I'm writing this open letter in the sincere hope that we soon get (better) support from FD for third-party tools. Atm there are more then 100 tools in EDCodex.info - approx 210+ entries in total. I know for a fact that NOT all tools are in EDCodex.
Active support by FD would mean an EXPLOSION of new and more varied tools.
In January Michael Brookes invited everyone to give functionality suggestions for an official ED api, see the thread "
[PROPOSAL DISCUSSION] External API Requirements" Thread. On February the 19th 2015 Michael wrote it would take a few weeks to evaluate it all (
source). On the 22th of May in the thread "
Any news on the official ED API?" he wrote the following about the API: "It's still on our radar, but it is low on the current priority list. If anything changes we'll let you know. Michael"
Source.
Atm there is little data for the third-pary tools they all centre around things like trading, logbook, shipyard. The community uses the following creative methods to retrieve data for the tools.
- OCR techniques. To extract market data from screenshots. The resulting .csv file can be imported in trading tools and market data is optionally sent to EDDN. Examples EliteOCR, Regulated Noise.
- Netlogs. When a debug flag is set in AppConfig.xml, tool authors can extract the current system a commander is docked in.
- iPhone web-api. This enables tool authors to retrieve market data, shipyard info, outfitting info and stats. They are also called OCR Error Free (OEF) tools. The three existing OEF tools: EDMC,EDAPI and EDCE) all emulate the official ED iPhone app released November 2014. EDMC stands for: Elite Dangerous Market Connector.
- Crowd sourced data. There is no official data about formulae used for for example fuel usage - needed for route planners. Shipyard tools have also resorted to crowd sourced data. Calculating 3D coordinates for a system is a pita as well. Especially after the GM distances have been reduced to 2 decimals.
The legal usage of the iPhone web-api is not 100% clear atm. An author of an OEF tool using the iPhone web-api asked if it would be allowed to temporarily use the iPhone web-api as long as the official External API has not surfaced, got the following answer from Michael Brookes on the 22th of May 2015: "It's being discussed. Michael" (
source).
I can imagine that a full blown External API would take considerable time to create and test. What quite a few commanders have suggested in the past is the following as a good temporarily solution.
- Dump market data when you are docked at a station in a JSON/XML file.
- Dump the 3D coordinates of a system when you exit SC in a JSON/XML file.
- Dump docking status in a file.
This can be extended to ALL data which is visible on the screens. The data is already in the ED client otherwise it could NOT be displayed. Do this in the most simplified way possible. Just overwrite a JSON/XML file each and every time new data is available. This would be very easy to achieve. The community can write tools to extract that data and use it. Even the dumping of data could be made optional for each and every commander- setting in AppConfig.xml.
I personally think that ED would benefit hugely from a large and varied third-party tools ecosystem. When FD does not have the time to create ingame tools the community can pick up the gauntlet. An official anser/comment from FD about this would be highly appreciated.
Please do NOT turn this thread into a discussion about if you like or dislike third-party tools. There are quite a few threads where this has been discussed.What can be ofc discussed is what kind of data, now available on the screens/menus would be useful/essential for third-party tools.
To be in compliance with the FD rules I'm not supplying urls for OEF tool entries like Elite Dangerous Market Connector (EDMC) in EDCodex. A key feature of the website: Its heavily search engine optimized (
SEO). Applying Google fu will be easy and effective.