Turbine Games Q&A/Communications/Q-01

Original Link (now dead) - http://www.turbinegames.com/qa/view_questions.html?id=109

Communications Tree

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Asked:	2000.10.27
Name:	Son of Cahn
Question Title:	Communications Tree
Category:	Communications
Question:	I do understand the coding involved in alot the issues is much more than is economicly possible at times, so I certaintly never expect to see major game changes in its current stage of this version. However, may I ask how we are going to get the communications ladder working for all involved in a monarchy? There mucs be some solutions to this serious issue, however implimentation of this would be advised in future code rewrites. (Despite rumor, it's not beyond the relm of possibility) It would seem to me that there is a way of tracking Allegiances, Monarchies, and such. If there were some way to parse that information, and have it tabbed in the Allegience panel somehow, it would be benificial to say the least. Something in the form of a collapsing tree subsystem, that polls a persistant data base, and updates as required. Someone joins a Monarchy, that person is added in their respective place in the tree, and their follwers are added under them, and so on. One issue that may arise when doing such a thing, is the amount of processor power it would take, and the effects on the end user (lag etc.) Also, the streaming of such theoretically large data bases as it changes from time to time with each of the ranks. Maybe a separate proccess, much like the help system, would eleviate many of the issues, hard to say. Sorry, shouldn't take your time like this, but I would really like to know who is in my Monarchy, and who my patrons vassals are, and see a visual chain of command somehow, and I was wondering how you intend to deal with this in the future.

Answered:	2000.10.31
Name:	Ken Troop
Answer:	While we have planned a number of allegiance and communication updates in the near to mid future, perusing one's allegiance tree is not a readily achievable goal at this time. We recognize that such an ability would be useful to all of our players involved in allegiances, but the UI and programming time required to make it happen put it somewhat farther down on our list. However, we hope that some of the other communication and allegiance features we will be implementing in the next few months will help people in socializing in and out of their allegiance.