Haha. To tell you the truth, I have little experience in database design myself, but even if they just replicated the XML layouts (one table for each top-level element) it would be so handy.
What I wanted to do was use the generated worlds to generate new content from (things like stories or jokes including people from the world, or even small games). It's an experiment, really, in using one game's content to create new things, that I wanted to hack out. I'm rather unfairly burdening you with a million requests beforehand though!
Text export would be great anyway, because I'm sure people would be interested in a more human-readable format. From my perspective, a database (or even a CSV-style file) would be a boon, but it's really up to you. You've done great work so far.
Doing a straight replacement of the xml with a table would be difficult on a few levels.
- Sites aren't tied to civs in the XML, they could be though through intelligent use of the events (in XML) though
- Using just the XML it's impossible to distinguish among races for anything
- The events table would need to have a large number of columns, most would be empty for any individual event.
- I'd need to be able to append items to the event table, because I can't put all the events in at once
The first two could be solved by intelligently using the XML and sites/history files together to make the database (like they are used in the program). The third isn't a big problem, but I don't know how manageable a 2.5million record x 15 field table would be. The last may or may not be possible. I suspect it is though.
I'll work first on a text export of some sort. It's just hard to know what's important to other people.
If you want a straight list of HistFigs/Sites/Regions stripped from the XML with their IDs that's not a problem. If you want the events, I'll have to think of a meaningful way to export them (perhaps by event type?)
Hopefully I didn't miss this when I jumped to the end but, I was wondering if you plan to allow a filter for any race.
I was parsing a history off a NrthAmer map, but I was trying to find info about a human city (Well ruin) to see how it fell, I forgot to turn on "Cull Unimportant Historic figures" (actually since it was all inhabiting I was just lazy I guess). But you can only remove Non-Dwarven Civ/sites.
Though I'm wondering if It didn't bring up the ruins as they'd be covered in the History bit that didn't get parsed.
If the events didn't get parsed then you wouldn't see what happened to it, but my understanding is that sites, once founded, are a permanent fixture on the world, so they should be in that list somewhere. If it was destroyed it wouldn't be listed as "Human" under the sites, because race is tied to the race of the currently occupying civ, which there wouldn't be one. In the future I'll (possibly) tie race of a destroyed site to the race that founded it, or last reclaimed or captured it, but for now I think it makes sense as is.
You can also sort by name to find it.
But to answer your question, I am planning a general filter for a future release. It's something I would find personally really cool and also really useful for debugging. It won't be exactly as efficient as the name filter in legends mode, but it'll be more extensive (only births > 100, only the dead, only sites that have been reclaimed, etc.)