Cantr II Discussion Forum

Managing a big town takes a lot of Excel sheets. Generally the results end up in table form on ingame notes, but you can't see the formulas that the numbers are based on. I was wondering, if a key character were to die for some reason, would it be okay to give the related Excel sheets to who ever inherits the throne, assuming they found them useful? Especially if I start generating css/html with the generate webpage option built into Excel instead of manually formatting tables in notepad (which is very slow and annoying), the results are certainly not pretty code-wise and would be very difficult to edit for someone who isn't good at css.

Overall, do other people use spreadsheets to organize and calculate ingame data?

I would assume that giving the actual files away wouldn't be allowed, which sucks because that's a lot of work to reproduce.

Personally I use google sheets (google's free version) to organize orders for one of my character's businesses.

I've recently created a spreadsheet that can be useful for any character who has access to so many cooking ingredients that it's not instantly obvious what to do with them. You mark which ones you have and the sheet makes the ingredients bold next to the food names if you have them, so it's easy to see if you have them all or if you're missing something. But if RD is planning to make big changes to food ingredients, I'm going to wait before they're done before publishing the spreadsheet.

One solution could be to place the key formula's (in normal language, not computer language) in a note. With those a successor could (with a little work) reproduce the calculations himself, without OOC contact between players.

I think, however, that using spreadsheets in game (like in a note) is unwanted. It is close to CR limits, or even over. There are no computing devices in the game, other than your fingers and toes. Of course you can use them offline.

Tiamo wrote:I think, however, that using spreadsheets in game (like in a note) is unwanted. It is close to CR limits, or even over. There are no computing devices in the game, other than your fingers and toes. Of course you can use them offline.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the characters did all of the calculations by hand. They're all usually simple formulas anyway, ones that can be reproduced easily (although it probably would take forever).

I use cantr2chains for calculating value of everything and res-cantrox for town storage history.
I don't use spreadsheets, because I store my notes in Cantr notes.

Cantr2chains: http://www.cantr-mmorpg.pl/progz/cantr2chains.rar
res-cantrox: http://www.cantr-mmorpg.pl/progz/res-cantrox.jar

Personally I don't think it's a CRB to calculators or spreadsheets, considering that our characters have all day to be thinking about and writing these things down, and it's just one of those innate abilities of Cantrians. Players are humans after all, with lives and better things to do than calculate the same things over and over in painstaking ways.
In this way players can have intelligent characters without having to do the math or keep track of things themselves in their head (or on a piece of paper).

Tiamo wrote:One solution could be to place the key formula's (in normal language, not computer language) in a note. With those a successor could (with a little work) reproduce the calculations himself, without OOC contact between players.

I think, however, that using spreadsheets in game (like in a note) is unwanted. It is close to CR limits, or even over. There are no computing devices in the game, other than your fingers and toes. Of course you can use them offline.

Can't it just be rped as you writing numbers in boxes and doing mental math with them? While we all know OOC that these things generally are the result of computing the mathematical feats already on display, such as knowing the exact progress of projects at a glance or how many days harvesting x grams would take, make this a non-issue to me.

Back on topic! I'm personally against exchanging OOC files like that. The greatest feature of this game is the persistent society/culture, if your culture or society is reliant on knowledge which can't be communicated in game then it should only survive as long as long as the person who possesses that knowledge is around. If it is something that can be communicated in game but you simply can't find someone who can be bothered to go about it IC then I suggest raising the salary or compensation associated with that role.