Victoria II war analyzer

Or the full name Victoria II save game war analyzer. Naming stuff is hard.

Paradox forum thread: link

Download links

What is it

The analyzer reads the save game produced by Victoria II (it's a strategy game, look it up) and presents all the wars in a family-friendly way. The program retrieves all the data that can be retrieved from the save file, such as total losses in a war, all the battles, wargoals and the war participants.

Most of the counties have a flag with them. Originally I planned to find all of them from the Victori II directory, but it converting .svg to a format usable by JavaFX turned out to be too difficult.

This analyzer is NOT a fully-fledged save game analyzer. It does one thing and does it reasonably well.

Instructions

  1. Make sure you have Java 8 installed on your computer
  2. Run the jar file
  3. Specify the save game. Usually the save games are in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Victoria II\save games\
  4. Optionally you can point to the Victoria II install directory. The analyzer will retrieve the country names from there.
  5. Click "Read file" and see how terrible your wars have been.
  6. The analyzer will create a file called "paths.txt" in the jar directory. This stores the path to the last used save game directory.

Screenshots

All wars tab: alt text War details tab: alt text Battle details tab: alt text Wargoals tab: alt text

Bugs and limitations

Tools

Build process

If you really want to build your own version of this then go right ahead. I'm going to assume you know what Maven is and how to install it. You need to have Java 8.

  1. Download this repository
  2. Run mvn install in the base directory. Everything should install without problems.
  3. Run mvn jfx:jar to compile it into a jar. The result an be found in target/jfx/app.
  4. Use mvn eclipse:eclipse to generate the project files for Eclipse. You might also need the m2e Eclipse plugin.

Code

The UI design was made by me and with Java 7 it looked fine. With Java 8 it doesn't. Thanks, Oracle. Due to this, some words will be hidden and some tables will have empty columns.

The internal architecture is horrible and should be rebuilt from the ground up. Also, most comments are now outdated.

About

This project was my first big Java project. I started working on it in April 2013 and released it in the Paradox forums. Then I forgot (or avoided) this project because I the code was so horrible. But around 1500 people downloaded it from the Paradox forums, so that was nice.

The save game is read in by a hand-made parser. Suprisingly, it works.

In April 2015 I finally got around to making it work with Java 8. I replaced the mostly static variables with object-oriented programming. I also replaced the Ant build with Maven.