I would LOVE such a documentation feature, rich with auto accquired media from the game that had an auto html export FTP function for website updates.

Dwarf fortress has something like this. You can go into the historic archives of a generated world and find the history of specific creatures. The raw data isn't formatted much but it does into very good detail. A dwarf for example might have been kidnapped at a young age and raised by goblins in a dark tower. Humans then come along and sack the tower and raise the dwarf themselves. Later on the dwarf actually becomes mayor of the human town and so on. It goes into suprising detail, it won't give you the nitty gritty details of things like combat but it list all of the results such as broken legs and the like.

If you could make a story generator that uses that raw history as a starting point I'm sure you could create something interesting if not epic. The biggest challenge is not processing power but keeping the story flow diverse enough so that your legends don't end up sounding too cookie cutter classic.

I would love to see a retell of events (as an epilog to the game). Brad mentioned that he would like to recreate the scope of some D&D campaigns and that the developer should accomodate a player who wants a year(or more) long game. A story generator will be a great way to end it. though would be increasingly difficult for larger and larger games.

Good idea.  Sounds awesome to me

Epic story generator ==

Epic story generator == Devs killer fonctionality

I won't come for cheap.

This will be a really tough feature to balance.  I think their original idea of making a story generator was too large in scale.  However, I do think there are probably some innovative ways they could tie together a bunch of important events and make it easy to read, view, and post for historical/post-mortem features.

The cool thing here is that this function would not only be great for players and devs, but people like Brad who post really, really long summaries of what a game entailed could have that all bundled together conveniently for their own use or to share with the public.  It would be very impressive to get to go through and browse games other people have played to see what strategies they employed, how the AI responded, etc.  There would need to be a feature to specifically include/exclude events and maybe even add comments/screenshots inline.

Having something like this would set a new standard in gaming and certainly more feasible if SD will be hosting the games on their servers (so they already have the data).

Really, this might be better titled "Historical Gaming Review" or "Game Event Collector", rather than "Epic Story Generator" since making the summary use fancy adjectives and follow a book format is too over-reaching.

I'd be happy enough with an improved version of GC2's Timeline tab that provided sorts and filters and could export to XML or plain text. An option to take automatic screen grabs and assign them Timeline-based file names would also be swell.

Just imagine the teras or even petas that the Epic Story Generator could create in a story log in one of those uber-ultra-mega-big-of-doom maps that Frogboy says that will be possible in 64 bits systems and that could last years...   Ok, maybe exagerating (a bit?) but you get the point.

Considering all the things that are proposed for Elemental by the Stardock people, i'm not sure that a powerful Epic Story Generator could be done. Too much work for an already big task ahead. I would like one, just keeping track of the dates when i hire a hero, conquer a city, battle enemies... maybe even given the names of NPCs involved... but no need for uber fancy things because there are already many and many interesting ideas to be implemented/developed and that i consider more worthy of effort.

Maybe add an in-game notepad so we can write our own history/story while we play? That should be easier. If you add some capability to take and add screenshots, that would be cool. Hmmm Maybe a button here and there that adds to our notepad the current statistics of the screen associated to it? Like if i'm in my city i could click the button and get added data about population, buildings,...

One can always dream.