I found the missing drive pictures! Their names are stored in XML elements named "Model" rather than "Thumbnail" as usual... duh. The next release checks both elements and shows all drive pictures. The tree view is going to be a standard Windows tree view control but with some modifications to allow for the long linear research lines in the tech tree. I'll have to think about adding decorations...
Oh yeah, I forgot: there were several requests that a manually selected GC2 path should be persisted. That's also something I'm planning to do, along with a proper installer/uninstaller.
When a picture doesn't appear for an entry, it's either because Stardock's XML data does not specify a picture or because a specific picture could not be found. Also, GC2 itself can render 3D model files; I can only show PNGs or similar bitmap files. Nothing I can do on my side to fix this, unless some Stardock guy would tell me which image files to show for the image-less entries. As for colored techs, I think the technology icons already correspond to the tech tree colors (more or l
Those numbers are exactly what's stored in the XML files. I don't know what they mean -- to my knowledge, even Stardock doesn't really know what they mean since the internal equations are heavily fudged for balancing. Brad recently made a JoeUser post about this subject. So the numbers are indeed not useful in isolation; you have to compare various projects down the same line of research and look at the relative improvements to get an idea of how useful a project might be. Or else you
Functions like AIIsPlanetKnown() and AIIsShipKnown() seem to indicate that the AI has to explicitly "cover its eyes" in order not see game elements that are hidden by fog of war. I've been thinking about the same problem, and I've been wondering if you have considered creating some kind of "fogged" world state that the AI can use directly, without this explicit masking? That seems more elegant but also a lot more work...
You'll be in for quite a culture shock if you ever port your programs to .NET.
Finally a nice technology tree! How about a function to save the in-game tree to a graphics file for printout? That way we could always have a current tree without waiting for a manual update (I think the GalCiv 1 manual still says "preliminary"...) Very nice change regarding planetary resource consumption... I always found it odd that my planets would continue emptying the imperial coffers even when they weren't doing anything. Can't I just fire those employees and tell them to find a
Could you please push the release date back a bit? February 2006 barely gives us time to play a couple 200 hour games of Civ4...
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