I understand the feeling completely, although I've never gotten my hands on the books. I would like to, but English language books are not as easily obtainable in this country as I'd like.
In any case, your game is looking awesome, as others may have mentioned.
I agree, I live in Egypt (and no, I'm actually Egyptian) and it's difficult to obtain such books here, I have to order them online, and even then they take too long to arrive or I have to go hunting for them at the post office.
Sorry if I seem unresponsive by the way. It takes a lot of concentration to code anything and I've been doing a lot of that lately.
Looking forward to watching it grow!
Well, here is some growth!
I've started implementing a full editor for the game (I told you mods were going to freak out!), the editor will support editing the map as well as items, scripts, and all kinds of data files.. I'm adding a dynamic terrain generation graph at the moment. Think of it as something that will allow modders to "define" how the terrain is generated to begin with.
That's the in-game map after being processed from a bitmap into vector polygons, each coloured part is called a region and the game detects them automatically, all the modder has to do is name them in the editor and they're set. The editor can then export the preprocessed map again to data files and the modder can redistribute them as preprocessed maps to users.
This will allow attaching all kinds of metadata to the regions, like temperatures, humidity, etc. Roads, cities, towns, and villages will also be created through the editor.
I never thought this game would turn into me writing a fully fledged GIS application, but there you have it. I overdo stuff.