Subway events with same time are misaligned

[cats00eye (Stephen)]

Windows 10 Build 19042.1237 (English (UK))

App Version

Version:
Application Shell: 3.07

Two events occupying the exact time span do not align in Subway (screenshot 1). This can be produced in a clean file (screenshot 2). Create a new file using the novel template, default settings. Create two events on the same day, same time, three hours duration. Create two characters. Add one as a participant to one event. Add the other as a participant to the second event. The two events are misaligned in Subway.

Edit: Thinking about it, I can see why there may have been a deliberate design decision to do this, to avoid simultaneous events potentially overlapping and becoming unreadable. Still, it is confusing, and - down the road - I think there needs to be a solution for this - say like a broad vertical connection between such events similar to the London Tube map where two stations are connected on foot.

[ortgard (Marc)]

Confirmed in macOS.

re: your edit: The thing is, when writing narratives with multiple arcs (or single arcs for that matter), simultaneity is a very important consideration. Whether an event occurs before, after, or simultaneously with another event is very clearly fundamental. (Ditto for project management, etc.)

[matt]

Hi Stephen & Marc,
This was a deliberate design choice we made at this stage.

Subway View shows events in chronological order, that is, in the same order items are shown in the spreadsheet.

We make no effort to represent time gaps there (i.e. the distance between items is the same regardless of whether a second or a year separate them), and this extends to items at the same time.

One reason for this is that in the “separated mode”, two events aligned mean it is the same event.

Matt

[cats00eye (Stephen)]

I guessed it was a design choice rather than a bug, and the connection you make to the Spreadsheet View makes that clearer, and maybe it’s just a case of clarifying what the Subway View does rather than changing it. One thing I’ve found useful in the Subway View is it picks up potential inconsistencies in a timeline in a way that can be harder to see in a cluttered Timeline View. For this purpose, it doesn’t matter, and in fact it probably helps, that durations between events are not represented proportionately - but when simultaneous or substantially overlapping events are represented as sequential it can be confusing. Maybe some kind of link between events, similar to a constraint, could be manually set by users so that it could be shown in the Subway View somehow?

[ortgard (Marc)]

I entirely agree that proportionality is not required, a topological approach is far preferable. Nevertheless, as I rather boringly mention elsewhere, TL3 is timeline software, and so I would expect it to behave as such (in places other than the timeline, obvs.).