Finding them randomly in events or so sounds like an interesting idea… thanks for that ;-). I am a bit biased regarding using them as a “skill-book”… but let’s see.
We can only speculate on important events, but here are a few possibilities.
- Titan Battles
- Summary of wars, including major battles. We’d have to determine how much detail to include and what constitutes a “major battle” later.
- Population and city status
- Interesting quests/modules completed
I think any events should have a short bit of descriptive text instead of pure stats. For example, [quote=“Chronicle, post:22, topic:1448”]
"[Day] Winter of [Year],
Goblins attacked the settlement again. Raids are becoming more aggressive. [Settler’s Name] and [Settler’s Name] were killed before the goblins could be driven off."
[/quote]
If they implement the ability to name different areas of the map, as they have mentioned, then you could add that to the descriptions,
Of course, there would have to be a random element to each bit of descriptive text selected so that the same events wouldn’t always be recorded the same way. I could see a sort of case structure where for any given event type, there may be 10+ different snippets of description. When one of those events happens, a random variable chooses which snippet is selected for the chronicle.
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… that summarizes quite good what I would like to do and have in my mind. However, the question which cannot be answered yet is, how it will be possible to track this events. I am quite convinced that it will be rather easy… but for the moment we have to sit and wait.
That sounds amazing and is exactly as i pictured it, i also would like to be able to insert a snapshot for the event (a picture of the titan, or the magic gem as an example).
I just had this image of a photographer descending from the sky (in a Earthbound-like fashion) to take snapshots of my city. Everyone say, “Fuzzy Pickles!”
In seriousness, the snapshots would be fun. I think they would be most difficult to implement, but maybe not. Maybe it could grab the Qubicle model and take a 3/4 snapshot of whatever was in the chronicle entry. The difficult part would be optimizing so that it didn’t chew RAM in the background by taking a bunch of snapshots. If I can get the chronicle at all, I think I’ll be happy.
Agreed, but if implemented right it would be awesome.
Such a “Chronicle” has to include pictures, that’s a no brainer for me. A Chronicle without visuals would not work. Nobody wants to read a wall of text, even if it is the own history… I just do not want to disclose now all the “features” I have in my mind, so it is no fun anymore ^^.
I disagree. This is, after all, what most novels are (and this forum, too, mostly) and there are plenty of people who read those. 
I think that if it were well formatted text, then it could be easier to read than a standard wall of text.
But either way I like the ideas we are generating. The big thing is that mods shouldn’t make the game bog down. Some people (myself, for one) have really old computers but are still hoping to be able to play Stonehearth and won’t have the RAM to spare for a lot of background computation. (Image processing tends to tie up a significant amount of RAM, in my experience)
Maybe we need to replace “Nobody” with “Voxel Pirate” ^^.
For sure a bit reading is ok and probably “wall of text” is not a scientific measure for this. What I try to say is that I think a chronicle is more catchy and appealing if it includes some lines of text and a nice picture as an eye-catcher, making it easiert to remember. Customized texts which are randomly selected, similar to your suggestion above, that’s what I think could be implemented and would be enjoyable. I just do not see the players scrolling through 3 pages of text to read about a settler who was eaten by monster while he was fishing ;-).
I’ll agree that pictures would make the chronicle a lot more interesting. My concern would mostly be difficulty and efficiency of scripting. I’d hate to have just defeated a titan and have the game crash due to being out of memory because I was trying to take a picture of it. (Worst case there might have to be switch to turn off picture capture so that the mod could run on low spec computers.)
Good point on the option to de-activate picture capturing.
Uhm, From a technical background I’d like to state for the record that pictures are easy, processing wise. The amount of computing effort used to generate your gravatar is about the same as converting a real-time screenshot into a medium sized thumbnail and rendering it on a curved plane after adding borders.
Heck, that’d run on a windows 95 computer with a TNT gfx card.
Under the extremely unlikely possibility that the above is too difficult to implement, a stock image of each titan, a goblin, major achievements and progress markers would be sufficient. Something like that could generate stuff like this with almost no processor use:
So deactivating them is kind of moot.
Anywho. flies away
-Bits
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That picture exactly captures what i was thinking
I would very much like some image processing on those screenshots to make them look like drawings. It shouldn’t be hard. Edge detection is one of the most basic filters and then, if you want to, another simple filter to fill in the darker areas.
Not sure how difficult it would be to make it look like a color painting. Of course it would depend on what style of painting you were aiming for.
This could of course be optional to the player.
Other ways to pimp the book could bee to burn the edges if there has been a big fire, add wine stains and a lot of misspelled words if there is a big celebration and if the writer is killed his last log post could end with an unfinished sentence and stains of ink and blood.
Careful with this though. Too much would definitely spoil it.
Also, initials and decorative borders here and there could add a lot.
That’s all for now. 
Great idea!
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Maybe you can make it so that the farther you look back in the pages the older they look ( they get kind of yellow, the edges of the pages are torn, and the words fade a bit).
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Nice ideas… I will put them on the feature list for version 2.x ^^. First a basic version has to work. After that, all the small and big details are very interesting ideas to extend it.
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It would be nice if say the first page was centered text with the name of the archivist, settlement name, etc, and then it was laid out in a day by day basis?
I suppose similar to how books are handled in Skyrim?
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This pretty much covers what I’d ultimately like them to look like. Mine was a crass, roughly hewn representation.
In my reckoning because Stonehearth seems to be sort of Gothic Era game (I would guess roughly the 15th Century or earlier is the driving era of the game. The Printing press was a mechanical invention from the mid 15th century, and I would honestly see that as a super endgame moral/research booster, not something easily thrown together.
If this was implemented I’d much rather have a character with ‘Scribe’ or ‘Archivist’ documenting the exploits of your tiny village as it grows into a sprawling empire; All with artful, meticulously crafted (read: procedurally generated) illustrations and mirthful, sorrowful, or vengeful diatribe regarding the event, who was involved, and what they did (which represent roughly three variables (the second technically being an array) that can be easily re-arranged and parsed into interesting narrative.)
Bam
-Bits
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@bitassassin, I agree with both ideas you have, being the printing press as an endgame or advanced machine as well as having the idea of someone recording your villages progress as it grows from nothing to sprawling.
Something I posted a little while back, which I think is very similar to this idea was having a scribe and a scholar as two levels in a tech tree. As such, I think this could be a solution to having a recorder at the beginning, which keeping the press endgame. The bard can arrive with your village, or at least be easy to devote a village to, and have him recording a diary of the cillage at the beginning of the game. As the game progresses, the bard can level into the scholar who has access to a press.
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So, basically, “The Chronical” is a mod where you can be able print crap like newspapers in a printing press?
I’m in! 