Introducing: Dwarfipedia
Hello!
For a while now, I've been developing a Legends viewer for Dwarf Fortress, but I wanted to approach the problem a little differently. Most Legends viewers are excellent at giving you access to the enormous amount of historical data generated by the game, but I always felt like they stopped just short of actually helping you understand that history. You get graphs, tables, event lists, and raw information, but not necessarily a sense of who these people were, what these places meant, or how all of it fits together. I wanted something closer to a Wikipedia for the world I'd actually been playing in, something I could use to explore its history rather than simply browse its data.
Features:
Figures, Sites, Civs, Written Works, and beasts all have their own pages.
Game tools: Interactive adventure mode character sheets, this has been helpful for me to jot down notes about quests, and other things. As well as a very much in development fortress mode companion that hooks into DFHack to give you data in a dashboard.
Cartography: Probably my favorite feature, you can generate many regions, and place them together on a map, move them as needed, paint over them to smooth some of the edges, or zoom in on a specific region, see the political borders of civilizations, see which races occupy which parts of the map.
And quite a bit more.
I'm now at a stage of development where I consider the software to be nearly complete. There are undoubtedly still bugs to find and things to improve, but the main reason I'm posting this is to get some feedback from the community.
There are a few decisions I made during development that I realize may not sit right with everyone, so I want to be transparent about them.
The first is that I integrated a local LLM and Stable Diffusion into the software. The LLM can access data from the current page and use it to generate prose describing the subject, rather than relying entirely on randomized word-bank text. The image generation works similarly, allowing the software to generate images locally rather than sending the world's data to an AI company's servers.
I'm aware that "it's local AI" may not make the use of AI acceptable to everyone, so I'm interested in hearing what people think about this approach.
The software relies heavily on word banks, or more accurately, sentence-fragment banks, to assemble descriptions of things in the world. Some of the descriptive information generated this way is therefore not necessarily accurate to what actually happened in the game.
The underlying Legends data is still the source of truth, but the prose presented around that data is intended more as a way of contextualizing and exploring the world than as a perfectly accurate historical record.
Personally, I don't mind that distinction. If I can pull up an obscure historical figure and get a useful page telling me who they were, what they did, where they lived, and what they were involved in, I'm much happier than I am staring at a table of raw events.
But that's ultimately one of the things I'm curious about from the community: would you find value in a Legends viewer that prioritizes making your world's history understandable and explorable, even if some of the generated descriptive text isn't perfectly faithful to the games underlying data?
I've included some screenshots. I'd love to hear what you think, especially about the overall concept, the AI features, and the accuracy tradeoff.