Hey ED Dev team, hey guys...
I'm working on a side project of mine based on Elite Dangerous and I recently encountered an issue that I hadn't anticipated. Let me explain...
Project purpose
The working title of the project is "ED Score", and the main purpose of the tool is to offer an application that reads ED Logs and plays a dynamic soundtrack accordingly. One soundtrack that I'm writing since mid 2016 and in the future a functionnality that will allow players to put music in different folders (battle / ambiant / stations...) and again, play it based on what happens in game.
The second purpose of the application is an AI companion that reacts to what happens in game and shoots some sentences based on what you do. "Hull critical!", "Water world discovered"... whatever you can imagine.
Technical details
The application is in c#. And drives the music / sfx with an FMOD wrapper. I have a prototype working with a basic soundtrack ( which is at the moment an excerpt from the House of the Dying Sun soundtrack I wrote ) and a few test voices extracted from a TTS and mixed / transformed / modified with FMOD's FXs and DSPs.
Issues
I am using the commander's log. And wrote the prototype using a test log opened in notepad++ on a secondary monitor and writing manually json test strings based on the real logs.
Since, ingame I'm mostly an explorer, I'm using a lot EDDiscovery, and while I have noticed that the logs were registered way later than it really happens ingame, I thought that EDDiscovery was throttling logs reading. Big mistake of mine when I realized that this was actually the real update speed of the journal when I made a test of the first prototype.
I'm assuming that before writing the journal, the game is waiting for the server transaction and only writes things that are approved on the server side.
So at the moment, for the music it is not really a big problem. But for the AI Companion, it is pretty useless, since you get the voice like 10 to 12 seconds later. Not really funny or immersive to hear "Water world discovered" after you have already scanned the two moons next to the planet.
Suggestion : real time log
I was wondering If it could be possible to have a real time detailed log of what happens in game. With the exact same structure of the journal log.
It could also contain some more accurate / detailed informations like shield level, hull level (each time it changes), target locked, modules status, mining informations... etc etc, whatever we could use to build applications around those informations to enhance player experience.
There is no point to keep the log after a play session, it can be reinitialized everytime you launch the game or load a game.
Side note
Full disclosure, I'm not creating and working on that because I don't like the initial soundtrack of ED. To be honest, I'm playing since the first beta with the original soundtrack of Elite. I a true fan of what the audio / music team does for this game, and I would love that every single studio puts so much effort in detailing and delivering such a good quality on the audio.
But I love to contribute to something I like. And seeing all the great tools made for ED, I wanted to offer an additionnal tool to immerse players a bit more... well... differently?
Cheers,
CMDR Oz Dunham
Update
When Anthor gave me the info about polling, I tweaked my initial code and succeeded to get real time updates. I'll create a new thread about ED Score in the other forum, this one can be considered as closed.
I'm working on a side project of mine based on Elite Dangerous and I recently encountered an issue that I hadn't anticipated. Let me explain...
Project purpose
The working title of the project is "ED Score", and the main purpose of the tool is to offer an application that reads ED Logs and plays a dynamic soundtrack accordingly. One soundtrack that I'm writing since mid 2016 and in the future a functionnality that will allow players to put music in different folders (battle / ambiant / stations...) and again, play it based on what happens in game.
The second purpose of the application is an AI companion that reacts to what happens in game and shoots some sentences based on what you do. "Hull critical!", "Water world discovered"... whatever you can imagine.
Technical details
The application is in c#. And drives the music / sfx with an FMOD wrapper. I have a prototype working with a basic soundtrack ( which is at the moment an excerpt from the House of the Dying Sun soundtrack I wrote ) and a few test voices extracted from a TTS and mixed / transformed / modified with FMOD's FXs and DSPs.
Issues
I am using the commander's log. And wrote the prototype using a test log opened in notepad++ on a secondary monitor and writing manually json test strings based on the real logs.
Since, ingame I'm mostly an explorer, I'm using a lot EDDiscovery, and while I have noticed that the logs were registered way later than it really happens ingame, I thought that EDDiscovery was throttling logs reading. Big mistake of mine when I realized that this was actually the real update speed of the journal when I made a test of the first prototype.
I'm assuming that before writing the journal, the game is waiting for the server transaction and only writes things that are approved on the server side.
So at the moment, for the music it is not really a big problem. But for the AI Companion, it is pretty useless, since you get the voice like 10 to 12 seconds later. Not really funny or immersive to hear "Water world discovered" after you have already scanned the two moons next to the planet.
Suggestion : real time log
I was wondering If it could be possible to have a real time detailed log of what happens in game. With the exact same structure of the journal log.
It could also contain some more accurate / detailed informations like shield level, hull level (each time it changes), target locked, modules status, mining informations... etc etc, whatever we could use to build applications around those informations to enhance player experience.
There is no point to keep the log after a play session, it can be reinitialized everytime you launch the game or load a game.
Side note
Full disclosure, I'm not creating and working on that because I don't like the initial soundtrack of ED. To be honest, I'm playing since the first beta with the original soundtrack of Elite. I a true fan of what the audio / music team does for this game, and I would love that every single studio puts so much effort in detailing and delivering such a good quality on the audio.
But I love to contribute to something I like. And seeing all the great tools made for ED, I wanted to offer an additionnal tool to immerse players a bit more... well... differently?
Cheers,
CMDR Oz Dunham
Update
When Anthor gave me the info about polling, I tweaked my initial code and succeeded to get real time updates. I'll create a new thread about ED Score in the other forum, this one can be considered as closed.
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