Downloadable information utility for GalCiv2

Published on March 7, 2006 By WishX In Galactic Civilizations II

Galactopedia

The Galactopedia is a utility program for Stardock’s excellent space strategy game Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, providing you with exhaustive information on all objects and technologies defined by the game. The information is taken directly from the game’s data files, and therefore always up-to-date.

System Requirements

The Galactopedia requires a Microsoft Windows system capable of running the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. This includes most Windows systems with Internet Explorer 5.01, except for the unsupported Windows 95 and NT 3.x/4.0.

Please use the Windows Update service or visit the .NET Framework home page to acquire the .NET Framework as a free 22.4 MB download, and to learn more about .NET system requirements.

Please see the Galactopedia website for more information, screenshots, download and source code!

http://www.kynosarges.de/Galactopedia.html

Comments (Page 4)

Chris Nahr

on Mar 27, 2006

Version 1.3.0 is now up. This one has a real installer/uninstaller, real documentation, and a bunch of new features: printing, searching, persistent user settings etc. I've also split Improvements into Planetary Improvements, Galactic Achievements, and Trade Goods, as suggested above.

By and large I consider the program feature-complete now. Of course I'll stand by for bug fixes and compatibilty issues with new GC2 patches but I don't think I'll add anything major from now on.

armchairknight

on Mar 28, 2006

Thank you, Chris. I'm amazed at what you've accomplished with this program. I am unworthy! But I'll take it anyway.

Mower

on Mar 29, 2006

This is most useful for study purposes when you cannot play the game. For me, I will read up with this from work.

egelliott3

on Mar 29, 2006

One feature request that I have is that some techs have an additional alignment requirement that is not indicated in the utility. I think that it might be nice to see this as a prerequisite of the technology. These are signified by the nodes in the XML. Thx.

Chris Nahr

on Mar 30, 2006

Thanks, Tarlynn! I had completely overlooked the alignment requirements. They'll be in the next update.

DaviddesJ

on Mar 30, 2006

For each improvement, it would be nice to list the improvement (if any) that obsoletes it, as well as the improvement that it obsoletes. That way you can easily answer questions like, "What's the next upgrade after the Enhanced Factory?" (Answer: Manufacturing Center.)

unreal_ed

on Mar 31, 2006

Some Galactic Achievments and Trade Goods are missing their required techs. Could this be fixed? Also could you add a Super Project button plz? Finally please change whatever needs to be changed when v1.1 is released. Thanks!

Martin the Dane

on Apr 01, 2006

Hi Chris Nahr, great app. I found a bug though I'm not sure its an error in your code, XP, my videodriver or .NET. What happend was. I started Galactopedia (GP), then started up GC2, swaped in and out a few times, to write a post on the forum, at some point I resized the GP-window. I then closed down GC2, and started swapping between FirFox and GP, but now the description window was blank each time I went into GP, to get the window to update I had to resize GP each time I swapped, or wanted to disply a new entry.

And then a few feature request:

I would like to be able to have a few sort options in the lists, so that I could sort alphabetically, by tec, requirement, generation, prereq, modules, etc.

I would also like to se the SizeMod value displayed. SizeMod is the percentage of the hull-size added to the component size. Ex. A Size 6, SizeMod 10 component will take up 6+flor(55*0.10) = 11 spaces on a non miniturized cargo hull.

Chris Nahr

on Apr 03, 2006

Version 1.31 is up, with just a few changes but the source code is now (almost) fully documented...

David -- Linking to obsoleting improvements should be easy, I'll do that.

unreal_ed -- There do seem to be some trade goods and galactic achievements that lack tech requirements, I'll look into that. It's possible that those things are not supposed to be built in the current version, though.

I'm reluctant to add a single button because that kills the nice symmetry... I could make two extra buttons for Super Projects and Unique Projects, though.

Martin -- Thanks for the explanation of how SizeMod works, I've left it out because I didn't know what it does! I'll add the data to the hull display.

Generalized sorting on entry properties is technically simple but requires a bit of infrastructure. Nothing too bad, though... I think I can put it in the next update.

I'm afraid I can't help with your display problem. Alt-Tabbing seems to work fine on my system. I've had one other bug report that the entry display was strangely garbled, and that also happened when Alt-Tabbing between GalCiv and the Galactopedia. My best guess is that there's a weird incompatibility of some system configurations regarding DirectX and the GDI+ display library used by .NET. Make sure you have the latest DirectX version and the latest video driver, and when the problem arises shut down and restart Galactopedia... that's about all I can advise. Sorry!

Martin the Dane

on Apr 03, 2006

Regarding the display bug: Last night restarting Galactopedia didn't help so unfortunately I'll have to run it on a seperate computer from GalCiv2. But I just downloaded both the new binary and source, so I'll se if I can figure out a workaround. If I do I'll let you know.

Chris Nahr

on Apr 04, 2006

I'm thinking that this might be a GDI resource issue related to the reallocation of the buffer bitmap for the entry display. I'll try to minimize reallocations in the next update, maybe that helps.

CommanderGizmo

on Apr 05, 2006

Just to let you know, it works great on x64 windows! The installer didn't know to look in the wow64 tree of the registry for my game path, but not a big deal.

Is there a significance to the way some techs are child nodes of others, for example the Phasors techs have PII nested in PI, and then everything from PIII after is nested into PII. Just wondering if it makes a difference in game somehow.

Chris Nahr

on Apr 05, 2006

SuperGeek: Good to hear the program works on x64. I have to admit, I didn't even know there was a separate WOW64 registry hive on those systems... Would you happen to have the correct GC2 key for your system? I'd like to add the WOW64 variant as an alternative registry location.

The tree view is nested somewhat strangely because the GC2 tech tree is extremely deep and very narrow. If all dependent techs were nested regularly you'd have to click through 20 nodes to get anywhere, and you'd constantly be using the horizontal scrollbar. Instead the tree view lists linear research sequences as siblings, without child nodes but with a ">>" sign in front of them. There's no game difference, it's just a more efficient use of screen space.

Chris Nahr

on Apr 05, 2006

Okay, version 1.32 is up with a few of the suggested enhancements.

Size modifiers for ship components based on hull size are now listed where appropriate.

Upon closer examination I found a ton of invalid identifiers for tech requirements so I've written some code to extract them programmatically. There's a new menu item, Debug -> Invalid Links, that shows all invalid entry references found in the GC2 data files. I've manually fixed a couple of obvious misspellings but a larger number of entries seem to be deliberately unreachable in the current version (1.1 beta) so I've removed them from the lists.

Lastly, I've revised the entry display code so that much fewer bitmap reallocations are made. This might fix the display issues Martin has reported, in case they were really a GDI resource issue or possibly memory fragmentation.

CommanderGizmo

on Apr 05, 2006

Chris: The registry key is as follows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Stardock

For some reason, MS felt that it made since to put all the x86 files into folders/nodes called wow64, and all x64 into the ones called system32 and such. Such depths of wisdom, those folks;)

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!