Nichola wrote:
Odder wrote:
What does canon say about customs/laws/religious practices regarding kissin' cousins?
I haven't read anything, but in most human societies this is taboo. The genetic problems that can arise are pretty ugly.
And yet the higher social classes of Europe did it pretty often. Sometimes politics trumps both genetics and the 'ew' factor.
Nichola wrote:
I'd add a check that says if they die in childhood before year [X], prune them.
For sure. I envision a few views - a 'person-centric' view that shows the heritage and nearby family of a particular person, and as the tree gets farther away from their line of descent it gets pruned, and a 'clan-centric' view that shows the members of a clan and their descendants, but as daughters marry out of the clan their offspring are not shown (past one generation, perhaps?)
Nichola wrote:
Odder wrote:
Something else I need to figure out how to deal with is the fact that accidents of breeding can result in clans dying off. This might mean that I should be working from present back to past, but that's more complicated.
Add a check in each generation such that if no viable offspring result (e.g. living to 25), then redo that generation.
Yah, that would work. The problem is the current approach operates year by year instead of generation by generation. Maybe I just need to add a check when I generate the wife of a male of the clan line (which is when her lifespan / period of fertility / etc gets generated), first to see if she's the last chance for the clan to survive, and if so ensure that she is fertile, lives to breed, and bump her husband's lifespan so that he can father some kids (if necessary). This, as with all the other tweaks, will slow things down, but it's still
way faster than doing it by hand.
Nichola wrote:
Actually, from my point of view, you have already done the hard part, which is creating the database, and turning the database into a nice display. I would be greatly interested in a feature that allows you to input a family tree and the tool just generates the tree output.
I definitely see the need for a feature for inputting family trees, especially if we're going to make it so that we can "build out" generated trees from the known canon ones. Let me figure out a format for bulk input of the trees (probably some form of XML) and then we can set volunteers to doing the data entry.
[quote='Nichola']As to the rest, I have a fair amount of practice and methodology built up, both for my own use and just plain 'playtesting' the article. I can write pseudo code instructions for all of this if you want. It will just take some time, which is why I have been suggesting you ask questions where you are stuck. Let me know how you would like to proceed.[/quote]At this point the tools going to go on the back burner (boy, I have a lot of back burners
) for a little while as I gear up for the first game of my new campaign next weekend.
The next steps I have in mind are to put this up on a website where people can go create their own private worlds of family trees - right now there's only one set of families in the database, so I need to create 'worlds' so that people can work on their own projects without interfering with each other. That's not a difficult task.
After that, a way to 'tweak' existing trees would be good - changing names and relevant dates, adding and removing children, etc. Not sure if that feature will come before or after the bulk import feature. Hmm, perhaps if I also do a bulk export into XML feature, then the tweaking can just be done by modifying the XML file and then reimporting it. Hmm hmm.
Anyhow, stay tuned - I will definitely post more questions here as I run into them.
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