Credits
Mammoth

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Matt Shannon

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Fleisch and Justtxyank

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iDOL

Credits
Mammoth

TEW IX Announcement & Developer's Journal Day 6 - External Editing

To aid database makers, a new external editing system has been introduced for almost all the sections of the editor. The way this works is that it takes your current data and creates a database file which isn't password-protected, where all the various columns have easily identifiable names (rather than the sometimes non-intuitive ones used internally by the game), and where the data is displayed in an understandable format (e.g. there are no codes being used, you'll be seeing text; so, for example, you don't have to know / work out that the internal code for 6'0" in height is 37, you'll just see it written in feet and inches). There's no ID numbers to remember or keep track of, instead it works by name matching - so if you're adding in a new relationship between two people, you just have to type in their names rather than going and finding out what their internal ID number is. You can then take that database and do editing using your preferred software, such as Microsoft Access. Once you've made the changes you want, you can then import the data back into the game - TEW will automatically run all the necessary error checking and make sure that you're not introducing any problems or incorrect settings, flagging up where any problems occur so that it's easy to go and fix them.

The game comes with a separate document, a "master list" of sorts, that lists all the different options for each piece of data. Database makers can therefore also have this open as a quick reference guide and just copy and paste text in to ensure accuracy.

All of this means that you can make use of the tools that external software provides, such as being able to edit multiple records at once, sort columns of data into specific orders, make comparisons, etc. It also makes group project work a lot easier, as you can divide up the work - for example, one person could handle relationships, another handle events, etc, and because you're working with names rather than ID numbers, you won't run into trouble with having to keep track of what state the database is currently in, nor do you need to worry about overwriting someone else's work. For example, whoever is in charge could just take the relationship data from whoever worked on that and solely import that, ignoring anything else.

Overall, this should take away a lot of the effort in making databases, particularly in the "grunt work" that takes up the majority of the time.