I've been looking at it since I bought the game this weekend. I've managed to get a five star/nine planet map built, but it's not reading all the properties properly, so I'm still working on it. I'll note, in case it's not up somewhere else, that the custom maps in the Data\CustomMaps folder are actually straight up XML files, even if they're given the extension *.GC2Map.
Here's critical notes I have so far:
1.) Opening/closing tags are
2.) The
tags describe the general details of the map that you are specifying. The Width and Height tags indicate the dimension of large grid (15x15) blocks. Size... not sure yet. Stars and Planets indicate the number of Stars and Planets you will be describing in your file. It is very important that these numbers be correct, or it'll throw off your design. Resources, Anomalies, Ships, and HomelessPlayers I don't know much about yet.
3.) The
group seems to be required... I've just copied and pasted as is, since I have no modded civs.
4.) The
tag describes your stars.
If you use the name element in the lead tag tp specify a name you want used, you need to set the
value to 1.
& are your grid position coords, from 0,0 to your max coords based on width and height.
values acceptable are 0 (White), 1 (Green), 2 (Yellow), 3 (Red), 4 (Orange), 5 (Purple), 6 (Blue), 10 (Sol=Yellow)
actually seems to have no effect on stars... I've tried from 100 to 6000, the star stays the same.
Rotation Speed is self explanatory... I've kept it between -2 and 2 (negatives are counterclockwise motion, IIRC)
Pattern I'm not sure of... seems to mess up my entered stats if I make it above 40 though.
Density I'm also not sure of.
5.) The tags describe your planets. It uses similar tags to stars, with some exceptions:
ranges from 1 to a limit I've not found. 60 is a pretty big world though... big as a star, it looks like.
is used to indicate which race (from the Info section) owns this world. Only use it if you're assigning planets at the game start.
is used to indicate if this planet is the assigned race's home planet, and is used in conjunction with . Set it to 1 if this is the homeworld, 0 if not.
sets your planet's quality, from 0 to whatever the cap is (26, I think).
allows you to set which Star's system this planet will belong to. Use the name you defined with the name element in the tag.
and (which are enclosed within the tag) are used to add moons or rings. Only one of these will function. I have not gotten two moons, or a moon and a ring to work, just either/or. Both use (which should be a size smaller than your world, or it'll just look wierd), (which should be a number greater than your planet's size), (same as above), and & ... which I've not found to change anything much yet.
I haven't experimented with the last 3 yet (Resources, Anomalies, Ships), since I'm still trying to get the game to read all my stars correctly (main problem is that it's not using my defined types and names for stars/planets... thinking there needs to be a sequence to the stars and planets based on coordinates, but not sure yet).
EDIT: so far, it seems the game will always force the race homestar/homeworld names on a system when it places the major races or randomly allocates minor races. So, as far as I found at this moment, even if you've added custom names, the homeworlds will always take precedence.
