Thanks, Ursca! Once I see in more detail what we've got in terms of period models, etc., I may well ask. And thanks for the vote of confidence, Xawery.
Status update - triage is done.
Repository now contains about 150 files roughly categorized according to which encounter set or location they belong to. Some of them (dragon, mines, raubritter) are large and need sub-sorting before they'll be all that useful.
There's a lot of material in here which I, at least, never saw in Darklands. Jeweler's street, soldier's road, the mechanics of unrest and rebellion, nunneries and hospices in cities, a random encounter with Templars burning a Franciscan friar at the stake... all sorts of content which it's pretty clear they had to leave out of the release, but left in the code. (For instance, the authors spent an estimated 10% of their total effort, a huge amount, on the mechanics to convince various residents to rebel or not rebel, or on finding blackmail on guild leaders. Neat stuff. I've never seen a whisper of it while playing - maybe that had to do with playing v.05, or maybe it's just me.) As far as I'm concerned, this is all still grist for the mill, but it's at about fourth-order in priority. The fact that we might conceivably not only equal the Darklands content we all remember, but in fact breathe life into the designer's uncompleted notes as well, is tremendously exciting. Have to keep my eyes on the immediate work.
We now have ready-made task number one: build a city navigation template. Here's a sketch of how I'd like to see that go:
1) Build the map of menus-that-are-nexuses. Every location that isn't a dead end (only exit is back out to where you came from) should get a menu. Map that out and crosslink it. Assume a minimal city, no University, no Fortress, no Soldier's Road (?), no Nunnery (?), no Hospice (?), no Jeweler's Road (?).
2) Construct the nexus menus (daytime only) which carry you from place to place, linking them all to each other as per the map.
3) Add menu options to the nexuses, and menus, for all the destinations which dead-end off of these nexuses, including actions (like checking rumours) which can be taken from within a nexus. These should start out as placeholder menus with no significant text and a 'back' button only; ultimately, some of them will end up as scenes, their content shuffled into dialogue. At this point we ought to have essentially all the "go there" buttons that we'd see in a Darklands city.
Ultimately, I think what I'd like to do is to have each city have a series of attributes (in slots) defining the presence/absence of a University, a Fortress, and so forth, and the city-specific names and face hash seeds for its inn/market/leaders/Medici reps/patron saint/etc. Not to mention the quality factors (we can affect merchandise quality in 0.8!) for the various types of goods, and prices outgoing and incoming. And the group's local rep. But then, we build a single master city, and the individual bits (like the University) only show up when the current city supports them. This is all notes for later, though, not things I'd expect to see in the first nav template.
Anyone want to step up to the plate to handle the city navigation task? I'm not going to offer to do this bit; I'm going to put my energies into developing our random-encounter code. Once we have a city template and a functional random-encounter script, then it's all insertions and instances from there for quite a while.
Not having to write the text of all the encounters is going to expedite this twohundredfold.
