Discussing Issues creating a offline Tech Tree browser.

[kanliot2]

I'd love to have an offline tech tree, so I can just skip around and look at what tech goes where.

I think the DW2 Tech tree is very well designed, I couldn't improve much about it.

In terms of offline use, I ran into a few problems.

The XML doesn't actually contain the unlocked items, or pictures of the items unlocked by that technology.
So, to display a picture of a Gerax Hyperdrive, you'd have to hunt down the image of that item. You'd have to write a bit of code just to display the most important stats of the hyperdrive, and work that into a "layout." If a tech gives a bonus, we would also need a nonobfuscated bonus name. (gametext.txt?)

Anyhow the amount of code I would have to write to display the items a tech would unlock. It would be a heavy job, and it would take a ton of reverse engineering. Just screenshotting each tech would be so much faster, although you'd have to do that multiple times, as starships differ across races.

So, I'm saying I looked into making an offline tech tree mockup, and it's not feasible unless you like reverse engineering the DW2 code written for each race, each ship, each item, etc.