How do I get a custom home system to work?

fyi, it didnt show up like I origionally wrote, the info for the text file that is.

Yes, you need to replace all of the < with &lt; so the forum does not eat it (thinking it's HTML).

Anyhow, you're probably trying to add a new entry to customplanets.xml for your race? That won't work (at least until DA). You need to edit/replace the same entry in the file as was used by whichever race yours replaces, because the game right now uses the order the systems are in to assign them to the races.

Ok, now I got the three planets there. I replaced the Darth Legion, so now when I click them I play as the Anui Rebels, but there are more complications. The three planets all look like I want them to on the main screen, but in the planet screen it is completly different. I would like for them to look the same on the planet screen and in the main screen. It just doesnt look right to see a brown planet on the main screen and then view it and see a lush green planet screen.

Also since I replaced the Darth Legion is there a way to get it so that on the "choose your race" screen my custom pic shows up? After I select them it shows my picture where the darth legion pic was, but right now it doesnt do that in the "choose your race screen" It just has a huge white box that engulfs about 1/4 of my screen.

Finally, I was wandering if there was a way to change what it says when you first start and it shows the quartly report. Also I would like to change what it says when my race first colonizes another world. In short, I would like to have my custom race be as though they were a unique race that came with the game. Actually I would like to replace all the races, save humans, with races I have made up over the years.

For the planet screen map, you need to add a <RAWTerrain> tag to the planet entry. Here's some info on what you need for that:

The final step in creating your own custom planets is to make a height map that describes the planet surface. For this purpose, GalCiv 2 uses 384x192 8-bit grayscale images saved out as raw (i.e., headerless) data. The simplest way to create a height map is to use an off-the-shelf paint program to "paint" a height map. I use Paint Shop Pro, the programmer's paint program, but Photoshop will probably do the trick too. Basically, the whiter a pixel is, the higher the elevation in the generated terrain. So, pure black pixels will appear as deep oceans and pure white pixels will appear as snow-covered mountain peaks. What happens in between depends on the planet's class, but those details would probably bore you and they're apparent enough when you see what happens in the game. Once you've created your height map, save it to the Data\HeightMaps directory of the GalCiv2 install directory. For our example, I named my height map file Strange.raw.

Once you've got a heightmap, add a <TerrainPalette> tag to the entry referencing a listing in PlanetDescriptions.xml. You can add your own entry to that file, or just adjust the grey levels in the heightmap so it works out with an existing one.

The entry in PlanetDescriptions in turn references an entry in TerrainColorSchemes, which is what tells the game how to colorize the heightmap. There's info on that in Cari's modding guide, but be warned--if you want to get a custom planet looking exactly like the normal texture, it can takes lots of annoying trial and error (starting and restarting the game, tweaking the files, restarting more, etc), but it can be done. I've asked Cari about an option to still use the heightmap in DA but have the planet's surface texture override it for display purposes, but she doesn't know if they'll be able to do that.

As to the race image, there are entries for all the images the race will use in RaceConfig.xml; just edit them to point at your own customized ones.

All of the game text should be located in english.str, screens.str, gc2_conversations.xml, and flavortext.xml.