Discussion Can APIs be used to export the left and right panels to a separate touch screen?

GenGyn

G
Hi everyone! So, I just downloaded ED yesterday for the first time and I've been learning the basics. This is my first post on the forums, so please excuse my nube question that follows.

I have a really intense flight simulation package I run on my PC, and I'm able to export viewports to a secondary 27 inch touch screen that sits below my main 46 inch monitor. So, I can export cockpit displays and controls to the 27 inch touch screen using their APIs. Is the same possible in ED? What I'd like to do is move the left and right panels to the touch screen and have them up all the time rather than have them pop up only when you look left and right, and then use the touch screen to select items on those panels rather than having to do the look left or right thing to get there. Can this be done?

Thank you!
 

GenGyn

G
Thank you for the reply. Rats, I was afraid that might have been the case. The flight sim I mentioned has a significant portion of its source code written in lua script, and we have been given access to a good bit of that code for user modification, and that in turn allows us to do some pretty elaborate things in the sim. It's too bad we don't have that same capability in ED because the possibilities are near endless. Thank you for the reply!
 

Lombra

Lombra
Yep, would be amazing. I think it just boils down to Elite being more of a game rather than a simulator. There isn't much of a "game" in flight simulators. The fact that you can build essentially completely immersive cockpits is a big part of why people do simulators.

Also, what we have is not really an "API". It's not very flexible and it doesn't accept any input. It only prints data, which is probably the main obstacle here. We do get a decent amount of useful data, but not really enough to reconstruct the side panels. I don't know all the info contained in the panels off the top of my head, but I think the navigation list is one of the things you couldn't do. Don't think we get data on nearby contacts, either. You could make parts of it, but as far as input goes you would be limited to what in game bindings exist. ...I kinda wanna look into this now.

Having the map on an external display is something I personally would love to see. That's probably better done with an official app, though... might be difficult to do using any API.
 
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GenGyn

G
I guess another factor might be trying to maintain some commonality in the code between PS4, Xbox and PC. The flight sim is strictly PC only.

The way sim exports work is, you extend the two displays (main and touchscreen) in Windows or NVidia control panel, then you tell the sim the screen resolution is 3840 x 1920, i.e. two 1920 x 1080 screens side by side. Then I define the main viewport coordinates where the sim runs as 0,0 x 1920,1080 or all the real estate available on the primary monitor. Then you're free to define additional viewport coordinates anywhere on the touch screen you like. So you can say you want the radar display for example at coordinates 1921,0 x 2221,300 which would place the radar display in a 300 x 300 pixel square in the upper left corner of the touch screen. Boom, done... simple as that (well, if you know what you're doing in the lua code.) Then there's the whole issue of having a high level script language available to do this with as opposed to a compiled executable that I suspect ED uses. The sim uses a combination of both.


I think the ED developers would have to do a major code rewrite and recompile to give us anything near the capability of the sim, and even then it would likely be very limited in what you could do.
 

sollisb

Banned
S
Lombra said:
No. Most of that data is absent from the API.
Click to expand...

You could go at it another way; All bounties are. listed in Journal, so problem to re-create

As for the 1st screen of local stellar bodies you can bypass Elite altogether and get your information from Systems.db. which can be downloaded from EDDB I think, I\d need to check my code. From that you can then extract all bodies within your system, there place in the 3D box and do whatever you like. 2D/3D map or a plain listing. For navigation I just send it to the Galaxy search box, execute the search and then select it and create path.

I don't think there's any way to list 'contacts' etc or target ship modules for targeting.
 
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