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[timtek]

If so what did you think about it, strengths, weaknesses? I'm thinking of trying it but don't know much about it.

[Davion]

It dumps a 300MB+ file of the Legends data. Nothing much to it yet since it isn't finished.

[NW_Kohaku]

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.

[darkflagrance]

When I wrote the Legend of Tholtig Cryptbrain, I wished that I'd had a feature like that available in 40d. Navigating the massive text dump should be more efficient in the file that inside the game's clunky interface. ctrl+f is better than filter string.

However, unless you discover a figure as ridiculously legendary as Tholtig or Cacame, and want to quickly trace all their connections, you probably won't need that feature. Just having the raw data doesn't immediately cause the outliers and exceptional events in the history to leap out.

[pickupsticks]

I'd never given a thought to it until I saw the World Viewer application.  I'm watching keenly for developments in output through this.

[timtek]

I'd never given a thought to it until I saw the World Viewer application.  I'm watching keenly for developments in output through this.

I haven't tried this but I think it looks interesting. It seems like it will make viewing the history data easier which was what got me interested in the xml export to begin with. The fact that DF creates such a detailed world to play in is awesome. I love being able to explore it.

[tfaal]

The entity population rewrite should alleviate this situation, as individual soldiers, peasants, and such are abstracted out into large groups with much more interesting and compact histories. At that point, legends mode may become quite sufficient to handle most world-browsing needs.

[pickupsticks]

That won't be as much fun, though!  I like tracing the histories of people I kill meet back for generations, seeing who moved to where when they got married and which relatives were killed by beasts (and which relatives started worshiping the beasts).
The mundane details of the peasants lives hold a certain fascination and it would be a shame to lose that to abstraction.

[NW_Kohaku]

That won't be as much fun, though!  I like tracing the histories of people I kill meet back for generations, seeing who moved to where when they got married and which relatives were killed by beasts (and which relatives started worshiping the beasts).
The mundane details of the peasants lives hold a certain fascination and it would be a shame to lose that to abstraction.

It would be interesting if the game would promote nobodies to prominance purely by virtue of their being involved in something unusual...

But the problem with just assuming everyone must be tracked just in case someone becomes a person of interest is that when we have potentially MILLIONS of people to track, as Toady has said he wants to do, and each of those millions of people have a few hundred or even thousands of bytes of information associated with them, then the Legends Mode will start taking up Gigs of disk space all by itself, and take absurd amounts of time to generate.

Even if some small minority of players really wanted to go looking for all the data they could obtain on every random guy they meet, I don't think most players want their saves taking several gigs of hard disk space apiece (not that you can't hit that now if you try) just to have histories of people they will never care about.

[darkflagrance]

That won't be as much fun, though!  I like tracing the histories of people I kill meet back for generations, seeing who moved to where when they got married and which relatives were killed by beasts (and which relatives started worshiping the beasts).
The mundane details of the peasants lives hold a certain fascination and it would be a shame to lose that to abstraction.

It would be interesting if the game would promote nobodies to prominance purely by virtue of their being involved in something unusual...

But the problem with just assuming everyone must be tracked just in case someone becomes a person of interest is that when we have potentially MILLIONS of people to track, as Toady has said he wants to do, and each of those millions of people have a few hundred or even thousands of bytes of information associated with them, then the Legends Mode will start taking up Gigs of disk space all by itself, and take absurd amounts of time to generate.

Even if some small minority of players really wanted to go looking for all the data they could obtain on every random guy they meet, I don't think most players want their saves taking several gigs of hard disk space apiece (not that you can't hit that now if you try) just to have histories of people they will never care about.

Perhaps the world could generate a few initial founding couples and keep track of their descendants completely, drawing from their bloodlines to populate history with significant figures. At the same time, it would keep track of the general numbers of people in the civ. Occasionally, if the old bloodlines are wiped out, or historical events require them, new bloodlines are randomly generated.

This way, the game would keep track of the overall population of a civ that exists as a mere number, along with a sub-population of actual figures who have read lineages.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, the game already has a worldgen option of "cull unimportant figures", which defaults to on...

I think it might be feasable to ask Toady for a few iterative levels of things like "once some random guy rises to prominance, track the rest of his family line on down", or "only track the guys who did something important" or "track x number of people in any given timeframe", so that we have some options for that minority that loves curling up with legends mode for several hours at a time, but so that we can have smaller saves if we don't care.

[timtek]

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.

[tfaal]

Bear in mind that the way an entity population is supposed to work is by fabricating detail when necessary. The individual histories of people you meet can be made up, incorporating events that affected the entire population into the story. If a dragon attack wounded 200 people, and a guy you meet is from that population, it's a relatively simple roll to see if he was hurt by it. You just have to run some basic sanity tests, omitting events that conflict with others. The same procedure can be run for a person's family, as necessary. The only additional test required is preventing ancestors from dying before producing descendants.

The last remaining factor would be for world-affecting figures to arise from populations. You could just roll every now and then for every given population, to see if a figure arises. Then you just generate them as normal, but skewing the rolls in their favor, and allowing them to interact with other historical figures via wars, ascensions, artifacts and the like. The only problem with this is that their origins will usually be ordinary. Not uninteresting, but ordinary. This could be solved by further skewing their rolls to include motivating factors (such as revenge, jealousy, etc.) in their origin, selected from a palette of events that affected the population. If you track the amount of each motivation within a pop (revenge motivation from attacks, jealousy from superior circumstances) then weigh the fig-creation rolls based on these societal forces, you can make truly compelling characters that represent the circumstances of their people.

[Mason11987]

I'd never given a thought to it until I saw the World Viewer application.  I'm watching keenly for developments in output through this.

I haven't tried this but I think it looks interesting. It seems like it will make viewing the history data easier which was what got me interested in the xml export to begin with. The fact that DF creates such a detailed world to play in is awesome. I love being able to explore it.

Hey Guys, I'm working on this right now.

I have a version that parses quite a bit of interesting data out of the xml.

Sadly it doesn't have everything in it that the legends mode can show you, but it still has quite a bit.

I'd have had it out this week but I'm on vacation (sneaking in some computer time ).  You can probably expect something that does serious XML connections and information sometime next week.

I also helped quite a bit with this page which could be useful to read the xml until I set something up to do it for you.

[NW_Kohaku]

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.