Bay 12 Games Forum

I keep getting 'runtime error 9' with all of my worlds large or small.  On the small one, I checked the log and it said,"No Artifacts in this world, skipping section". Dunno if that means anything to you.

Very glad to see this up and running! Right now, I understand it's still developing, but I'd like to make some suggestions towards where I think the program should head.  Basically, the whole point of the World Viewer should be to make it easier to find the STORY of the world, not just the facts. And stories come from two things-- following a history chronologically, and picking out the IMPORTANT details within that timeline. You need to be able to filter out unimportant stuff, and correlate different histories together, especially where they interact (such as with war, and later on with trade and other diplomacy).

But first of all, a simple usability request.  This is a little much, don't you think?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The lines should be a toggle, and there should be a different way of visually distinguishing the civilizations. Perhaps the insides of the circles could be tinted the civilization color (also as a toggle)? In fact, I don't know if there might be a way to load the data for civilization claimed territory? Then that could be overlaid as a tint over the whole map, dithering where multiple civs claim the same land.

Moving on to actual features, I think the map is one of this program's greatest features, and it would be fantastic if there was at least a small window for the map on each screen, so that as you click on events, it can show where those events are located. Clicking on a war, for instance, should bring up each battle location, colored for casualties on each side, and perhaps numbered or dated so you can see the order of events.

Next, there needs to be some sorting options for some of the lists. Key sorting options for civilizations, for instance, would be population size, species, founding year, and age (not necessarily the same thing as founding year, as civilizations CAN die out).  For wars, you could sort by number of battles, starting date, ending date, total casualties, greatest impact (that is, casualties as a percentage of its total civ population at the time, bringing genocidal wars to the top), and that sort of thing.

In order to quickly spot interesting things, graphs might even be a good idea. Population graphs if nothing else, but you could also have a timeline graph showing casualties per year, coloring them either by civ, entity, or war.  In fact, layering a point graph of casualties next to a population graph could be VERY interesting.

And speaking of coloration, it might be helpful to be able to sort the colors themselves. What I mean is that in the map I'm looking at, I can distinguish 8 color groups, for instance-- reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, purples, pinks, and reds. These groups have at least four shades within themselves and those shades can be distinguished, and yet they are also clearly grouped and similar.  By taking advantage of these groups, we could set it so that all human civilizations are shades of blue, all dwarves shades of red, goblins shades of green, kobolds shades of purple, and so forth. One day, when better diplomacy goes in, it might be useful to group the colors by nation alliances-- so it'd be nice if the code was set up with color groups in mind to make that possible down the line.

I'll do that. In the meantime I noticed it was puking at the exact same spot, 8257 bytes into the file.

That corresponds to the white space just after the second <site> tag in this snippet:

Code: [Select]

<site>
  <id>41</id>
  <type>shrine</type>
  <name>drinksnarl the untamed birds</name>
  <coords>2,10</coords>
</site>
<site>
  <id>42</id>
  <type>lair</type>
  <name>droolcalls</name>
  <coords>10,3</coords>
</site>

edit: Here's the zip: http://www.sendspace.com/file/dtub8r

Getting a crash dialog "Run-time error '13': Type Mismatch" when it's 1.31% through parsing XML. I unchecked 'Log only Errors' and what I get in the log is below.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Quote

World Parsed at 12/14/2010 2:56:53 PM
History file: C:\DF_world\region1-world_history.txt
Site file: C:\DF_world\region1-world_sites_and_pops.txt
XML file: C:\DF_world\region1-legends.xml
XML file: C:\DF_world\world_graphic-elw-region1-30--10081.bmp
World: Tt "Tt"
Loading history file
Civs: 5
Races: 5
Leaders: 26
Worshipped: 17
Done Loading History file
Loading Sites file
Site: Kamdeedin lists Leader specifically as a member of the site
Sites: 42
Done loading Sites file
Loading XML file
Loading regions

• There is now a logging system, which should help greatly with finding any problems in your world.  Unchecking the box adds additional non-problem messages to your log files, about stats, and other uncommon but not problematic encounters in your files.
• Removed FM20.dll requirement, which probably made it usable by many more people.
• Sublists in most tabs now when double-clicked go to that item with greater detail.
• Lots of bug fixes

You guys are just awesome 

Nice! glad your back with a rewrite! Ill see if i can test it in a bit soon.

Glad to see you back, I was worried the World Viewer had become yet another dead app.

Quote from: Mason11987 on December 13, 2010, 11:51:11 am

Can you try installing this?

http://download.microsoft.com/download/activexcontrolpad/install/4.0.0.950/win98mexp/en-us/setuppad.exe

Now I'm a little worried as I tried to run it and got the following error:

Quote

The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142).

Sorry for flooding the first posts with problems.

Glad to see this is back albeit in a new form. Unfortunately I'm getting an error when I try and open it:

Quote

Component 'FM20.DLL' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid

Any ideas?