Administration and automation of the AGCEEP project

[vicotnik]

Although I've played AGCEEP for quite some time I've never made any contribution, but since I'm both interested in and see difficulties with the conversion to the new map I think I might have an idea. The format used by EU2-events and scenario information is quite limited and means that administrators for example have to track actual event ID:s and the limitations in various aspects of the event system means that nonsensical or even misleading tags and names have to be used.

My idea would be to instead move to a format without these restrictions in the high level perspective and then compile this information into actual event files (hard limits will of course remain, but you don't need to worry about specifics). The first step would obviously be to decompile all current information into the new format, but the format of the event files is pretty easy to parse. Once this is done you could automate things like renumbering and splitting provinces, and you might in an advanced version also create graphs of connected events.

If there is interest in this kind of tool I could look into making one.

 

[unmerged(40707)]

Sorry, I must have missed this...

We already have a tool to help us for this task. It is a database made by Aegnor and it will be used for conversion to new map. You could discuss with him.

Could you post an example?

 

[vicotnik]

It was mostly a question about using tools to automate mundane tasks, like splitting provinces into x provinces with taxvalue of the 1+original/x (or whatever you are using). The format thing is more radical, it would basically be about using a similar format without the restictions presented by the default eue-format that is later compiled into regular eue-files. It would simplify the writing of events at the cost of having to depend on a compiler (which is admittedly a pretty large cost).

I noticed that Aegnor had a database of some kind, if it was extracted from parsing the eue-files directly then he already has some of what you need to implement these kinds of ideas.

I might write some code during the weekend to see how difficult it is.

 

[vicotnik]

Well, after some initial programming it doesn't seem like parsing is particularly difficult but it still takes some work to include all posssible cases. There are quite a lot of different triggers and commands I hardly knew about. Since Aegnor already has this part covered it doesn't seem that necessary to finish it, I'm not sure exactly what he's done, but he should be able to extract all events linked to a specific province and so on.

As to the compilation aspect it's not so bad either since the format is quite regular. I'm not sure how to illustrate the idea because you could do it in quite a lot of ways, but the simple way would be to just remove limitations. Instead of giving events unique ID:s you could give them proper unique names and say "trigger English Final Victory" instead of "trigger 100062". Other things could include using "country = Khorasan" instead of "country = U01" and "tatar" culture instead of "naskapi". You could of course also simplify common triggers and commands in various ways.

In any case there are obviously downsides to this as well, and I can see that there is no interest in it. Good luck with the new map in any case!

 

[unmerged(40707)]

I see clearly now but, as I said, tool for conversion is already made and, as you said, such "Code Generator" could have downsides. Anyway, thanks for having proposed your help.