GUI.md

Commonwealth Cartography GUI

Prerequisites and assumptions

• You have optionally built the database, or, have a copy of commonwealth_cartography.db from a release
• You have optionally extracted the map marker icons, or, are confident they do not need updating
• You have optionally rendered the background images, or, have a copy of them all from a release.
• You have optionally validated all image assets are present
• An installation of Visual Studio
• Experience using Commonwealth Cartography as an end user
• Competency in C# .NET and SQLite SQL
• Reasonable Fallout 4 datamining knowledge

Development of Commonwealth Cartography

Now that we are finished with the 'data mining' part of the process, we can focus solely on the end-user product.
You will find the GUI project CommonwealthCartography under the main solution, CommonwealthCartography.sln
Commonwealth Cartography uses .NET 6, and also relies heavily on Microsoft.Data.Sqlite package plus others to provide connectivity to the database.

As this point, you should simply be able to 'start debugging' in Visual Studio to get it to run.

Debugging without building the database

Building the database is a multi-step process and you don't need to build it to debug the Commonwealth Cartography GUI, you just need a working copy of it.

If you want to debug Commonwealth Cartography and skip out on the datamining steps, you need to grab a copy of the pre-assembled commonwealth_cartography.db from a release. This can be found in \data\commonwealth_cartography.db.
To use this copy in your debugging, you should recreate the \CommonwealthCartography\data\ folder (alongside the img\ and font\ folders) and place commonwealth_cartography.db inside. Then rebuild the solution, and a post-build event will copy this to the relevant location(s) in bin\, therefore allowing you to debug.

Packaging a release.

In order to package a Commonwealth Cartography release there are a few steps.

• Make sure the database has been newly compiled from the latest Fallout 4 version. (Including all prior steps - Extraction with Edit Scripts and Preprocessing).
• Verify using git that the database summary report (Database\summary.txt) has not indicated any issues. Particularly look for large changes in averaged values, or any changes in cell table info.
• Verify using git that the skipped cells report (FO4Edit\Output\SkippedCells.csv) does not indicate any in-game cells have been incorrectly skipped.
• You should assess if any map marker icons may have changed or been added and if so, run the extraction.
• You should assess if any cells or worldspaces have been added or have changed in a way significant enough to outdate their rendered background image. If so, run the background renderer for those spaces.
• Use the Image Asset Validator to verify that at least all required image assets are present.
• In Visual Studio, right click the Commonwealth Cartography Project and select 'Publish'. With the included PublishProfile.pubxml selected, press 'Publish'.
• Launch CommonwealthCartography\package_release.bat. This batch script will just check for a published build, remove any generated preferences file and then zip up the publish folder, leaving the zip in the folder besides the batch script.
• CommonwealthCartography.zip is the file which should now be distributed to end users.