So where's the dynamic world default file?

[joefromchicago]

As I understand it, the goal in switching the world data from a .txt file to an .html file was, in part, to permit the creation of a dynamic world file that reflected political and demographic changes over time. So, for instance, New York City and Brooklyn would be separate cities before 1898, Los Angeles would start off as a small town and get progressively larger, etc. This is how Andreas described it in 2011:

When we started the world database project, we wanted to provide a number of world files which OOTP could load when needed. For example one file for 1900-1910, one for 1911 to 1920 and so on. When you sim a year in OOTP and there's another world file available for the new year, OOTP would load it and merge the data into the league file. There's some work to be done until that will be possible. But it's part of the world database concept.
If we only had more time.... (or more sales so we could hire more manpower)

So where is this dynamic world database project? Is anybody working on it? Does anybody (besides me) even remember it?

[Cryomaniac]

I assume it ended up being too much work (and maybe makes the files take up too much space, the world default file at present is over 9MB, which okay isn't HUGE, but if you have 11 or 12 of them then that's over 100MB of XML files).

[joefromchicago]

No doubt that's true. I imagine a truly dynamic file for the entire world would be huge - and that's assuming that the data are out there, which, for a large portion of the world, they aren't. Nevertheless, I think a dynamic file could be created for the US and Canada - they're probably the most important countries for most players, and the statistics are reliable and accessible.

In addition, although the population numbers would be off, it wouldn't be difficult to track the major political changes over the past 140 years. For example, there wouldn't be a Poland before 1918 or an Israel before 1948, Norway would be part of Sweden until 1905, etc.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

No doubt that's true. I imagine a truly dynamic file for the entire world would be huge - and that's assuming that the data are out there, which, for a large portion of the world, they aren't. Nevertheless, I think a dynamic file could be created for the US and Canada - they're probably the most important countries for most players, and the statistics are reliable and accessible.

In addition, although the population numbers would be off, it wouldn't be difficult to track the major political changes over the past 140 years. For example, there wouldn't be a Poland before 1918 or an Israel before 1948, Norway would be part of Sweden until 1905, etc.

A dynamic file could be done for most of Europe too I would imagine, a lot of countries have pretty good census figures (although some would have to be extrapolated - the UK 1931 census documents were destroyed during WW2 and there wasn't another census till 1948, for example), so you might be able to get at least rough population figures by decade.

Your point about political changes is a very good one. It would be a hell of a lot of work but it would also be very cool. For some reason it got me thinking about the whole multitude of tiny German states in the 1700s though lol.