Discussion Commanders log manual and data sample

[MagicMau]

The new version of the Player Journal reference manual (v9) for 2.3 beta 1 is now available.

Awesome! Thanks for the hard work and adding in all those details!

Three minor things I noticed by reading the doc, as soon as the beta hits I will add those as bug reports too, but here goes:
* Cargo event does not list if items are stolen?
* Passengers event is mentioned in the change log, but is not listed in the doc
* Can the screenshot event also have Longitude/Latitude?

Especially thanks for the StartJump event, I was still parsing the netlogs to get a better estimate when that happened, and now that's no longer necessary! Yay!

 

[nrage]

The new version of the Player Journal reference manual (v9) for 2.3 beta 1 is now available.
...
Here's a summary of the changes:
...
• Include faction info in the RedeemVoucher event
...

Thanks! As a player faction CEO and general information gathering nut, this is my #1 change in this release. I would really love to see more influence and state information on factions on FSDJump or Dock events, pretty please

 

[Martin Schou]

The new version of the Player Journal reference manual (v9) for 2.3 beta 1 is now available.

updated document:
http://hosting.zaonce.net/community/journal/v9/Journal_Manual.doc

now also available as a PDF:
http://hosting.zaonce.net/community/journal/v9/Journal_Manual_v9.pdf


Here's a summary of the changes:

• The code for various nested arrays of records within an event record has been rewritten for consistency. Some events are affected, they now have an array of records with an entry for each material, rather than a record with material names used as value names. All Json key names should now be fixed strings, not material or commodity names. This also allows localisation of the material names. Affected data:
o EngineerCraft/Ingredients
o Scan/Materials
o Synthesis/Materials
• Add Latitude and Longitude info to "Location" event, if starting game in SRV
• Fix bug when storing old Item in "ModuleBuy" event
• Add new "StartJump" event at the start of a hyperspace jump
• If you do not have a Detailed Surface Scanner, a basic scan will now add some info in the journal. A basic "Scan" on a planet will include body name, planet class, orbital data, rotation period, mass, radius, surface gravity; but will exclude tidal lock, terraform state, atmosphere, volcanism, surface pressure and temperature, available materials, and details of rings
• Scanning a planet with rings, if you have a DSS, new include ReserveLevel info
• When accepting a mission, ("MissionAccepted") include info on the effect on influence and reputation
• Include faction info in the RedeemVoucher event
• When ship takes off when dismissed by player in SRV, or lands when recalled via SRV, save a Liftoff/Touchdown event, with PlayerControlled=false
• Add "SetUserShipName" event
• Add events for Muticrew: JoinACrew, QuitACrew, CrewMemberJoins, CrewMemberQuits, KickCrewMember, ChangeCrewRole
• A detailed scan of a planet with atmosphere will now include detailed atmospheric composition
• When accepting a "massacre" mission, the target faction and kill count are now logged
• Add ShipName, ShipIdent, FuelLevel and FuelCapacity info to the "LoadGame" event
• Add info at startup with new events for Cargo, Materials, Passengers, and Loadout
• Added "Scanned" event

Excellent work as always.

Is there a chance that you'll get to add all factions, allegiances, governments, states and their influence levels in a system to the log at some point? Being able to somehow grab the entirety of a system's status would be fantastic, and will greatly help in giving us a "live" view of the galaxy. Something along the lines of

{ "timestamp":"2017-02-10T14:25:51Z", 
"event":"SystemState", 
"System":"17 Draconis", 
"Factions":[
{ "Name":"New 17 Draconis Alliance", "Government":"Confederacy", "Allegiance":"Federation", "State":"Investment", "Influence":"75.9" }, 
{ "Name":"Jet Bridge Inc", "Government":"Corporate", "Allegiance":"Federation", "State":"Civil War", "Influence":"19.4" }, 
{ "Name":"Noblemen of 17 Draconis", "Government":"Feudal", "Allegiance":"Independent", "State":"Boom", "Influence":"3.8" }, 
{ "Name":"The Order", "Government":"Theocracy", "Allegiance":"Independent", "State":"Civil War", "Influence":"1.0" }
] }

Is there a chance that you'll get to add a complete dump of the PowerPlay status for a power into the log? Currently trying to keep track of PowerPlay activity requires far more manual data entry than is allowed under the Geneva Convention. I'd give a complete example, but the smallest power has 38 control systems, and that's a bit much for a single post. My thinking is that this could be put into the log when a player opens the PowerPlay view for any one power. That should reduce the amount of log activity, and will mostly only affect those who are truly interested in it, rather than spamming everyone.

I'll even go so far as to promise to erect a shrine in your honour on the EliteMahon subreddit, and I suspect the other PowerPlay subreddits will also sing songs of your praise.

 

[Athan]

The new version of the Player Journal reference manual (v9) for 2.3 beta 1 is now available.

updated document:
http://hosting.zaonce.net/community/journal/v9/Journal_Manual.doc

Firstly, awesome work.

When the final version for 2.3 live is produced, of not sooner, could you (give the job to an intern ?) make sure the index is all correct? Currently it lists 'Scanned' as on page 39 when it's actually on what's marked as Page 41 (at least for me viewing this using LibreOffice 4.3.3.2, latest on Debian stable, on Linux).
(Never mind, using LibreOffice 5.3 on Windows 10 the index is correct.)

Given 'you' have relented and given us the available data on a basic surface scan... any chance of spitting out ALL the data you get any time you scan a Navigation Beacon ? This would provide a method for Cmdrs to fill in blanks where they'd already scanned a system pre-Journal, or if it's a system where we all start with the data.

 

[Olivia Vespera]

All hail the messenger.

 

[silence please]

Could we get an entry after scanning (and k-warrant/cargo scanning) a ship? Possible parameters:

• Name
• NPC/Player
• Rating
• Faction
• Ship type
• Alignment (Neutral/Friendly/Hostile)
• Bounty rewards
• Modules (Any information that is available to the player via the sub-targets menu)
• Cargo (in the case of a cargo scan)

This would be a great addition - very useful for using in tools like EDDI.

 

[Athan]

Given the addition of Basic Surface Scans triggering a Scan event could we get a ScanType key added with value of something like "basic" and "detailed" ? This would also allow for a Nav Beacon scan to fire such events, one per body, with ScanType "nav_beacon". Obviously there could be localisation in this as well, so maybe ScanType key and then value is an object with 'type' and 'localised_type' ?

 

[lemny]

Still no material/data dump? Or did I miss something? [???]

 

[jgm]

Still no material/data dump? Or did I miss something? [???]

You missed it; it's there.

 

[jgm]

I've had a chance to work through the new manual. Lots of great stuff in there. My notes:

• StartJump - please could we have destination system in there as part of the data for hyperspace jumps? This information is already present in the netlog, but having it available here means that I and others could drop a lot of code that has to query the netlog purely for this one piece of information. It would also mean that users would not need to carry out manual configuration as they do today to supply the path to the netlog. I suspect that your concern here is that if the jump fails for some reason (e.g. server disconnect) then the jump won't complete but as long as this is clear in the docs I don't believe it will be an issue, and users can continue to use the FSDJump event to keep track of the actual system for the commander
• Loadout - this is a big one so I'll break out the points, but this is so close to allowing people to avoid talking to the companion API for ship information.
  • Please add ship ID, ship name, ship model and ship ident at the top level of this event
  • Although the event provides per-module information on engineering recipes it does not provide details on the actual rolls. Would it be possible to provide a 'modifications:[{"Name":"mod_weapon_range","Value":0.51262384653091},{"Name":"mod_weapon_burst_interval","Value":0.13714607059956}...] array for each of the modules?
  • Any chance of supplying cargo hatch information in here? Pretty please? At the moment tools like Coriolis and ED:Shipyard need to guess the power priority and enabled state of the cargo hatch and is a common cause of player confusion
  • We're also missing the 'value' (i.e. purchase price) and 'health' metrics for each module
  • There is a bug in the sample JSON: the "MediumHardpoint2" module entry does not have a closing bracket
• ShipyardNew and ShipyardSwap - please could you write a LoadOut for the ship after each of these?

Again, thank you for taking the time to continue to work on the journal and provide not only a great tools for third party developers but also for listening and responding to the feedback presented here and in the relevant bugs threads. I can't overstate how much it is appreciated.

 

[lemny]

You missed it; it's there.

ohh... you are right... thank you FD...

 

[Athan]

I've had a chance to work through the new manual. Lots of great stuff in there. My notes:

• StartJump - please could we have destination system in there as part of the data for hyperspace jumps? This information is already present in the netlog, but having it available here means that I and others could drop a lot of code that has to query the netlog purely for this one piece of information. It would also mean that users would not need to carry out manual configuration as they do today to supply the path to the netlog. I suspect that your concern here is that if the jump fails for some reason (e.g. server disconnect) then the jump won't complete but as long as this is clear in the docs I don't believe it will be an issue, and users can continue to use the FSDJump event to keep track of the actual system for the commander

For this I'd call the key "IntendedDestination", which leaves room for things like mid-jump hyperdictions (that might in future change where you go to) as well. It makes it clear that it's just where the Cmdr intended to go, not necessarily where they will/did end up.

 

[hchalkley]

Thanks for the comments - I have had a quick skim through - my priority at the moment is to make sure all the new Multicrew functionality is properly handled in the journal. Currently I'm looking at issues with how bounty awards are written for wing and crew members.

As for "Is there a chance that you'll get to add all factions, allegiances, governments, states and their influence levels in a system to the log at some point? " (etc), I was specifically asked by the designers not to include large info-dumps into this journal - it's supposed to be a list of things that *you* the pilot have done.

There's only a limited amount of time left for late changes - after beta2 is locked down, it's only critical fixes allowed. I'll probably be able to get the destination star system name in StartJump, but I'm not promising anything.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Thanks for the comments - I have had a quick skim through - my priority at the moment is to make sure all the new Multicrew functionality is properly handled in the journal. Currently I'm looking at issues with how bounty awards are written for wing and crew members.

As for "Is there a chance that you'll get to add all factions, allegiances, governments, states and their influence levels in a system to the log at some point? " (etc), I was specifically asked by the designers not to include large info-dumps into this journal - it's supposed to be a list of things that *you* the pilot have done.

There's only a limited amount of time left for late changes - after beta2 is locked down, it's only critical fixes allowed. I'll probably be able to get the destination star system name in StartJump, but I'm not promising anything.

Can't add any more rep

But if you could post a list of all the Atmospheric Gasses types/names for the AtmosphereComposition event, that would go a long, loooong way to being very useful for those concerned with designing a DB table for that

Regards

 

[Athan]

As for "Is there a chance that you'll get to add all factions, allegiances, governments, states and their influence levels in a system to the log at some point? " (etc), I was specifically asked by the designers not to include large info-dumps into this journal - it's supposed to be a list of things that *you* the pilot have done.

Could you please make the designers aware of this: Things that I, as a Cmdr, do include playing the BGS. The key information required to facilitate this is the minor faction states (current, pending, cooldown), and influence levels. Currently we have no choice but to laboriously hand-enter this (spreadsheet, database, site like Inara.cz or EDDB.io) every day in order to keep track of what's going on and plan our goals. It personally can take me anything from 20 minutes up to an hour each day to do this. If the information was spat out as part of Docked/Location, and possibly FSDJump, events it would allow me to play more, which is only to the benefit of any other Cmdrs my (in)actions might affect. It also allows me to, somewhat (depending on what other Cmdrs have also done) track the changes caused by the things I have done.

Would it be better if I asked for the bucket change amounts to be journaled? After all, those are very directly things I've done (but I understand FDev wants to keep that somewhat opaque).

Thanks.

 

[furrycat]

Things that I, as a Cmdr, do include playing the BGS.

Indeed. I the pilot open up the system map and look at the faction states.

What about if said information were returned when you did a (potentially new type of) discovery scan?

 

[hchalkley]

Can't add any more rep

But if you could post a list of all the Atmospheric Gasses types/names for the AtmosphereComposition event, that would go a long, loooong way to being very useful for those concerned with designing a DB table for that

Regards

I think it's these: ( Water, Oxygen, CarbonDioxide, SulphurDioxide, Ammonia, Methane, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Helium, Neon, Argon, Silicates, Iron )
although it would have to be quite hot to have Iron or Silicates in the atmosphere

 

[punkerich]

Could you please make the designers aware of this: Things that I, as a Cmdr, do include playing the BGS. The key information required to facilitate this is the minor faction states (current, pending, cooldown), and influence levels. Currently we have no choice but to laboriously hand-enter this (spreadsheet, database, site like Inara.cz or EDDB.io) every day in order to keep track of what's going on and plan our goals. It personally can take me anything from 20 minutes up to an hour each day to do this. If the information was spat out as part of Docked/Location, and possibly FSDJump, events it would allow me to play more, which is only to the benefit of any other Cmdrs my (in)actions might affect. It also allows me to, somewhat (depending on what other Cmdrs have also done) track the changes caused by the things I have done.

Would it be better if I asked for the bucket change amounts to be journaled? After all, those are very directly things I've done (but I understand FDev wants to keep that somewhat opaque).

Thanks.

What he said. Another BGS runner seconds this.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

I think it's these: ( Water, Oxygen, CarbonDioxide, SulphurDioxide, Ammonia, Methane, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Helium, Neon, Argon, Silicates, Iron )
although it would have to be quite hot to have Iron or Silicates in the atmosphere

As usual, you're a star. Thanks!

If this could be said to be a definitive list that would be peachy.

 

[madbilly]

The new version of the Player Journal reference manual (v9) for 2.3 beta 1 is now available.
...
Here's a summary of the changes:

...
• Add "SetUserShipName" event
...
• Add ShipName, ShipIdent, FuelLevel and FuelCapacity info to the "LoadGame" event
...

Ship names confirmed for 2.3

I know there's a suggestion out there for including the full stellar classification in the details for a star scan, e.g. M4 Va, K7 IIab, A4 Ib, TTS6 IVb, K0 Vz, T7 V, Y4 V, O0 Vz, B9 VI, etc. I see that it's not included in this updated manual and I assume that's because the scan data is from the System Map but this classification is from the Galaxy Map. If it's not possible to include the full stellar classification in the journal then could you please tell us the algorithm that the game uses for calculating the stellar classification from the star's scan data?