ExplOCR: An OCR Application Explorers May Find Useful

I'd be interested in the original screenshots if you have problems. They are kept in the archive folder at your program save location, there is a settings menu item where you can check the folder location. If you have resolution-dependent problems, please also tell me what the screen resolution is, the screenshots will be always be pruned to settings values.

I'd be interested to find out why the program is working so badly on the 1080 screen of user ChaosCloud. That may be a screen setting I don't know yet. The program currently does work for me, and reliably, so I'd be particularly interested on the 1080 screenshots that didnt work.

I'm less interested in the scaling issues because I can't reliably develop for resolutions I can't test with. Some things that come to mind would be:

This kind of thing always depends on how the display is scaled up as the amount of on-screen space increases. You can either put in more text, or make the font larger / change line spacing, or you can do a mix of both. That is something I obviously can't test or prepare for since I have one screen available and thats it. For that reason, I'm treating line spacing / character spacing / table gaps as PIXEL dimensions. You can toy around with the settings for those in ExplOCR.exe.config, but possibly I can figure out the values for you if supplied me with a suitable screenshot. However, since DPI / font size is likely changed, there would be shrinking involved and I can't implement that currently.

(Shrinking is currently out of the question because I'd need a much larger sample to train the neural nets if I also have to worry about letters which look different becauseof interpolation artifacts caused by shrinking. That is something I'd have to redo if they change the font rendering again as in 2.0/1.5. Commas often come out looking like dots in magnified views, and this will likely get worse when shrinking. Since we have commas and dots fighting for dominance in the numerical values, this is no easy matter.)

Overall, I am not thrilled by how the program performs on the scaled-down screenshot sample. The font size related problems seem fixed, the letters are nice and green. However, you are missing entire lines. Line spacing has changed for 2.1/1.6, and this seems to be not quite uniform as screen size (and possibly DPI) changes: If it were scaled the same way as the font, the values from the config files should let you lock onto all text lines of the scaled down screenshot. Something is wrong with the way lines are spaced, and I would have to guess wildly what it is. This part of the problem is more interesting to me than the scaling itself (-> screenshot please).

In the past, scaling up to ultra-wide 1200 screens worked well once people adjusted the ScreenshotX, ScreenshotY, ScreenshotW, ScreenshotH settings in ExplOCR.exe.config -- note that I have set height 1200 there, which will work for both 1080 and 1200. Shrinking the images for high-resolution monitors also used to work, but you'd have to import files individually which is too much of a hassle. I can't develop software on screens I don't own, partly because the next layout change will break it all again.

TLE
 
I'd be interested to find out why the program is working so badly on the 1080 screen of user ChaosCloud. That may be a screen setting I don't know yet. The program currently does work for me, and reliably, so I'd be particularly interested on the 1080 screenshots that didnt work.
I'd love to give them to you, if I'd had them. The screenshot folder is empty for whatever reason. But as said, it was only the first screenshot that didn't work for whatever reason, the others worked.

I've also taken another look at my own attempt and I mixed the left panel width detection a bit up, it was actually crawling along from the bottom left corner searching for the exit button, then after finding it (as in finding the first bigger color difference on a greyscale map) it crawled along that to the right and that gave the panel's width.
 
Hello Explorers,

I have just released a fix for the net log problem. I have also added support for viewing / editing galactic coordinates (main and table windows). All three coordinates share the same text field for now, located beneath system and body names..

Detecting the body code within the system doesn't work for some systems currently. I'll figure this out some time in the future, but right now I'm rather too busy.

Download link: https://github.com/ThoroughlyLostEx...Beta3-1.6-b/ExplOCRbeta3-for-Engineers2.1.zip

TLE
 
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Hello Explorers,

I've only had the time to check 3 or 4 worlds so far, but it seems that the new resource information on landable planets is being ignored and doesn't break OCR for the current version of the application. I'll have closer a look next time I actually get to play.

Please do send me names of systems / bodies where you see any problems in 2.0.5 so I can have a look there (unfortunately, this would work only for bubble systems where I have/can easily get the system map info). This would make it much easier to spot problems.

Eventually, I'll get around to include the new data in the OCR process (and fix any problem it may cause in the current build). Remember that you will be able to extract data from scans you make now after a future upgrade is available by mass-rescanning the screenshots in your image archive. So for now remember to use the auto image stitch feature to include the new data in your screenshots for later use.

TLE
 
Hi ThoroughlyLost Explorer,

Wanted to give it a try, but. First time I unpacked the archive, I think ExplOCR.exe has been flagged as dangerous and been quarantined, because I had fired it but when I alt-tabbed back to the folder, the file was gone.

Unpacked a second time, it stayed there. I fired it, with and without admin rights, nothing. Not even a process visible in the task manager. After a few attempts, a warning dialog box prompts saying that Windows can't access the file or can't find it etc., though it's still in the folder.

I'm running Windows 10 64bits with the November Update. My primary monitor resolution is 2,560x1,440, by the way.
 
Hello Explorers,

it has by now been brought to my attention that ExplOCR stopped working because of patch 2.2. Altohugh the problem looks easy to fix, it will take me a little bit to get around to actually doing it.

Please remember that you can archive all your current planet scans in the program automatically, and then mass-rescan them after the problem is fixed (mass-rescan takes a few minutes and runs unattended). This is explained somewhere in the precious posts and instructions. This way, you won't lose exploration info of system you can in the meanwhile.

Thank you for your patience,

TLE
 
Hello Explorers,

I have now updated my utility with a quick fix. It adresses the changes in table layout I have seen so far in about, uh, 5 minutes of gameplay. Fonts, character rendering and content seems unchanged so the details of the reading process should all still work.

Usually, I run a set of stability fixes to make sure an update will work on a broad class of screenshots. I don't have the time for this right now, so I'll need your feedback on wether there are screenshots that don't wotk yet.

I have updated the download link in the main introductioon post, but here it is again: https://github.com/ThoroughlyLostExplorer/ExplOCR/releases/download/TagBeta4-1.7/ExplOCRbeta3-for-Guardians2.2.zip

Instruction on how to use the software and how to re-read archived scans for time intervals where the software was behind the current game version and didnt work are spread around this thread in longish posts I'd rather not repeat.

Best regards,

TLE

PS: I heard about built-in logs. I have only fixed my existing utility to work with the current version of the game and completely ignored anby new features. Of course, built-in game features replacing my utility are highly desirable, please send me a link where I can check what the game does ;) Previous poster, hat my utility does is basically: Transform the cwelestial body data table view into ASCII text, with a bit of an UI.
 

Jon474

Banned
@TLE

Thank you, Cmdr.

Err...what does this actually mean...you know if you were asking...for a friend?

"Restart the program with command line argument "-multiread" (This is a safety feature, just so people never ever activate this by accident)"

Is this something to do with Run?...I tried "D:\ExplorerOCR\ExplOCR.exe -multiread" but nothing, absolutely nothing happened.

Loving your work...as always!

Kind regards
Jon
Type-6E
 
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Hi Jon474,

same here. Looking at the code, it turns out that it isn't "-multiread" but just "multiread". Ooops. I'll fix the documentation.

Thank you for your patience,

TLE
 

Jon474

Banned
Ha. That will sort it. Everything working as intended.

Thanks for the update. It's all good.

Kind regards
Jon
T-6E
 
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