(Question) Has anyone figured out how to edit the encyclopedia?

[Dresden]

I know there are encyclopedia files in the Rome2/data folder. However, changing them does nothing. Therefore, I assume the in-game encyclopedia links to an online version. Has anyone figured out how to make it link to the version on the hard drive?

[RadixHidayat]

I think the game uses ones in the directory "data\encyclopedia\en"

[Igo]

yes Id like to know as well, since I find it stupid that I must be online to make full use of the encyclopedia.

[Dresden]

All the encyclopedia files are in the game folder, but changing them does not affect anything when you play. Somewhere the game looks online when it could look on the hard drive. I am assuming when Steam is offline, it may use the offline encyclopedia but I haven't tested this.

Either way, there has to be someway to make the game look at the hard drive. Then we could edit the encyclopedia.

[AngryTitusPullo]

Have you tried to put the encyclopedia in .pack ?

[Dresden]

That is an interesting idea! Thanks LestaT I will try that.

Edit: Although the only problem with that may be that it is 300MB.

[AngryTitusPullo]

That is an interesting idea! Thanks LestaT I will try that.

Edit: Although the only problem with that may be that it is 300MB.

You don't need to pack it all. Only stuff that you need, for example new units/renamed units/buildings etc. I tried it once. The only thing is I do not know what program to edit them. Some HTML knowledge needed or something I guess ?

[TheFra]

Does it work? I never managed to get any changes in the pack to show but haven't tried recently. If CA aren't going to fix it then I really need to, its one of my biggest gripes.

[Dresden]

@LestaT You were able to get your changes to show up in game? I haven't been able to get it to work. You can edit the pages with any Notepad++ type editor.

@TheFra It seems that the encyclopedia on the hard drive is completely unnecessary. The game always looks for the online version. I can't find any part of the db that is telling the game where to look, so this seems like a dead end. If we could somehow tell the game to look in the data folder, then it would be easily changeable.

[TheFra]

@TheFra It seems that the encyclopedia on the hard drive is completely unnecessary. The game always looks for the online version. I can't find any part of the db that is telling the game where to look, so this seems like a dead end. If we could somehow tell the game to look in the data folder, then it would be easily changeable.

I wonder what happens if you have no internet connection or cannot talk to the live site? If I get time I will have a look at that tonight.
Edit: Yes it always looks online and will show nothing if not connected. I did get it looking at a locally hosted site by adding an entry in my host file for their site (127.0.0.1 dsi0fanyw80ls.cloudfront.net).

[AngryTitusPullo]

@LestaT You were able to get your changes to show up in game? I haven't been able to get it to work. You can edit the pages with any Notepad++ type editor.

Never tried it but some mods for Shogun 2 did edit the encyclopedia I think (involving new unitsw etc). Maybe you can check their method.

[Dresden]

What entry did you change to edit the host file site?

[TheFra]

Hi Dresden, sorry for the slow reply only got to look at this again this morning.

I finally got it working but its a little bit of a pain!

First I had to setup IIS on my machine to point at the local copy of the encylopedia. I then added the following line to file C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

127.0.0.1 dsi0fanyw80ls.cloudfront.net

This will re-direct any requests from your machine to dsi0fanyw80ls.cloudfront.net, which is where the online version lives, back to your local machine. Would be good if we could tell it the location of the online version rather than hack our host file. I'd be surprised if that is hard coded so must be set somewhere.

I then had an issue with file extensions, the URL coming from the game does not use them, so I amend the encyclopedia.xml file in the rome 2 enc data pack to use them

From
<url type="CAMPAIGN_INDEX">/manual/single-player/0012_enc_page_campaign_play</url>

To
<url type="CAMPAIGN_INDEX">/manual/single-player/0012_enc_page_campaign_play.html</url>

And the results from TheFra's new encylopedia! http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...78E7431091377/

[Dresden]

This wouldn't be moddable though, right? I mean we can't make it so that all users look at their own machine?

[TheFra]

This wouldn't be moddable though, right? I mean we can't make it so that all users look at their own machine?

Yes but they would need to install a webserver to host the local encylopedia and then update their host file as above.

The other option for a mod is to host it's own version of the encloypedia and then direct people to that, again via a host file at this stage. Neither approach is ideal really. Would be good to know if the hostname of the encylopedia is moddable but I haven't been able to find it.

[AngryTitusPullo]

Something to bring up at mod summit. No use creating new units if it can't be added to the encyclopedia too. It makes new units incomplete.

[General George S. Patton]

I believe it is written in html

[TheFra]

This issue is not how to change the files, as stated its just HTML and CSS and I've shown above it's pretty easy, or even what you can change but rather how and where you host those changes.

Currently the game is using URLs pointing at a specific location. You can frig it to look locally but you still need to be running a web server to respond, which isn't ideal for most people.

From the mod summit it would be good to know if we can configure the game to look at local files and not require a web server (maybe something using like file:///c:/myEnclopedia/Mypage.Html)?

[Dresden]

The game itself contains the encyclopedia, that is what is so odd about it. You would think you could tell the game to look in its own data file, and then edit those files using HTML. But I can't figure out how.