Hi. I hope I’m not the only person out there who could benefit from this tweak.
Basically, the Subway view looks like it could be useful, but currently it treats any Relationship type as an excuse to force multiple individual lines to intersect.
Here’s why this is a problem for me: I’ve been using the Reference Relationship type as a handy way of keeping track of character ages. Doing this means that in the Relationship view I can instantly see how old each of my characters is when each key story event occurs, even if they aren’t present or in fact are completely uninvolved in that particular Event.
However, Subway view doesn’t understand the concept of “just for reference”. It assumes each Character with a Relationship tag for a given event must be directly involved enough to warrant a massive detour just to connect those two coloured lines at the Event marker. This creates a huge visual mess as literally every one of my “just reminding myself how old everyone is when this thing happens” Relationship tags causes all of those individual character lines in the Subway view to briefly crash together before going their separate ways again.
I realise that I can prevent this behaviour by toggling the Subway layout control to Separate, but then I lose what I perceive to be the key value of the Subway view: the ability to visualise when two (or more) characters actually interact throughout the narrative structure.
I even tried going into the Advanced Settings and creating a new bespoke Relationship type called Age, in the hopes that maybe Subway view would overlook it when deciding whether or not to “merge” lines… but no dice.
Perhaps I’m missing some obvious sub-setting that would convince Subway view to stop assuming a Reference tag is equivalent in importance to a Participant, Observer, or Target one. If so, please point me in the right direction; I don’t want to give up the existing utility of the Relationships view in order to get the Subway view to be genuinely useful.
Many thanks in advance!