Interested into a GUI App?

[Ravo92]

Hello Maxpetul,

i made myself a small GUI in C# for your excellent C3X mod and wondered, if you're interested in using it too?
I, of course, would upload the whole code on github and maintain and update its contents.

Thanks for your feedback and have a happy new year!

Best Regards,
Ravo92

[maxpetul]

Hello and a happy new year to you too,

I'm somewhat interested in a GUI config editor. It's something I've thought about creating myself before but I never made it a priority and never got around to it. My ideas back then were either to write it in C, so it could be launched through a batch script like other things in the mod, or to make it a little web app on a github.io page. Now, I would like to make it possible to edit the config from in game, although that's a lot more difficult to make happen as I'd have to figure out how the game's UI works in detail, and I won't have time for that any time soon. Anyway, I don't mean to dissuade you from the C# approach, just sharing my thoughts on this.

Another complication are all the config options that have special formats. There are some really awkward ones like the leader aliases. Have you added support for any of those yet? Are you planning to? If I'd thought of this sort of thing before, I might have made the config file JSON and saved a lot of trouble here. Oh well.

[Ravo92]

Yea, I want to add support for every format there is available.

Also the entries you see in that grid are already parsed from the ini files (nothing is hardcoded here!!).

Also if a custom ini exists, he is reading the key value pairs from this one, if not, he reads them from the default.

Saving happens to the custom one.

On my Roadmap:

• Extending explanations to each option with gifs or screenshots.
• Read installfolder from registry for Easy install
• Auto Update for mod and gui files
• Call the bat file via gui for launch and install

[Philiquaz]

Adding to this, I've been working on c# biq reader/writer forked from QueryCiv3. It's currently scoped just to rules and not map data, and it's using hardcoded entries rather than something iterable for a nice clean editor, but my intent has been an integrated rules/c3x/civilopedia editor (and currently a floating imgui ui that sits on top of civ3 while your turn timer is going)
But if there's interest in developing further I'm down to share my thoughts

[instafluff0]

I'll add: I'm not sure how Districts/Natural Wonders/Animations would fit in with this, but I'd love it if we could make this work with them somehow. Those all currently have separate config files and formats by necessity, which of course dramatically complicates things. Anyway I'd be happy to contribute if there was a pathway to that.

Edit: @Ravo92 and @Philiquaz, would you be willing to combine efforts and share a repo we could all work on together?

In parallel to all of this, I've been considering for a while to try having Claude Code build out an electron app or something similar from scratch that would do all this, just never got around to it. I think it's worth trying but it wouldn't make sense for all of us to try this independently, without trying to coordinate.

[instafluff0]

Update: in the spirit of "let's just try it", I tried it.

I didn't write a line of code, vibe-coded the whole thing. Obviously it could do much more than this, but already works great. It's an electron app. Reads and manages all of our config files, PCX images, FLC videos, etc. Thoughts? @maxpetul @Ravo92 @Philiquaz

https://github.com/instafluff0/C3XConfigManager

[maxpetul]

That looks very nice! It makes me think I should try using AI more for this project. I used Claude to write most of the AMB Editor, probably about 90% of it in terms of LOC, but that was really just the interface. I did the hard part manually, which was reverse engineering the file format and sound DLL. I've been thinking of connecting some AI to Ghidra to see if it can make any progress there on its own. It would be very useful if it could.

[instafluff0]

Thanks! That makes sense and I think we should absolutely give it a shot. BTW I'm thinking to go big on this, in terms of end-to-end editing.

[Ravo92]

Thanks! That makes sense and I think we should absolutely give it a shot. BTW I'm thinking to go big on this, in terms of end-to-end editing.

Well i guess i can archive my c# project. 🤣

[instafluff0]

Well i guess i can archive my c# project. 🤣

Sorry man 🤣🤣

[Philiquaz]

Well, I may be a bit of an AI doubter, but what you have going seems fairly decent. As mentioned, I've been using imgui to just throw an overlay-type window on top of civ3, but further than read/write on biq data segments I haven't really done more, other than try to uniform-ise the existing data. Mostly so that it can have iterators and metadata attached to add navigation utils (mimicing ideas from previous projects a la dsmapstudio) but it doesn't actually touch on text or anything beyond the biq. Mostly since I kept trying to screw with how we read the formats.

The key point is to align editing vanilla game features with c3x features. and in the process help with text modifications. Mostly, search+replace general lines/regexes associated with features.
Your current program doesn't seem to fully associate c3x config options with their biq counterparts, leaving them distinguished.
I would advocate solidly that these features are displayed together.

I'm happy to add what I have, though I think the only novelty I can contribute is in the file format, which you seem to have already (provided we believe in the llm) as the imgui implentation is fairly trivial.

[instafluff0]

Thanks @Philiquaz. I posted a GIF dump of sorts the other day in CivFanatics; at this point it's evolved to basically be an everything-editor, including text files and BIQs, with full integration and validation with C3X.

You're right to be cautious and thoughtful about using LLMs for this. It's not a silver bullet, at this point it has 150 or so human-readable tests, which gives me some confidence but of course the proof is in the pudding and I'm sure there will be bugs here and there.