously, there might be some limited collaboration that could be supported… simple lock/unlock checkout/checkin of individual files and/or folders… with resulting global changes being deferred till later…? But from what I’ve seen, primarily from providing customer support for simple non-client/server Microsoft Access database applications, attempting to support multiuser with anything less than full blown client/server results in really sluggish performance and integrity issues.

Regardless, thanks.

2

These articles and related links explain how Google Docs manages it:
googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/09/ … -docs.html
googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/09/ … cs_22.html
googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/09/ … cs_23.html

(Keep in mind that Google Docs is only dealing with individual documents, not – as Scrivener does – with complex metadata showing relationships between documents.)

Short version: it’s hard, and it took several years of effort from a large team at a very large company to do it well. There are more people in the on-call support rotation for Google Docs than Literature and Latte has total employees.

Real time gaming is actually much easier, because all of the possible actions in the game world are known in advance. No one in the Halo universe expects to be able to drag in a Doom scenario, but writers drag enormous new chunks into their manuscripts all the time. Moreover, in games the client side handles all the graphical heavy lifting, so the amount of information that has to actually go over the wire is pretty small.

Katherine

3

Wow, yeah, the challenge turns out to be even nastier than it first appears to be. For any hyphenate writers-programmers out there… perfect distraction/excuse for procrastinating on one’s writing for years or decades while trying to finance and solve :stuck_out_tongue:

Note to self, step away from the bright shiny mesmerizing distraction, get butt back in chair, fire up superb Scrivener, and get back to writing.

Thanks Katherine.