Release EDEngineer - an overlay to track your blueprint progress in realtime

[Cmdr Zach]

next update will have an option in the context menu of the tasktray icon to disable it

Thanks! This tool is SO useful! Wish I had it before I got to Grade 5 with all Engineers......

Also hope you can work with other Elite community developers to somehow export this data to web tools.....such as Inara or somesuch.

 

[CMDR HG]

Somewhat "big" update : 1.0.2

• Added material/data count. A warning will popup if you have 5 or less slots available, you can disable that warning in the tasktray icon context menu!
• Added origin details to blueprints ingredients. Icons allow a quick view of the basic origin (market, mission, scan, surface, salvage, mining) and a tool tip will give more detail when you hover the ingredient (like "Ship salvage (military & authority ships)"). You can hide icons if it's too much visual noise via the new switch on top of the left panel.
• Added an option to disable "Blueprint Ready" notifications in the context menu of the task tray icon (it's enabled by default)

• Fixed an error in RamTah's blueprint which was missing CMM composite in its ingredient list. Please report any similar issue like this one if you see it!
• Frontier's fixed an issue with "Material Discovered" event, it's now integrated in the app. Please double check materials/data you've recently discovered, the counter might be slightly off!
• Fixed the "Very Rare" icon which was showing as "Rare"

• FULL german translation available ! Many thanks to @Scorprox for his hard work and dedication
• Spanish translations fixes, thanks a bunch to @TCAS !

 

[BumbleB]

Nice update, for some reason the Blueprint ready & cargo Almost full Warning is ghosted on my taskbar. Can't enable those options for some reason

 

[CMDR HG]

Means that your Windows version is too old to support toasts notifications. You need to have Windows 8 or more recent to have access to that feature!

FYI there seems to be an issue with multi commanders and the new cargo counters, I'll have a look tonight.

 

[BumbleB]

Means that your Windows version is too old to support toasts notifications. You need to have Windows 8 or more recent to have access to that feature!

FYI there seems to be an issue with multi commanders and the new cargo counters, I'll have a look tonight.

Blah any way to get it to work on older OS's ? I have no plans to upgrade my OS as I tried win10 and nearly died cause i just couldn't get on with it :'(

 

[CMDR HG]

Don't take it personally but I'm not particularly keen to develop features for users who refuse to upgrade to more secure and more performant operating systems ; unless it's absolutely required for them to even use the application in the first place (I did fix a similar issue shortly after initial release which made EDEngineer not working on Win7 and older).

However if any developper wants to develop a custom notification system for these systems, I'll gladly accept any contribution on GitHub

 

[BumbleB]

No worries on that, I didn't know if it was a simple thing to do or not for Win7. Not refused to upgrade just alot of pain and suffering on my part when I tried. I may give it another go at some point when medical supervision just in case *laughs*

So long the main bulk of EDE works then I'm good tbh, I think everyone in the ED community has been waiting for a program like this tbh, I know I have been.

*kudos*

 

[CMDR HG]

Two patches that brings two pretty cool features, as well as localization and bug fixes!

1.0.2.2

• Ingredients not used in a single blueprint now appear faded with a hint in the tooltip. Check it out!
• Fixed an issue with commanders having special characters in their name (<, >, :, ", /, \\, |, ?, *)
• Fixed an issue with users having multiple commanders which made the application not correctly update cargo (visually) after switching from active commander
• French translation progress (not finished though) ; thanks to @calvin00 and @Giblood for the dedication! Almost there

1.0.2.3

• Added synthesis blueprints (thanks to @ravstar52 for providing the raw data!). They appear with a light blue color and you can distinguish the ingredients you have favorited from blueprints and from synthesis. In the Engineer filter, you have a new filter "@Synthesis" and new type filters are available too.
• Updated localization

 

[Cmdr Zach]

Wow wow wow.

I've been unable to play for a fee days due to a particular nasty incident with a blank screen and a Neutron Star jet stream.

Come back to see a LOT of quality of life changes. Love that you can now see where to find materials, and ones that are not used anywhere are greyed out.

Could I request that the three tiers of favouritism available on the blueprint pane, ie favourite, default or ignore; be replicated on the left pane please?

I can highlight (star) materials that I have favourited, but I would also like to see which materials are ONLY used by blueprints I have ignored, so I can thin them out?

Keep up the awesome work. Hope you find a way to export the info you are collating for us to web apps at some point too.

 

[goemon]

[*]Added synthesis blueprints (thanks to @ravstar52 for providing the raw data!). They appear with a light blue color and you can distinguish the ingredients you have favorited from blueprints and from synthesis. In the Engineer filter, you have a new filter "@Synthesis" and new type filters are available too.
[*]Updated localization
[/LIST]

thank you so much

 

[CMDR HG]

Could I request that the three tiers of favouritism available on the blueprint pane, ie favourite, default or ignore; be replicated on the left pane please?
I can highlight (star) materials that I have favourited, but I would also like to see which materials are ONLY used by blueprints I have ignored, so I can thin them out?

Keep up the awesome work. Hope you find a way to export the info you are collating for us to web apps at some point too.

Good idea, I'll probably add a fourth filter on top of cargo to only show "useless" ingredients (i.e. ingredients that are not used in a single blueprint and ingredients that are only used in ignored blueprints) such that people can easily clean up their cargo.

Regarding the dataexport, it's something I plan to implement with a lightweight local server. You would use your browser

http://localhost:8083/Zach/materials.json

and you would get the content of your materials. Some more routes like cargo, data, commodities, blueprints, favorite blueprints etc... Could then easily be added. The idea is that the user would chose which format he wants (like json, csv or xml) so it could be consumed by anything. Local applications could poll these URL regularly to get an updated version of the cargo (EDEngineer taking care of tracking the logs, which is pretty error prone and took a while to become properly working).

That's a mid-long term goal though, don't expect that to be there so soon

 

[Andargor]

Good idea, I'll probably add a fourth filter on top of cargo to only show "useless" ingredients (i.e. ingredients that are not used in a single blueprint and ingredients that are only used in ignored blueprints) such that people can easily clean up their cargo.

Regarding the dataexport, it's something I plan to implement with a lightweight local server. You would use your browser

http://localhost:8083/Zach/materials.json

and you would get the content of your materials. Some more routes like cargo, data, commodities, blueprints, favorite blueprints etc... Could then easily be added. The idea is that the user would chose which format he wants (like json, csv or xml) so it could be consumed by anything. Local applications could poll these URL regularly to get an updated version of the cargo (EDEngineer taking care of tracking the logs, which is pretty error prone and took a while to become properly working).

That's a mid-long term goal though, don't expect that to be there so soon

Nice work, it's become a must-have app for me. It would still be simpler to dump totals in JSON format in the same directory you have the manual changes, just prefix it with "totals" instead of "manual" and fire on the change event (on load hold off until after the first pass, ofc), there aren't enough changes for performance issues. A server is more complex.

If you must, for the local server, may I ask that you use a very non-standard port, and allow it be configurable, because if you have some of the other third-party apps (or other tools unrelated to Elite) they use 8xxx as well. Otherwise, you'll have more complaints, and therefore more support to give.

 

[Cmdr Zach]

I would suggest looking at the existing relationship between EDdiscovery and the EDSM website
You give the discovery app your game commander name and a key from the EDSM website login, and the app can then sync with the website at a button press or every so often.

Polling local webservers sounds like a more complicated way of doing it, based on the very little I know.

Thanks again for listening to and implementing so quickly my feedback!

 

[CMDR HG]

Writing & replacing an entire file each time there's a change might work right now for what you want to do with it but it's a quick & dirty solution that is not sustainable. Let's say someone wants to have the progress for his blueprints, should I write that file again on each change? The blueprint.json file is pretty big, and it doesn't even contain state (which progress is part of).

Let's say someone else writes a third party tool that would like to get the state of the cargo ; polling an API is pretty standard and reusable, especially if there's a GET route where you give the last time you queried and the response contains the difference between now and the date you sent as a parameter. Constantly checking a file and reloading entirely its content to memory (and eventually implement a diff system yourself) is pretty clunky...

The port configuration is obviously necessary, just like the server itself is entirely optional

I would suggest looking at the existing relationship between EDdiscovery and the EDSM website
You give the discovery app your game commander name and a key from the EDSM website login, and the app can then sync with the website at a button press of every so often.

Well that is exactly an API. Instead of getting data to consume it, EDDiscovery posts the data to let EDSM consume it. If anyone writes a web application where EDEngineer can connect and push data to centralize it, then obviously that's the better way

 

[Kir Nalto]

FD may learn from players what should be in game.

 

[Genxav]

for some reason EDE is not accessing all my materials, currently im pretty much 1000 and 500 because missions and other things and the info is showing me i have half of both do i need to do something to refresh it?

 

[Cmdr Zach]

Not really used it last couple of days, but when I looked at it it seemed it wasn't updating, or was taking quite a while to.

I've been in combat so not been looking at materials really.

 

[CMDR HG]

I tried manually by adding lines to a log file of Elite via notepad, and changing the timestamp to sometime in 2017 (the timestamp needs to be the most recent otherwise it's ignored) and it seemed okay to me.
I'll try later in real conditions (i.e. discarding a material and looking at EDEngineer if it's taken into account) but if anyone could confirm in the meantime that'd be great!

Edit: So I tried it in game and it looked fine to me. Maybe you're confused about the "last update" timestamp at the bottom of the app? Time is in UTC (just like the game is).

 

[CMDR HG]

Published 1.0.3.0!

Highlights: Full Russian Translation and local API server available (some routes available but now that we have the groundwork, adding more is easy!)
But also: added fragment cannon double shot G5 blueprint and fixed an issue with Encoded Emission Data logs, might have been an issue some folks encountered without really knowing. Nasty one

 

[punkerich]

Damn dude, this is a great tool for sure!

One (propably dumb) question though:
is it normal you have to resize the panel after each update? Is there a way to save size/window position?
Win 10 here, if that matters.