A Legacy of Descriptions?

[Andrew]

So, some of you may be aware, I primarily work on M&F, but I've no problem sharing my efforts when I think there's a use for it. For instance, right now I'm working on a system for Might & Fealty to unify 90% of the game's future descriptive areas into a single place. Which, I know, I know, BM has had descriptions on things for a while. However, this will include the storage and maintenance of legacy descriptions for things, which means you can research them down the line to see what previous descriptions for an area were, who changed them, and when.

Fundamentally, for BM, this would put descriptions for characters, families, regions, guilds, guild houses, religions, temples, unique items, unit groups, etc., all on a single database table, all handled the same way, and for those that make sense to be researchable, have them be researchable.

At a basic level, BM and M&F are similar enough that the vast majority of my work on this for M&F can easily enough translate to BM, so once it works in M&F, minor changes are all that is needed for BM. This means the dev time should be relatively minimal.

The question is, is this something that BM would have an interest in having?

If so, what should be describable? And which of those should be a thing you can look into?

[Anaris]

Just off the top of my head, Tom's decision to split the database into separate schemas for the overall game/OOC administration level and one for each world would make things significantly more complex to implement.

That said, I have no particular objection to having the game remember descriptions for everything.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that's occurred to me to. The main thing would be building the queries and Doctrine itself in order to make sure you pull the right world's data when editing things. Given how BM already calls particular Doctrine Entity Managers, I don't think that will be all the complex to work around though. I just call it the same way it's called in other places, and it should grab the correct one, as appropriate.

The other question is the structure of it all. M&F has clear structure on where different parts of code go. In M&F this code would be considered a service, as multiple other parts of the code would use and interact with it. Looking at BM, I think I have an idea where it'd go, but I might need some help with that.

It'll be written in such a way that if new things are added that need described, there isn't much work to do. First, you add the columns in the database with the proper associations. Second, you add the logic to the description manager itself so if it comes across that type of object class, it knows how to look it up (which should be as simple as copy+paste and a simple edit). And then you just call the functions as appropriate.

I guess the question is, really, what all should be describable?

[JeVondair]

I, for one, welcome our new stick-bopping overlord and his idea for persistent descriptions in a unified database.

[Gabanus family]

Region name
Duchy region is in
Income/population etc
Description of region
Who made the description
When description was changed

Maybe even keep track of changes of Lords, Duchies and Realms so you report back some history of the Lordship in game later down the road (possibly paid like religion spread map which is awesome btw).

[CryptCypher]

A wonderful idea for which future generations will be thankful. (and totally take for granted the days when it didn't exist. *GASP* "What!? You used to LOSE all your messages, rps, realm and region data?! PERMANENTLY!?")

[Eduardo Almighty]

I like the idea... I used to save my descriptions on my wiki page because there's always someone coming in later and changing it. Like they did with Trinbar.

Edit: No need for that

[Andrew]

Region name
Duchy region is in
Income/population etc
Description of region
Who made the description
When description was changed

Maybe even keep track of changes of Lords, Duchies and Realms so you report back some history of the Lordship in game later down the road (possibly paid like religion spread map which is awesome btw).

Uh, I think you're playing the wrong game. If you want full historical data on basically any data point, you want M&F. I can tell you the exact militia count a of a region no one visited three years ago, or when the second of eight times someone built a market.

But the last 3 are inherent to what I'm proposing be added (and what I'd do the bulk of the work on).

The questions are:

1. Is this something that would be wanted?
2. What other things, besides regions, should it include tracking of? Characters? Units? What?

To explain why I need to explain how this works. Most of the time, when things are described, it's exists next to whatever it's describing, or in a place dedicated just to describing THAT thing. So if you want to describe something else, you need to expand the data table for that new thing or make another one just for describing those new things.

With this, you expand just the table that tracks descriptions, telling it how to relate itself to the new thing being described, and add a line to the code that will tell it out how figure out the data submitted to it. It figures everything else out dynamically.

Say it gets implemented, and it tracks regions only. But down the line, we want to describe families. We just tell it how to understand a unique family, and how to find one, and that's it. You use the same code to get it that you use everywhere else. You use the same logic to update or make new ones that you use everywhere else. You use the same code to find old ones that you use everywhere else. It makes future expansion faster.

[CryptCypher]

Throwing out random ideas.

I'd like to learn about all those random militia left behind by players - whether purposely or through inactivity. It'd be interesting to find out you have some random militia unit in region ABC that served under the infamous king of whatever realm way back in the day.

Tracking artifacts would be amazing. It'd let us finally have a chance to properly describe the history of said items. Its hard to know just how many hands held such an object before reaching you, how many realms it traversed, how many times it was found, lost, looted, stolen, sold, and to whom. Getting in touch with that history would be incredible.

Finding out all the realms a region has belonged to over the years? Who held what? How long? How it was lost/handed over? Definite hell-yes.

Keeping track of votes. Is that possible? Way down the road, it might be useful to recall whether it was a 1-vote margin that changed history forever, a landslide victory, or a slight disadvantage gone awry.

Executions/torture. We really should have some way to keep track of these things. It only makes sense, y'know. "Oh... So *thats* why such-and-such hates us... We executed his grandmother after a night of wild passion torture. Woops!"

I'd love to see a list of all the titles a given character/player has held. It'd be great for personal accolades, as well as writing those pesky wiki's. I still remember the first lordship of my favorite characters, but the rest have been lost in time.

It'd be cool to find out how many generations of a given family have been through a given realm/region/duchy/city. *cough Riombara/Obia'Syela cough* I think I've had 4 or 5 characters inhabit that area over half a decade, and I'd love to recall more details. It'd sure spice up RP's.

This is probably impossible but keeping track of all the RPs shared to/in a particular region would be amazing. So much history! So much effort... So many late nights.

Keeping track of all the artifacts discovered in a given region, and by whom?

[Renodin]

The way Andrew described it, he really started on something that sprung to my own mind as well. Families.

There's a feature upcoming (wimpie I believe) that allows characters to have a description and picture even. Forget the picture perhaps but that description would be very valuable to the game's history and dynamics for the players. Or so I imagine.

If we could save those and store them for future reference. I could imagine it would not only be a cool way of recording BM history but also a valuable resource down the line in terms of family tree concepts. Especially with the Marriage feature being considered.  Thinking of future overlap and all that.

[CryptCypher]

Ah, yes, marriage. That's going to be a *big* one.

[Andrew]

If anyone was curious, this got a go ahead from Anaris on how he'd like it implemented and I've already completed the harder parts of the code in what needs to be done. As for what ends up with such descriptions, that'll be up to Anaris, but it's pretty easy to expand on, given the examples I've provided in the code for how it works.

Right now, Region Descriptions, Character Descriptions, and User Texts will use this for storing their input, once implemented.