First I'd like to respond to the previous poster:
While it is possible to industrilize with very few factories around, I believe it is necessary for a few basic goods created by factories to be avabilable for education of POPs. This belief is based on however that the WM does not create goods out of nothing, which is something I can't confirm. Anyway, there are few of countries in the GC that start out with factories (such as England). It therefore leads me to think that one should convert EU2 manufactories and/or center of trades into Victoria factories. I'd rather not have the really broken economy in the out-of-the-box GC where some goods are chronically short of supply.
As a side note and idea; perhaps it is possible to convert EU2 victory points to Victoria prestige? At least the user could be given the option, and that a certain ratio would be applied (like 1 Victoria prestige = 10 EU2 VP). That should make the relative start between countries a bit more differentiated.
Now I'll get back to the things we need to do as soon as possible:
We need to decide on what language and compiler/tools to use. While I'd prefer to use C++, the best compiler and development environment is MSVC. However, it is way to expensive and has it tendencies to strongly reduce portability. (I just stopped using version 5 and tried to convert a few old projects to DevCPP - what a pain...). Of course there a loads of freeware compilers too, but those usually have their issues and lacking documentation. Like you stated earlier Java could be used as well, but I'm not too familiar with it so I'll need to practice a bit if we decide to go that route. To round it off the most important thing is that the language we choose need to have good facilities for clear IO, UI and data structure handling.
Now to the conceptual part. I haven't read much (not even in the forums), but is there any known documentation of all the specific Vic-related scripting statements for the .EUG files? Else we would have to research these in order to accomplish anything meaningful.
I've said earlier that we need someone to do the boring task of organizing EU2 province IDs into Victoria IDs, and EU2 tags into Victoria tags. Preferably this should be done in a format that we could use to load into the converter (if we don't need to modify it further). That is in a text format, but note that it means plain ASCII text and not Word! (For any non programmer who'd like to do that.) Below I'll make examples of tag definitions.
First country tag mappings file, with EU2 country to the left and corresponding Victoria to the right, separated by white space (note that many of the tags would be the same as seen below):
FRA FRA
ENG ENG
XXX YYY
Then the province mapping file. It is worse because each EU2 province would probably need to map into several Victoria province IDs (to the left the EU2 ID, to the right a list of Victoria IDs separated by whitespaces):
214 184 637 223
142 384 73 273
112 64
198 632 612 600 273
Tip: To view the IDs in the game, type "showid" when pressing F12. This should help you immensely since there are very few ID maps as of yet for Victoria.
Note that I made all those provinces above up, and that they probably should probably be sorted in EU2 numerical order for convience. In the same way the country list should be sorted in EU2 alphabetical order.
My last qustion is, how are states represented in the Victoria save game file? Are they at all, or are they simply initialized during loading time? If they aren't that is certainly more convient than if we have to care about them. Factories and colonial buildings might be organized into states though, and then Victoria province IDs need to be mapped into state IDs as well.
