| Program: | Galactopedia for Galactic Civilizations II |
| Version: | 1.6.1 (History) |
| Released: | 10 December 2006 |
| Author: | Christoph Nahr (Copyright) |
| Contact: | christoph.nahr@kynosarges.de |
| Website: | http://www.kynosarges.de |
Make sure that the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is installed on your MS Windows system. Galactic Civilizations II by Stardock Corporation must be installed either on the same system, or on a shared network drive. See Security Permissions for more details on running Galactopedia over a network.
Install the Galactopedia binary package to any directory of your choice. The installer optionally creates a Galactopedia group in the Start Menu, and a shortcut on the Windows desktop. When updating an existing Galactopedia installation, simply choose the same directory as before. All of your previous installation options should be pre-selected for you.
Start Galactopedia using either the Start Menu group or the desktop shortcut. Galactopedia will attempt to locate a GalCiv2 installation on your system. If the attempt fails you will be prompted to select the game’s installation path manually. See Locating GalCiv2 for more details on this step.
Once the game has been successfully located, Galactopedia will take a second or two to read all required game data before the main window appears. Now you can browse all technologies and game objects to your heart’s content!
You can get more information in the following places:
Galactopedia requires a Microsoft Windows system capable of running the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. This includes the following operating systems:
On all of these systems, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later and Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0 or later are also required.
The Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable (22.4 MB) is required to execute Galactopedia. You can acquire the redistributable through the Windows Update service, or directly from this MSDN page.
Note: The .NET Framework 2.0 will not install on Windows 95 or NT 3.x/4.0. Therefore, Galactopedia cannot be executed on these platforms either.
Galactopedia requires a number of .NET security permissions that are available only when the executable is running with “Full Trust”. This is usually the case for all .NET programs that are executed on the local system.
Running the executable from a shared network drive or over the Internet is not possible by default, and will result in an error dialog showing any denied permissions. System administrators can change their .NET security policy to provide the Galactopedia executable with these permissions.
Note: Security permissions only affect the executable itself. The location of the GalCiv2 installation relative to the Galactopedia executable (see next section) is irrelevant. As far as the .NET security architecture is concerned, accessing shared network drives is no different than accessing arbitrary local files.
Like most Windows programs, Galactic Civilizations II stores all user-specific data under
the corresponding My Documents folder rather than in the game’s installation
directory. Therefore, locating the game on your system requires knowledge of two directory
paths: the common installation folder and the user-specific save game folder.
Galactopedia requires an installation of Galactic Civilizations II, either on the local system or on a shared network drive, that provides the data for (almost) all displayed entries. When the program starts up, the following steps are performed to locate a GalCiv2 installation:
In order to be found valid, a GalCiv2 installation folder must have a subdirectory named
Data\English. Galactopedia currently does not support any localized data folders.
You can reset or change the user-selected folder from within the program. Please refer to the online help for details.
The data for user-defined ships isn’t stored with the GalCiv2 installation itself but in each player’s save game folder. When the program starts up, the following steps are performed to locate a GalCiv2 save game folder:
My Documents folder contains the subdirectory
My Games\GalCiv2 (for the original game) or My Games\GC2DarkAvatar
(for the Dark Avatar expansion). If so, use this folder.You can reset or change the user-selected folder from within the program. As with the installation folder, you can browse for a GalCiv2 save game folder on any connected drive, local or networked. Please refer to the online help for details.
You can uninstall Galactopedia via Add and Remove Programs in the Control Panel, as usual. If you chose to create a Start Menu group during installation, you can also use the Uninstall Galactopedia shortcut located there.
Deinstallation removes all user settings from the registry, but only for the current user.
If other users were running Galactopedia and changing the default settings, a registry key
HKCU\Software\Kynosarges\Galactopedia will remain in their respective HKEY_USERS
hive. You may delete these keys manually if you wish.
This section provides additional information regarding the source package, available as a separate download at the Galactopedia home page.
The directory to which the source package archive was unpacked contains the source files required to build all .NET assemblies comprising the binary package. You need either the free Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK (354 MB), available at this MSDN page, or Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to perform the build.
Note: The .NET Framework 2.0 SDK and MS Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Windows 98/Me. Therefore, you cannot rebuild Galactopedia on these platforms.
Use Visual Studio or MSBuild to load or build the solution Galactopedia.sln.
The output directory is bin.
Rebuilding the solution will create an unsigned executable whereas the executable in the binary package is signed with a strong name. There are no functional differences, however.
Visual Studio provides various “wizards” and “designers” for automatic code generation. I never use these tools, though, so you may find it difficult or even impossible to edit the files of this package in “design view” because the required directives are missing.
Alternatively, you can use NAnt 0.85 to build
Galactopedia. Change to folder Galactopedia and execute the build script
NAnt.build. The following targets are available:
bin. This is also
the default target.bin.bin
that is signed with a strong name. You need a key container named “Kynosarges” for this target
to succeed.GalactopediaSource.zip
contains the entire directory tree after invoking “clean”. The binary package GalactopediaSetup.exe
contains all relevant files from the bin directory tree after invoking “release-signed”.Target “package” requires Inno Setup 5 to create
the binary distribution package. The control file GalactopediaSetup.iss is also
needed for this step.
Comprehensive information on the Galactopedia source code is provided by a stand-alone class reference, available as a separate download at the Galactopedia home page. This reference was created from the XML comments in the source code, using the free NDoc help compiler.
To recreate the class reference from the source package, you need the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop. To view the class reference, you need the Microsoft HTML Help Viewer. You can obtain the current versions of both programs at this MSDN page.
All files – individual files, multi-file packages, and individual files contained in multi-file packages – that constitute the original distribution of the Galactopedia for Galactic Civilizations II are Copyright © 2006 by Christoph Nahr. Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is © 2006 by Stardock Corporation.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The semantics of some of the GalCiv2 data are not entirely clear to me. For example, the variants of the Small and Tiny hulls show different technology prerequisites, and some weapons may not be available in the actual game. I’ll fix these issues once I definitely know what’s going on there…
The GalCiv2 data files sometimes misspell the identifiers of required technologies, and more often indicate nonexistent requirements. I’ve corrected the misspellings and removed all unreachable entries. Use the Debug: Invalid Links menu command to show all invalid identifiers that were encountered in the XML files, and what happened to them. Please refer to the online help for details.
Galactopedia does not support the modding mechanism introduced by version 1.2 of GalCiv2. Galactopedia will reflect any direct modifications to the original GalCiv2 data files, but any user-created data files located in the dedicated mods folder will be ignored.