Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri Tech Tree

June 6, 2005

I absolutely love the Sid Meyer’s Alpha Centauri game. It comes from the very beginning of the game development history, when there were no user interface features known which we take today for granted.

One of the features which are missing in the Alpha Centauri is a complete browsable technology tree. In game you are able to see the details of any given technology, and a tech around it. But it doesn’t give you the whole picture of the tech progress available for you.

So, young I was, in 2005 I noticed that all the resources of the game are in an openly visible format: pictures and text. Thus I opened a graphics editor and started putting all the pieces of info about all the technologies into a single sheet, connecting the tech with lines.

The result was a humongous raster image which brought to its knees a couple of computers of that era. Ideally, I understand that such a tech tree should better be presented in some vector format and/or in something like a searchable HTML file. But it was so long ago so I just don’t care anymore.