An easier to code example where I could be the analyzer.. i could enable a setting like this:
"Stop world generation when goblins are at war with me."
That one might stop generation when war was declared or suspended. You can do this now manually by looking through the historical events, but it's kind of time consuming.
Or this:
"Stop world generation when goblin population is below X."
An intermediate step to this is making legends text appear as they occur during world gen. That way you'll get a chance of recognizing what's happening and stop the world when you read that an interesting event like a battle or rampage is currently happening.
Ya, something like "[X] - Pause for important historical events." It could be broken down further too.
Right now it's all summarized in "Age of (x)", "Year (x)", "Hist Figures: (x)", "Dead: (x)", Events: (X)". Like you say it might be a good intermediate step because these are not very descriptive. Probably easier to program than the automatic analyzer that I brought up. The issue, I guess, is figuring out what is important and what is just a normal historical event - so that the program can determine when to pause world gen.
Ofcourse, you can force goblins or other civs to always be at war by editing their creature stats in the "raw/objects" folder. Maybe an addition to this would be to make it so that goblins will only always be at war with particular races rather than it being all inclusive.
Notice that I used the word "force". I think Toady is trying to get away from that by letting the world decide for itself what happens. That's the primary reason historical events can be so numerous and spread out - the world isn't dependent on a human being to determine what happens. If that were the case, it'd move at a snails pace. Thus, free of human dominion (smirk), it can weave plentiful, unpredictable historical data, and right there, after reveiwing what is only random data to our logical minds, we can see a story unfold! He's also trying to give some flesh to conflicts so that they're not just good/evil - instead they're born out from a variety of circumstances. That can result in some very humourous and dare I say, realistic clashes. I like this, but at the same time, we as players have some personal preferances and there needs to be a way to satisfy them - allow us to
force some things. The least he can do is give us a few more options in the creature files or, better yet, put the settings in-game for those of us who aren't programmers or hackers - some of us don't like hacking a file. I know that when you start a custom world gen there're parameters you can set, perhaps some of the creature settings could accompany them.
At the end of the day, though, I think Toady is doing excellent job. I am by no means saying that we need to take apart what is there and rebuild it, no way! I love what is there, but I think it can be fleshed out and given more detail. This should all be prioritized, ofcourse. I'm certain there're far more important things than what is being discussed here, but atleast it's constructive rather than a thread about how much DF sucks and should be remade as something else!
Time for me to work on fort shemaval, and I need to figure out how to build wells! (sorry this is dwarf-mode speak)
And yes, to someone else, this probably belongs in suggestion topic forum.
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Topic: Adventure mode substantially less menacing (post 23a) (Read 3501 times)