Saturday, September 3, 2011

[World Building] Getting ADD with too many options

So I learned a bunch of new and useful skills when it comes to spreadsheets, now more seems possible and I'm getting more distracted because work is getting harder.

Another Dream World Building Tool. 
Ok I got Harn Manor and it is really tempting to make the World Builders Ultimate Spreadsheet. I know how to do it now, in fact I'm tempted to spend 4 hours in the a trance building a program outline. Most of Everything needed to build a Manorial Estate/Fief can be made with Harn Manor. Worse/Best, (worse cause its distracting, but its actually good news that's distracting) it has the necessary foundation to build Cities.

Harn Manor makes villages and their manors. ISW has trade and trade relationship rules that can be scaled and tweeked to fit a TL1 to TL4 Economics. These create Trade flow stats, allows me to convert high Trade nexi into a Town. A very high Trade Nexus into a City or a Capital.

Another Distraction is Google Sketch up and Low Tech Companion.
I had a little project at work where we needed AutoCad count the furniture in a given floor plan for pricing. I helped generate the solution, because of my improving Spreadsheet skills. Basically, there is a plug in for AutoCad that allows for all its assets be listed down. It is a relatively simple script to generate a txt file output, and a script to update that output file (saving over the last one). It is also a simple matter to generate a macro, to import that txt file and another macro to organize the data, then another macro to create costing report based on our price list and all the modifiers. (a product that does this is being sold for $700 each seat)

Then there is the possibility that sketchup can do something similar. Sketchup can probably generate some reports, depending if you name the objects and group it properly. Then it is a simple but laborious matter of allowing the spreadsheet to organize than calculate the results using Low Tech Companion 1 to 3 rules.

Then just use Google Docs to store all these different files and structures to share... Distracting.

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