![]() ![]() Most, if not all, of those are likely used in the files in the units directory, so you'd get most of it by scanning through those files. An easy example to reverse would be the fields in a 'unit_stats" data structure (whatever it's really called). It all depends on the element they belong to.Ĭlick to expand.I was thinking more of the next level up, the semantics of the various tokens, rather than just the grammar of the format. The content of curly braces might be a list of uniform numbers, it might contain simple assignments or nested elements. Within a quoted token " can be escaped as \" and \ in turn can be escaped as \\.īeyond this basic level there is no common syntax. almost all quotes you see in the game source are completely useless like tag = "GER" is strictly the same as tag = GER. ![]() Generic tokens may be quoted with double quotes but this is only necessary if they contain whitespace or characters with special meaning. This means whitespace is not required anywhere except to separate two generic tokens or for stylistic purposes. The comparison operators and curly braces are used for the usual nested elements you see throughout the files.Īll other stretches of text delimited by special characters or whitespace are treated as numbers or generic tokens depending on whether they look like a number or not. Parenthesis and commas are not really used for anything as far as I can tell (there are only two places across the whole game where commas are used - wrongly). There is no option for multiline comments. On the lexical level, the following characters have special meaning: !# (),Įither of the first three introduces a comment which stretches until the end of the line. Most files may start with a UTF-8 byte order mark but it has no real impact on how the file content is treated. But even one staffer assigned that task, along with management that values it being done, would be a tremendous force multiplier for the players that are willing to work on the wiki.Ĭlick to expand.I reversed the file format as well, but there is not much to it. Paradox doesn't have staff members to do all that work directly. (That requires a level of trust in the player-editors.) If players expect the wiki to be of any use, they have to give up some of their thousands of hours of playtime to do a ten or a hundred hours of work on the wiki, putting in what they know and can discover, benefitting other players but not themselves. That access really ought to happen before release, too, so the work can be ready when the product is released. If Paradox expects the wiki to be of value, they need to have someone on staff whose job it is to coordinate that work, taking questions from the player-editors and finding out the answers internally from designers, devs, and code that players don't (and shouldn't) have direct access to. That's admirable work, but it's sad that all that work is necessary. But the information they put in often needs to come from Paradox rather than exhausting sleuthing, repeated testing trying to average out statistical trends to guess at formulas, and reverse engineering the binary executable that you see so often in the forums. Most of the wiki editing can be done by willing players - if we have willing players and they have the information. So the best product would come from teamwork. And for a lot of the rest, a Paradox employee could find out answers with much less effort, making the information much more likely to actually wind up in the wiki. The code isn't available for public inspection, so "the public" can't document everything. (And as far as I know, that format isn't documented, so there can be guesswork as to what the syntax means.) Then people like bitmode put an even more tremendous amount of work into reverse engineering the code and tracing through it to find out what it actually does. For other things, you have to dig through the mod files. The problem with that approach is that not all the information is available even to willing editors. ![]() Paradox probably sees it as documentation they don't have to do, which is also not the most productive attitude. (Do you know the story of The Little Red Hen?) And all the other players mostly want to play rather than edit a wiki, too. ![]() It can be a lot of work to try to dig up all the information, and then get it into a nice format in the wiki. Imagine yourself as the responsible party, and you can get some insight on why "the wiki" hasn't already done what you want done. Much like my unpopular response to the "why aren't their mini-campaign scenarios" from Paradox or modders, the point is to look at the question from the production side rather than the consumption side. So asking "is the Wiki going to add X" is a lot like asking "why haven't I added X"? That's not a rebuke, by the way. At least in theory, wikis are maintained by their users. ![]()
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