2024 Wiki update

Hi everyone, it's your friendly neighbourhood Alsadius here. In mid-2024, I decided that I was tired of the wiki being stuck back in the VB6 days, and decided to update it to C#. As of October 13th, I'm finally done (huzzah!)

However, there's still a bit more follow-up work I'd like to do. Here's what you can do if you want to help.

Get a wiki account

This wiki is locked, due to past spammer issues, so you'll need to message Erik L on the forums to get an account.

Unfinished work

If you want to clean up unfinished pages, go to the Template:Not done, Template:Unsure, and Template:Redlinks pages, click "What links here" on the left sidebar, and work on those articles. "Not Done" is for pages with major holes, "Unsure" is for things that need small tweaks or clarification, and "Redlinks" is for pages that are complete themselves, but that link to a bunch of other pages we might want to create.

Additional cleanup

What I'm doing is just intended to make the wiki usable for C#, but it won't be as complete as we might like. If you want to make any of these articles better, feel free - there'll be plenty of space to improve.

Here's a few other things on my to-do list:

• "Race" is a really misleading term - should go back and use "Empire" instead.
• Tutorials really need rationalization and updating.
• Maybe move all the ancient 2010-era sample ships and "Garbage Dump" pages to a separate namespace? (Check with Erik, that's mostly his stuff.)
• A lot of screenshots are still VB6, and should be replaced.

Technical Notes

Namespaces

The wiki had a brief attempt to use namespaces to split between C# and VB6, but they weren't used much(C# pagelist, VB6 pagelist), and IMO they're clunky to work with. So instead we're using prefixes for now. Generic pages have generic names, but for game concepts that have separate articles for the two versions, use the prefix "C-" for C# pages, and "VB-" for VB6 pages. If you're doing this, you should also have a page with no prefix, using the {{generic}} template at the top of the page. It will display a note like this when you do:

Example: Terraforming is a generic page that covers the basic concept, and links to C-Terraforming and VB-Terraforming for version-specific details.

If the two versions are similar enough that separate pages aren't needed, then make an article that discusses both, and use the {{bothversions}} template at the top of the page. That'll display like this:

This article contains information relevant to both the C# and VB6 versions of Aurora. Where differences exist, they are noted in the appropriate sections.

If a game concept only appears in one version and not both, you can simply leave it with the generic name. However, because VB6 is the old one, I've also added a {{vb6 only}} template. The editor should add a link to the C# version if there is one (e.g., {{vb6 only|[[Naval Admin Commands]]}}), or "nonexistent" if there is none (i.e., {{vb6 only|nonexistent}}). That looks like this:

Other Templates

If an article still has significant holes in it, use the {{not done}} template, which looks like this:

If the article is basically finished, but there's a specific question or two where you're unsure of the answer, use {{unsure}}, which looks like this:

Unsure - Please Verify

For articles that are themselves complete, but that contain a lot of red links, use {{redlinks}}. This will not display on the page, but will collect these pages for later additions.

Useful tools

If you want to check the stats of anything in the game, the most reliable source is the game's database. If you're not familiar with databases, you can think of them a bit like spreadsheets, with each DB table being a single sheet. (A complete tutorial is beyond the scope of this page.) A good lightweight database viewer is DB Browser for SQLite - download it, and use it to open AuroraDB.db in your game folder. The tables "FCT_TechSystem" (technology), "DIM_PlanetaryInstallation" (installations), and "FCT_ShipDesignComponents" (ship components) are especially useful for a range of wiki pages.

It's also possible to copy directly from the database into a wiki table. This site can do the job, and includes a simple editor to help you rearrange/trim columns or clean up the table. You'll need to manually type column headers into a new top row, but otherwise you just copy-paste like you would with any table or spreadsheet. The output can be copied straight to the wiki.

If you have any questions, I'm on Discord constantly, Reddit fairly frequently, and for the moment I'm also on this wiki and the game forums pretty often as well (and I use the name Alsadius for all of them).

Thanks!