Ship information in-game?

[syndicatedragon]

Is there a way to get the information displayed in a ship's tooltip at a time when you can't hover over a ship of that type? I found the "Reference" tab in the galaxy map, but it doesn't seem to have information like immunities etc.

[BobTheJanitor]

Not exactly in game, but if you start the game, hit F3, then hit Ctrl+Shift+F8 the game will close and it will generate some ship data excel files in your ai war fleet command\RuntimeData\Data folder. It would be handy to put it all up on the wiki, but as frequently as it has been changing lately that seems like a self-defeating endeavor. Maybe now that the game is in a semi-stable state it might be something to consider again.

[TechSY730]

If you hover over a ships name in the reference tab (in the table below, not in the selection boxes), the "hover over info box" that shows ship stats will show where the box normally does with ships on the main screen. Also, you can press F1 to change the side bar into a mini-reference. Hover over the icons now in the sidebar to get the stats like you normally get from the side bar. Press F1 again to change Mk. lvls (it goes from Mk. 0 to Mk. 5). To get back to the normal sidebar, press shift+F1

[keith.lamothe]

You can also use F1 in normal "looking at a planet" view to convert the sidebar summary into an index of ships; it starts with no-mark ships, I think, then mark Is if you press F1 again, then mark IIs, etc.  You can mouseover an icon and it will show some of the data.

Also, on the reference tab, if you mouseover the name of the ship in the leftmost column of the table (it's drawn as a button) it should display the normal tooltip as if you were looking at one in the game, though it has to omit a few pieces that only work in the context of being owned by a specific player.

Edit: ninja'd

[TechSY730]

Two downsides to the F1 method.
1. The ships are grouped by ship type of the same Mk. (Like all the various different hybrid hive structures under one icon, and the roaming enclave, preservation warden, and normal Mk. III neinzul younglings are also grouped together, among others). In this case, the tooltips are appended together, but sometimes the combined text can get too long to fit on screen. In this case, you will need to go to the reference tab to get the info that was cut off.
2. Only things that can be shown in the normal side bar will appear in the F1 sidebar list. This means that the stats for modules (like for riot control ships, hybrid hives, and the later fallen spire starships) will not appear in that list. For those, you will also have to go to the reference tab.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm starting to wonder if I'm overly obsessed with perfecting the Wiki. Apologies in advance for bringing it up again. I wouldn't mind setting up a page on the wiki to contain the vast amount of information in an average shipdatafull.xls file, but does anyone know of a good excel to wiki converter that would actually work for something as huge as that? I did find the one at excel2wiki.net but with a file this big and with this many columns, that really ends up with a rather ugly format and with a lot of the longer descriptions scrunched up into two word wide columns. What would be perfect is something that could turn it into more of a paragraph format, similar to what you get on mouseover in game. I will freely admit that I have little to no experience in fiddling with excel data beyond being able to make things word-wrap and freezing certain rows/columns. I could take the less lazy route and research it myself, but it never hurts to look for a shortcut.

In my imaginary dream land (there are flying ponies there, it's great!) there would be nice little screenshots of each ship icon, and maybe even the full graphical rendering as well, although that would either be a lot of tiny jagged jpgs or a rather huge download every time someone loads the page. This kind of page is sort of what I was hoping for the first time I went to the wiki, and I guess I've not yet recovered from the discovery that no such page exists. Of course I'd want to be able to do this without creating any work for Chris and Keith, since I'd like them to keep working on making good games. However, I myself am quite lazy, so I'd want something to automate most of the process for me and leave me with just a bit of cleanup work to do. Except for adding graphics, that would probably just have to be a long process of taking screenshots and cropping them down...

[TechSY730]

I'm sure if they wanted to take the time to do it, they could write a script that takes the descriptions and important stats of each ship from the code, cross reference its zoomed in icon, and generate a table entry for that ship suitable for putting straight into the wiki. They may even be able to have the script for this split this into several pages based on ship type (fleet ship, starship, etc)

However, I doubt figuring out, writing, and debugging such a script would be worth it to make pages that basically duplicate information already in the game.

It does seem odd that the wiki lacks that. Most "big name" RTSs do in fact have such a out-of-game online reference of that sort. But then again, most "big name" RTSs also don't have that level of information in game. AI War sort of has it backwards compared to the mainstream. Not that this is a problem, but is a little odd to many people looking for info for the first time.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm sure if they wanted to take the time to do it, they could write a script that takes the descriptions and important stats of each ship from the code, cross reference its zoomed in icon, and generate a table entry for that ship suitable for putting straight into the wiki. They may even be able to have the script for this split this into several pages based on ship type (fleet ship, starship, etc)

However, I doubt figuring out, writing, and debugging such a script would be worth it to make pages that basically duplicate information already in the game.

It does seem odd that the wiki lacks that. Most "big name" RTSs do in fact have such a out-of-game online reference of that sort. But then again, most "big name" RTSs also don't have that level of information in game. AI War sort of has it backwards compared to the mainstream. Not that this is a problem, but is a little odd to many people looking for info for the first time.

Well I'm sure the devs could do it, but like I said, I don't want that because then they're not making AVWW, or pushing the next AIW patch, or doing any of the other things that I'd much prefer them to do. I'm just trying to figure out a way that the average peon could take the available information and create such a page. I'm not asking for anyone else to do it, just if anyone knows a good way to finagle very wide excel data into wiki-friendly formats.

[Draco18s]

I'm sure that if someone wanted to write up a wiki page for all the unit stats Keith and Chris wouldn't mind it being on the wiki, they probably just wouldn't update it.
(Hint: if someone writes the page I could put it on the wiki)

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm sure that if someone wanted to write up a wiki page for all the unit stats Keith and Chris wouldn't mind it being on the wiki, they probably just wouldn't update it.
(Hint: if someone writes the page I could put it on the wiki)

Oh I've got wiki editing access. I already asked and they foolishly kindly allowed me to have it. Thus far I've mostly just gone through and cleaned up a few areas that were obviously lacking content, like the page of ship data for the base game which was a whole lot of blank spaces before. I guess I'll just have to go study up on manipulating excel data. It seems like there should obviously be a way to take the data and get it in the format I want, that's practically what excel is for. I just don't know how to do it yet.

[keith.lamothe]

As has been guessed we aren't really going to spend the time to update a massive chunk of info like that on the wiki when it's already in the game.  It's not that I'm not willing, just isn't an efficient use of time (imo).

But if some of you care enough about it to do the work of keeping it up to date, I'm happy to provide the tools necessary (if the existing ones are lacking), since that's mostly a one-time time-cost.  Could even have it preformatted, though I'm guessing it's best to just stick with a csv or similar dead-simple format and y'all can apply some relatively simple regular expressions to transform it into whatever.

The Ctrl+Shift+F8 thing is something Chris did, so I don't know a ton about it.  The balance export on the reference tab is something I did, and I know rather more about that   But whichever one you think is the best starting point, I'm guessing will be fine.  Just let me know what else you want it to do.

[Draco18s]

Keeping it up to date would be easy enough (for people like me and Bob) and just cross reference the change-notes with the page.

The tricky thing would be deciding when to update it.

There's the Major Patch, the Beta Patch, and the Not Yet Released Patch.

[keith.lamothe]

I figure the simplest thing is for y'all to just export it whenever you want to update it, whether that's for the current beta version or the current official version (or both, if you're feeling particularly quixotic).  You wouldn't be able to get data for a patch that wasn't out yet, but that would be something of an exercise in futility anyway as I often revise balance changes after having posted the release note (I then update the release note, naturally).

The actual process of doing the update should be pretty straightforward and quick, if we work out the export properly.

[Draco18s]

The actual process of doing the update should be pretty straightforward and quick, if we work out the export properly.

Wiki formatting isn't strait forward. :\

And if we wanted it to "look nice" we'd want a template, which are a pain in the ass to build (me, myself, I've only ever edited templates and on a very small level).

Then we'd have to have some way to convert the CSV (from Excel, say) into the template format.

[keith.lamothe]

It depends on how much data you want to display, in what layout (table with one row per ship, separate blocks per ship, etc), and how small an area you want to be able to cram it into and still have it look right.

I'm not sure how y'all want it to look, but I'm assuming (hoping) it can be worked out in some set of rules that is consistent across all ships.