[Utility] Emurian Mod Manager for Stellaris

[Viekas]

[A download link can be found in the description of the youtube video.]

Hello everybody,

I'm Viekas

I'd like to share with you all a free application I've developed for Stellaris over the past week and a half. This is a feature rich mod manager built (currently) for Windows only.
(Sorry! *nix and macOS players.)

What's "Emurian?" Emurian is the name of my ficticious empire in Stellaris.

This application has only been tested on two windows systems with standard DPI and 1080p resolutions on English systems. So feedback on the interface is very much needed!

That's enough of an introduction, so here's a little more information about the program itself. (Pictures included.)

Main features include:
• Enabling and disabling mods.
• Exporting and Importing lists of enabled mods / mods to enable.
• Launching the game with a custom mod list enabled.
• Deleting mods (manual unsubscription from the Steam Workshop still required.)
• Removing broken mod references from settings file.
• Finding missing mods (helpful when sharing mod lists with a friend.)
• Viewing lots of information about your installed mods, including file sizes.
• Backing up small/medium sized mods to a zip file.
• And more.

Image Gallery: http://imgur.com/a/8fyjz
Demonstration video:

 

[Viekas]

I just wanted to give anyone interested in this project a heads up that I just released a new version today, version 1.5. Which includes a lot of minor stability improvements, crash fixes, and feature enhancements.

 

[zukodark]

Why haven't I used this before...

 

[ImpalerWrG]

Looks excellent for managing to 200+ mods I've subscribed too, will try it out tomorrow and provide feedback.

 

[Viekas]

Thanks, I would definitely appreciate some feedback!
As of yet I have only had a couple of friends give me any feedback on it.

Hope you enjoy it.

 

[primem0ver]

What language/platform is it written in?

 

[Viekas]

This is written in C# (.NET v4.6.1) and runs exclusively on.

 

[primem0ver]

Do you know C++? I am asking because there is a farily easy to use C++ API that would make the manager available for all platforms. I have used it before.

 

[Viekas]

What API are you referring to? It'd be interesting to see.

Yes I do know C++, but rewriting everything would be a very time consuming undertaking.

I chose C# because it is my language of preference on Windows and I was at the time under the very wrong assumption that Stellaris was Windows only. If I had taken a few seconds to look I would have started this project in another language like C++ or Java. lol

 

[primem0ver]

The reason I ask is because I have been considering doing a similar project (though not as far reaching). I wanted to create a program that checked all currently running mods for compatibility issues (based on files with the same name... such as vanilla files). I was originally just going to do it for myself in c# as well but if I were to ever make a public release, I would do it using C++ using the Qt API. It is almost as simple as .NET (minus the need to create header files and its rather unique approach to "events"). A Qt program created in their own IDE is compatible with any OS (as long as you have a compiler/Qt compiler for that OS). You can also use Qt in MS Developer Studio though exporting A Qt project from MSDev to a native QT project is not quite as straightforward as they make it appear. Qt is also free for open source use.

If you are familiar with Skyrim, the Mod Manager (not NMM) for Skyrim was written using the Qt platform.

 

[Viekas]

Oh yes! I am aware of Qt, I've had a little experience with it but never made a complete project on it.
On a side note regarding what you said, my program actually does exactly that. It has a very basic mod conflict detector that detects file name conflicts with other mods.

Qt is definitely my first choice if I took this cross platform. Under the hood my source is in need of some major house keeping, refactoring, and commenting.
Java/Swing and Python/Kivy also both interested me for making a cross platform version. At the moment though I don't have any real desire to rewrite everything, mostly due to time constraints. There is a real potential for just writing everything in C# with GTK bindings though for *nix and macOS, but even then there is a lot of Windows specific code that would need to be rewritten from scratch.

 

[primem0ver]

Is it save to assume that your conflict checker makes use of a zip API so that you can check zipped mods as well?

 

[ImpalerWrG]

So far I am very pleased with the manager and it's helping me immensely, I fully replaces the build in mod selector in the pre-launch screen.

I did notice though that mods that use the

path="mod/nameofmod"

which is how a mod is created initially, rather then the usual format for a downloaded mod

archive="C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\steamapps\\workshop\\content\\281990\*inscrutable mod code*.zip"

Are not registering as any size nor can they be opened to the contents, though they can be check-marked and played fine. This is really only an issue for folks who are making mods in addition to downloading them but it would be a handy addition in future versions if your looking for improvements to make.

 

[Viekas]

Is it save to assume that your conflict checker makes use of a zip API so that you can check zipped mods as well?

Yes that's correct! I'm taking advantage of the awesome DotNetZip library. I found that .NET's native ZipCompression was throwing exceptions trying to extract details from mods due to their compression.
Whereas DotNetZip just works.

So far I am very pleased with the manager and it's helping me immensely, I fully replaces the build in mod selector in the pre-launch screen.

I did notice though that mods that use the

path="mod/nameofmod"

which is how a mod is created initially, rather then the usual format for a downloaded mod

archive="C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\steamapps\\workshop\\content\\281990\*inscrutable mod code*.zip"

Are not registering as any size nor can they be opened to the contents, though they can be check-marked and played fine. This is really only an issue for folks who are making mods in addition to downloading them but it would be a handy addition in future versions if your looking for improvements to make.

I'm really happy to hear that it's helping you out!
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'll be sure to get it fixed when I have some free time.
This was definitely an oversight, as I am not a modder. I programmed in special handling for "path" variables to be enabled and disabled, but I forgot to do the same for sizing and opening.

 

[Kepos]

Great work, thx for your fine tool.
At least I am now able to wipe those outdated mods, that are hard to locate.

Is there a way to start Stellaris without the game's starter menu? At current (120 mods active; 6.5 GB), it is a bit sluggish and I do only get 20% chance to start the game...so I waste more time for starting the game as I like to.

 

[Ivan Bajlo]

The second I attempted to start your manager Windows Defender quarantined it, reporting detecting:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wds...edia-description?Name=Trojan:Win32/Fuery.A!cl

You might want to submit your manager to Microsoft to prevent future false positives.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission

 

[ImpalerWrG]

Mine has also stopped working properly, it opens without any error message but dose not form a proper sized window and is unresponsive.

 

[Bonr]

This is awesome! My friend that I play Stellaris with is constantly finding new mods to play with, and you hadn't yet posted this at the time, so I started working on my own simple, console-based mod manager (well, not really a manager so much as a tracker, so if you go back to play an older save, you know exactly what mods you had enabled).
I wrote mine to automatically backup a list of your mods to a .txt every time it detects a new save file (that way I can leave it running in the background 24/7 and it only uses 0.1% of my CPU at most), but that's about it since this was my first real program and I was learning C++ as I went.
I'm glad I found this, since you have a lot of the features that I had hoped to eventually add once I learned how to do so! I'm going to have to add an option in mine to output Emurian-compatible .stml files so I can better make use of your import function!

 

[James Fire]

Is this still working?

 

[Kepos]

Is this still working?

Well, it's starting, but for convenience, I changed over to Paradoxox Mod Manager. Anyhow, Emurian Mod Manager has a interesting feature, as it shows a well sorted mod list on one side.