Box-of-Flumph

[ploesch]

Ok, so I spent a litle bit of time with Box of Flumph.  It was really cool.  I don't think I have a complete grasp of what it does, but I have some handle on it.

I can definetely see how this could be an excellent tool for giving a history to a Kingdom.

I would love to see a campaign Manager done by Daan, you are the best!

A few suggestions.  There needs to be more brths, families used to be very large.  Which brings us to death, the Mortality rate should also be higher, people used to die younger and of disease, accidents etc. much more often.

Regional Events.  There should be regional events that effect many people or everyone in a kingdom.  Floods, Plagues, Bountiful Crops, Wars Famine, fires, etc.

OK, this was funny, but some people had titles at silly ages, perhaps the titles should be generated as part of life events, the Highest rated title (not the most recent) would stick.  I had a 1 year old Alcoholic in my Country, so sad.

Just throwing it out there.  Thanks for that though, at the very least it's entertaining.

[LWentworth8567]

I not getting many adults how many people are Adventuring here? Other than that and the stuff above. this really helps.

EDIT: after a reinstall It is showing other Ages But 1 Poligamy is that accurate and 2 Random Marrage when born.

[GhostWolf69]

I have now played around with this little experiment of yours Daan, and I must say that it is quite impressive. The load of work you put into it is awesome.

I have a few gripes though, as I'm sure you can imagine since this is not a finnished product.

1) The first and most Important to me is GROWTH. I have not looked into the algoritm behind the scenes here but after testing and more testing I have yet to see a settlement (of any size really) that grows over time. I started out with a metropolis of about 300+ people, clicked +100 years and ende up with 900+ Cool, clicked another 100+ years to let it "grow" even more... BAM! I was back at 400+.... What? Was there a war or something? The Metorpolis just lost 50%+ of its population over a 100 year period. I got curious and clicked +1000 years... (I can live with the wait) The result was 300+ people. More or less back where I started. If this was a freak occurence I could understand but I've been testing this now 15+ times with the same result.

2) The second thing I wanted was size. A metopolis should be bigger IMHO. 300-700+ people jsut doesn't cut it in a fantasy setting. I want 7000+... I thought this would only be a matter of setting type to Metropolis and age it long enough... but as I've shown in my first point above, that doesn't happen. I realise that this would bog down the speed even more and that it could be impossible to do this due to Processing limitations, but still... the option would be nice, to really have a metropolis that was... well... a metropolis.

3) The third thing is events. I just love the idea behind this, really. Love it. But shouldn't there be some sort of rule that stops people from becoming life long friends/enemies when they are 1-2 years of age? "Yeah I remember you! You are the nitwit who stole my pacifier when I was 1,5! DIE!!!" I don't know.... to me it would suffice if important things didn't start to happen until the person was at least 10 or something like that.

4) There seems to be a hell of alot missing when it comes to Jobs. out of the thousands of people I've created in my testing only a mere fraction actually had a Job. 99.9% of them simply had a blank space in their job description. You should maybe lookinto that?

4b) Connected to the Job-issue, looking at the City page I see all these "needed" numbers, I love them too... A big town needs a lot of workers... sadly the column that should say how manny workers of each type they have is blank, due to Jobs not being assigned properly. (For a while I entertained the notion that this could explain the dramatic drop in population... maybe they died fromstarvation? :) )

After this testing result barrage I would like to add a whish list:

 - Ability to regulate Population Race (mix races in %)
 - Ability to set a size for a town at "start" of simulation, (example: I want this town to be 700+ individuals even before I start to add years...)

Because let's face it; alot of us will use this tool to set up history, names and relations for settlements we allready have a firm grasp of. i.e. we might know the pop-size, the race-spread and so on. but we don't have all the good stuf this simulator is providing us. So the ability to enter the "known" parameters into the equation wuld just be super.

Thanks for a nice test-run. Amazing job, keep it up!

/wolf

[xavierorion]

I must say i can see the the usefulness of this tool.  I have played around with it a little and can see how it would be great for starting a campaign.  Yes you may have to iron some things out after the initial creation, but for the lesser NPCs this would be great.  

I agree with all the suggestions made before this.  More races, maybe interracial marriages etc.

My biggest problem with the tool so far is not being able to see the saved campaign information.  I do not have open office (though i may have to get it for this tool).  Preferably, i would like to see it as a MS Word document (wow did i just say that *smacks himself).  Lets face it though most people use MS Word.

thanx

Xavier Orion

[ploesch]

....Preferably, i would like to see it as a MS Word document (wow did i just say that *smacks himself).  Lets face it though most people use MS Word.....

Actually RTF or PDF is more universal.

You should try open office though, it's free and an excellent program, it can also handle word Documents.

[daan]

Thanks for all the comments. If Box-Of-Flumph becomes the next project after Redblade i'll be sure to include them.

I wanted to comment on some things.

I noticed the sudden population death. I suspect it has something to do with an inbalance between genders and age groups, or simply the fact that a generation is meeting the wrong people, and thus is unable to marry and breed.

As for the town sizes, its purely a usability issue. 10.000 detailed NPCs means a 250 page campaign file, so I decided to let the generator handle key figures in town and planned for some statistics for the rest.

On the jobless cities: If you flag a city as 'spawner', it will /never/ have jobs. Spawners are there to simulate external kingdoms from which people want to move to find jobs in yours.

On the OpenOffice thing, I made Box-Of-Flumph to test some things for Redblade SRD, like exporting to OpenDocument. The reason it doesn't include an HTML, RTF, PDF or word exporter is I already have some experience with those

One thing that might help, you can supposedly convert OpenDocument to word: (haven't tested this myself yet)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter

Daan

[PitFiend]

Thanks for all the comments. If Box-Of-Flumph becomes the next project after Redblade i'll be sure to include them.

I wanted to comment on some things.

I noticed the sudden population death. I suspect it has something to do with an inbalance between genders and age groups, or simply the fact that a generation is meeting the wrong people, and thus is unable to marry and breed.

As for the town sizes, its purely a usability issue. 10.000 detailed NPCs means a 250 page campaign file, so I decided to let the generator handle key figures in town and planned for some statistics for the rest.

On the jobless cities: If you flag a city as 'spawner', it will /never/ have jobs. Spawners are there to simulate external kingdoms from which people want to move to find jobs in yours.

On the OpenOffice thing, I made Box-Of-Flumph to test some things for Redblade SRD, like exporting to OpenDocument. The reason it doesn't include an HTML, RTF, PDF or word exporter is I already have some experience with those

One thing that might help, you can supposedly convert OpenDocument to word: (haven't tested this myself yet)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter

Daan

You made a great job with this tool, I used it for a while and found it is a nice add to my personal arsenal of RPG tools.

To solve the 250 pages of docs you can make templates for every classless or generic NPC, and generate a few IMPORTANT ones for IMPORTANT NPCs, that can reduce the amount to 15 pages, 10 for job templates (1 per job) and 5 for nobility and other important NPCs like Fresno the king, Hector his man at arms, Aluria the princess, Tim the merchant and Joe the bartender to name a very basic example.

[cm2ramos]

Yes, this could be VERY useful.

Other than sorting out the aforementioned errata (afterall this was a test), being able to select multiple races in the population would be a bonus.  Here's a scenario to consider when you later develope...

You're setting up a Campaign Region that consists of primarily %Human, %Elven, and %Dwarven.  You decide to create a starting Town that consists of those percentages in 300 people, but you also have some wandering welcome races like Halfling, but want to exclude Half-Orc and Gnome from the mix.  Set the parameters and go for say 50 years.  You see from that first 50 years some Halflings have settled into the city, and now there are Half-Elves about.  Now, you want to grow the Town to a City, being able to modify the parameters of the Town to now grow as a City for the next 100 years to see what happens.

The other option I would like to see is being able to modify some of the characteristics of these folk i.e. Names, relationships, etc.  

Personally, if you do take this on as your next project and put a random NPC generator into Redblade, you can link the two.  This way when one of the populace comes into play, all we need to do is click and pull up a fresh NPC from Redblade SRD.  Now, THAT would be the way to go!  :-D

You have A LOT of potential with these...

Cheers!

C.M.Ramos