Terrestrial family tree

wordman

wordman

Two Thousand Club
I've just looked at a demo of PhpGedView, a genealogy program that can be hosted online. I'm half tempted to host a new site that uses this program to track bloodlines of terrestrial exalts. Is anyone strange enough to find such a site useful? Would anyone contribute to it?
 
I am writing my dragon blooded game right now which would start next month, depending on when I end my vampire arc.


It is set in the imperial city and heavily influenced by dragon blooded politics. I would definitely use such a site, what kind of contributions are you talking aobut?
 
Data entry, for the most part. I could set up a shell of the obvious terrestrials (the empress and her offspring), but there have got to be a lot of canon terrestrials tucked away in various books, probably with vague to non-existent mention of lineage.


For example, if a book mentions that A and B are cousins, but nothing else, you can infer the existence of "unknown X" (A's parent), "unknown Y" (B's parent and sibling of X) and "unknown Z" (parent of X and Y), but you might never have names of X, Y or Z and might not know how they fit into the broader tree.


Also, since PhpGenView supports pictures, finding, scanning and adding images could be useful.


(Also, I'm about to head out of the country for a week or so. FYI.)
 
I've installed the thing and taken a first pass at adding stuff. You can see the result here. For now, the "account making" code is turned off, so no editing, but you can still browse the data.


And, yes, I know the theme sucks.
 
I've been keeping a list (as I go through the books in turn) of canon exalts (and including all exalts from my DM's world), divided into type and caste, etc.


Geneological tables = awesome. Much more detailed.
 
I was imagining something that would actually generate family trees, graphically. Is that feature not there, or did I miss it?
 
Due to the idiosyncracies of geneology in people that live for hundreds of  years, I've got a character who is 12 years old and the uncle of a man who is in his early eighties. Can thi handle that? If so, woot!
 
Can thi handle that?
Click to expand...
Yes.


It cannot handle some other things, though, which has me considering other software. Perhaps this or this. In particular PhpGedView doesn't seem to be able to handle something as simple as a "display names with surnames first" option. It's also a fairly wonky UI for data entry. On three different occasions, I've accidentally created situations where a person had themselves as a parent. In the first place, the software shouldn't even allow something like that to be entered. In the second, the UI made it look like I was doing something more sensible. Only the fact that the trees that get drawn have a setting that limits the number of generations prevented infinite looping, as far as I can tell. Another (more forgivable) issue is that it doesn't allow calendar customization (but does allow plugins for calendaring). I totally love PhpGedView's circle diagrams, but they are not so useful in this context (given the sparse data) and not a good enough feature to put up with the UI squirrelliness.


One the plus side, all of this stuff uses GEDCOM, so entry in one of these systems (or in easier to use software like Mac Family Tree) is as good as the other.
 
Along simular lines, my ST found some awesome freeware called free mind which easily could be used for family trees... or rough drafting a game. It's pretty awesome. I highly recomend it.[/url]
 
I would think the software Lore5 uses to draw Charm trees could handle the graphical portion easily, no?
 
Flagg said:
I would think the software Lore5 uses to draw Charm trees could handle the graphical portion easily, no?
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No. Dot might be coerced into doing this, but how eludes me at the moment. It doesn't have any native ability to handle the "Y" type connections used in genealogy.
 
I've been keeping a list (as I go through the books in turn) of canon exalts (and including all exalts from my DM's world)' date=' divided into type and caste, etc.[/quote']
Do you still have this list? Does it have page references? If so, could I get a copy?
Click to expand...
 
Random issue:


The book says that a) Ragara Banoba is the son of Ragara, so you have:


Empress -> Ragara -> Ragara Banoba


One part of the book says that b) Heral is Banoba's nephew. This implies


Empress -> Ragara -> sibling of Banoba -> Heral


Another part of the book says c) that Banoba is the cousin of Heral's mother d) Regara Soras. If Soras and Banoba are cousins, then:


Empress -> sibling of Ragara -> Regara Soras -> Heral


The thing is that Soras is pretty clearly descended from Regara at some point, not one of his siblings. (His siblings include the other Great House founders.)


I don't see a way to make all three of these facts in the book true. Let's set fact d (that Soras is Herals mother) as unambiguously true. If a) and b) are then true, than Soras would need to be Banoba's sister, not cousin.


If Banoba was Ragara's grandson instead of son, it would be easier.


Not sure how to enter this.


For Banoba and Soras to be cousins, they must share a common grandparent.


For Heral to be Banoba's nephew, he must be the son of Banoba's sibling.


For Banoba to be Ragara's son, Ragara would need to be his father, making the Empress his grandmother.


For Soras to be a Ragara, she would need to have Ragara as an ancestor.


Suppose Soras married Banoba's brother. This would allow Heral to be nephew. Does this help?


I think you have to conclude that the "fact" that Banoba and Soras are cousins is wrong, and that they are actually siblings (or, at least, half siblings).
 
There are tons of mistakes like this in the books.


For example. The paragon of the earth dragon, there are actually two. One is a daughter of mnemon out of the manual of exalted power dragonblooded and in the blessed isle book there is the description of all paragons and the earth dragon paragon is nothing like the mnemon one from the manual, but both are in office for well over 100 years now ^^
 
That's actually handy, that way you can buy yourself expensive christmas presents and you can be sure that you will always like them.[/url]
 
OK, I'm calling the data entry for MoEP: Dragon Blooded finished. I probably missed some, but good enough. Entry of data with the new code still isn't great, but it is better than before. Takes a little getting used to.


At this point, the site is probably ready for data entry volunteers. I think the best way to go about it is to break it up by books. If anyone is interested, let me know with a post here, along with which book you want to tackle. You might also try making an account on the site. (Haven't tested that. Quite possible that mail won't work.)


Current stats:

  • Total Individuals: 193  
  • Total Males: 65 (33.68%)  
  • Total Females: 57 (29.53%)  
  • Total Unknown Gender: 71 (36.79%)
  • Total Families: 158  
  • Total Unique Surnames: 43
  • Total Photos: 8
 
With the new year, I'm looking to simplify. As a result, I will be taking down my Dragon-Blooded Genealogy site in the next few weeks. I don't mind hosting it, but as no one but me has contributed to it, and I have other things I'd rather be doing, it doesn't have much of a future.
 
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