Honestly, the size of the saves doesn't really bug me. Even mediocre pc's have plenty of storage space at this point. a gig or two isn't much. Even if space was tight I'd delete a movie or three for dwarf fortress.
The problem isn't the hard drive space, it's the rate at which your computer can access the hard drive - every time you save or load a game, that means your computer has to read or write an entire gig of data... which takes a while.
If the game has to read in the entire file, it's a bug. If it's structured properly it should be able to read in a manageable subset of the data on-demand in order to provide information to the player about the world.
The problem with legends data is that it's mostly superfluous data that is impossible to read, and which you have to use very specific searches to even find specific names that you know the relevance of - otherwise you just get flooded with people who are members of some group you don't know, who were related to people you don't know, who fought against other people you don't know...
Simply having it all dumped into a text file is not what you really need, what you need is a better means of focusing in on specifics.
Actually I'd FAR rather have access to the raw data, this is the kind of thing where normal games limit themselves by trying to "control" your access to the data. With this approach, the community can build tools around the data that meet their needs.
I doubt it would be of that much use now, but if adventure mode really takes off, you could scan through this historical data to find an "interesting" time and place as a starting location for your adventurer. In a way, you could play "time traveler", where you scan through history looking for events that you don't want to happen, and then insert yourself into history in order to attempt to prevent the event.
Wow, that'd be freaking awesome actually, although you could only do it once, unless there is some way to insert yourself into history, change the outcome of events, and then roll history forward from that point again in order to evaluate the outcome of your actions, and possibly spawn a new adventurer in order to further alter history...
Off to the suggestions forum to propose this.
EDIT: Luckily I had the good sense to search the forums for "time travel" first, and found that it is/was in the dev notes at some point, but now I reeely reely want to be able to do that. I think it's one of the side effects of the system Toady is trying to make, so if I'm patient maybe it will happen.
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Topic: Have you ever tried the legends mode xml report? (Read 2053 times)