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.

The Galactopedia is © 2006 by Christoph Nahr but available for free download under the MIT license. Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is © 2006 by Stardock Corporation.

Important Note: As of January 2007, I no longer maintain the Galactopedia. The last released version is known to be incompatible with the current version of Dark Avatar and the newly released Twilight of the Arnor.

Thankfully, Netriak has updated the Galactopedia for compatibility with Twilight of the Arnor. The new version can be downloaded at Stardock’s Galactic Library.

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 or later, except for the unsupported Windows 95 and NT 3.x/4.0.

Windows Vista comes with .NET 2.0 preinstalled. Users of older Windows versions should 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.

Project Information

Consult the following links for more information on the Galactopedia. Copies of the ReadMe and WhatsNew files are included with both download packages.

• The ReadMe file contains the copyright notice, setup instructions, and technical details on the project.
• The WhatsNew file contains the annotated version history of the project.

Here’s a screenshot of the Galactopedia in action:

• Entry on Galactic Resort (936 by 672 pixels, 62.8 KB)

Download Files

The current Galactopedia version is 1.6.1, released on 10 December 2006.

Users should download the Binary Package only. Developers may want to download the Source Package and the Class Reference as well.

Binary Package

The current binary package is GalactopediaSetup.exe (344 KB). This is a self-installing archive created with Inno Setup. Simply execute it when the download is finished and select an empty installation directory, or the directory of a previous Galactopedia version.

Starting the Program. If you chose not to create any shortcuts during installation, double-click on Galactopedia.exe in the installation directory to start the program. Otherwise, just use the provided Start Menu and/or desktop shortcut.

Dependencies. The Galactopedia will query the registry to determine the GalCiv2 root directory, and will read various data files in this directory tree. The Galactopedia does not have any other external dependencies and will not connect to the Internet on its own. Any changed user settings are stored in the registry but will be removed when uninstalling.

Source Package

The current source package is GalactopediaSource.zip (137 KB). This is a standard ZIP archive containing subdirectories and long file names. Extract the contents to any directory of your liking.

You need Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to load the included solution and project files, although you can also use the free Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK (354 MB) to rebuild the Galactopedia. Both Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK require Windows 2000/XP/2003.

Class Reference

The current class reference is GalactopediaClasses.chm (976 KB). This file was created from XML source code comments using the free NDoc help compiler. To view the class reference, you need Microsoft’s HTML Help Viewer (which should be present on most systems).

IMPORTANT: The class reference was generated with an alpha version of NDoc 2.0, so there may be errors. Specifically, if you find that the links to the MSDN Library are not working you should select the pseudo-topic “SDK Link Manager” from the Index and enter the actual root of your MSDN Library topics.