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?
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.
Author
Topic: World Viewer 2.0 - View World information with Map + Mod Support (Read 70429 times)