Antimoany's Lair

Tracking the entire lineage of my progens

Dragon images © Flight Rising

The links should be in the floating sidebar to the left. If for some reason you can't see it, here they are:

full-size tree | trimmed tree | forum thread | updates

Both trees contain a lot of images. The're 100px dragon avatars, so they're not huge, but it's still a lot of images in quantity. They're set to lazy-load, so if your browser supports that you should have an easier time. The trimmed tree contains far fewer images total than the full tree.

In the full tree, exalted, unbred dragons display at half-size because the tree is massive and the lineages are long and I needed some way to save space. It's still massive, but trust me, that saves a lot of space.

In the trimmed tree, exalted unbred dragons don't have images. They're just names in a list. This should save a lot of bandwith, and it saves over 21,000 pixels of screen space. Aye, that's the right number of zeroes, I didn't make a mistake.

The tree is massive, and navigation isn't graceful.

If you're on desktop, click the mouse wheel (M3) to pan. Caret browsing may also prove beneficial.

If you're on mobile, good luck.

There are 809 dragons on Flight Rising that only exist because I bred my progens

Of those:

This means roughly 82% of my progen's, uh, progeny has been exalted.

It also means the trimmed tree has nearly 600 fewer images than the full tree.

Comparing this to Flight Rising's overall stats: (as of 3rd May 2023)

Roughly 81% of all non-G1 dragons on Flight Rising are exalted.

I'd say that means my progens' lineage fall within the average expectations for exaltation. Maybe a little higher than average?

For a long time, I've wanted to track the full genealogy of my progens. Admittedly, "genealogy" normally means "ancestry", but in this case I wanted to map out their progeny.

I ran into a few obstacles. The biggest of which was the fact that no genealogical software I tried could handle:

In searching for solutions, I did learn that all these "edge-cases" are common in real, human family trees. And that no software can handle any of them well.

Most software handles weird connections by duplicating individuals, and thus whole branches of the tree. This is very confusing to look at, and for software that collapses branches that are too big, creates an infinite loop.

I tried to draw a family tree myself, but that ended badly. Lining things up neatly was a losing battle.

I had to rearrange the entire tree to handle just one edge-case...and when I came to another, I had to rearrange the entire tree again to accommodate it, and soon found it wasn't possible to accommodate all edge-cases at once because the necessary arrangements conflicted.

Also, my version of photoshop can't handle canvasses larger than 4,000 pixels.

I did come out of my attempt with an understanding of why no software can handle these edge-cases gracefully, and why so many of them resort to duplicates and infinite loops: There are only so many lines you can draw on a 2D plane before they cross, and any lines crossing looks confusing no matter what you try. Weird angles can help once, but fnangling the entire tree around those weird angles gets harder the more of them there are.

But surely I can do something better than genealogy websites, right? I know my needs, and giving equal weight to all members of the tree was causing a lot of the problems.

So, screw equal weight. Paxid and Bedwen's progeny get priority, and the mates they created further progeny with really aren't that important.

With that particular revelation made, it became much easier to get everything else into place.

I decided I'd just throw something together with HTML and use CSS to draw the lines. It couldn't be that hard, right? I even drew cute little leaf backgrounds for the dragons and had my progens at the bottom as roots, so it would look like a tree when finished!

Except I couldn't get past the idea of the parents being at the bottom and the children at the top. My brain didn't like it. That's not how things work! Parents go at the top! Children go below them! It's a terrible shame because it was a cute idea visually, but I found it too confusing and I knew how it was supposed to work!

Reversing the order proved harder than I expected, and without the cute leaf backgrounds to smooth the rough edges, things looked weird. I found and heavily adapted this CSS, which did what I had spent days trying to do but much more intelligently.

I might revisit the roots-and-leaves idea some day, though it would require restructuring the entire tree and I'm sure that will be a pain. For now, it's at least functional in its current state. In itself, that's an achievement for this project.

I think I'll check in every couple of months or so as I remember to update things. That includes checking if errors have been reported via the form!