(This is not a prank. Legitimate Toady reply dated March 30)
Holy Carp. I knew myths were slated for iteration, but when Toady talks about it...crapabear wrote:what kind of experiments are you doing with your test myth generator? [...] What kinds of myths are we talking about, and how crazy can the results get?Toady One - (some emphasis added) wrote:These myths are meant to take the world from its starting point (whether that's primordial chaos, or an endless mud flat, or a cosmic egg, or coupled divine beings, or nothingness, or an endless cycle, or whatever), and then bring the story up to the point where the year 1 situation of world generation has solid backing, in terms of the existence of the proto-civs, the land, the megabeasts, the underground, all of it. Yeah, we started playing with it more seriously because of the upcoming w.g. artifacts and the religious stuff coming for start scenarios, and now we're pretty sure the myth generator will be put in the game either before or during the first w.g. artifact release, since they'll be tied together. And who knows what else will happen.
I'm not sure how to evaluate the quality of the results -- say, after some stuff happens and we have some freshly created dwarves, the celestial ibis mates with the sun and lays an egg which contains the progenitors of a giant-sized race who all come to reside in their lost city and forge the device which weaves the destiny of the dwarves and the dwarves rebel and break the device and that's why dwarves grow old and die now, or whatever. It just grinds away and things happen, tossing in different worlds and nature spirits and forces and races and artifacts and second-generation gods and whatever. At the end there's a kind of overlap where everything is explained (why dwarves die, etc.) but you've also sort of started history -- this leads to questions about whether you'd be able to play in an actual Age of Myth where dwarves don't yet age and the sun doesn't exist, or something. As usual, the number of options will simply expand over time, and the myths will only be partially used at first. It leads to lots of interesting relationships that differ from world to world, and we'll try to use those in the ways people talk and what they can do, but it's a large project.
I also tried to experiment a bit with building origin stories from the facts at hand, so it can trace back and find the relevant events and make a paragraph containing only the pertinent bits, so different races might see things differently, but that's all very rough. There's also the matter of the current "localized" pantheons, and how that will play out when there's actually a unifying correct story is unfortunate, in terms of cultural differences. We might play around with distortions of the true data, and just having everybody be partially wrong (or everybody is right, in their way), but that's always hard, especially early on when we don't have a good handle on the data structures for correct data. Lots of options, lots of ways to handle it, and we'll only get to some of them. We might be approaching the point where we can actually have a nice slider for the simple world gen parameters, in terms of supernaturalness (although dwarves would stay at the lowest setting for a long while yet).