ICARUS Terminal is an immersive second screen experience, that also has useful and unique functionality with real time, context sensitive information (e.g. based on location, equipment, cargo, materials, ship status, etc), including notifications for significant events. It is free, open source software.
ICARUS Terminal works well for commanders in the bubble assisting with navigation, engineering and notifications. Commanders exploring out in the black using a tool like EDDI configured with EDSM can use ICARUS Terminal to view the systems they are in - the system map automatically updates anytime you scan a body or honk - and can use the route planner to view systems they (or other commanders) have already explored and plan refueling stops.
The application integrates with the game without any configuration. It's a Windows application that also supports remote access via a browser, from other computers, tablets or phones. The interface is fully scalable (e.g. with CTRL + mouse wheel or DPI settings) and adapts to different screen sizes and orientations and display scenarios (from VR to Ultrawide to mobile phones) and you can customize the appearance using the in app interface, with the option to use different themes on different devices or to sync theme settings across multiple devices. You can run multiple ICARUS Terminal windows on the same PC and set them to display different panels, which is useful if you have a multi-monitor setup. It also supports full screen and always-on-top mode, which is especially handy for ultrawide screens, multi-monitor and VR setups.
It is a lightweight, standalone native Windows implementation with opt-in auto-update notifications. The download clocks in at around 20 MB. It was created with Next.js/React, Node.js, Go and C++ and uses sockets for real time communication. The core is cross platform - it is actively developed on Mac, Windows and Linux - with simple instructions for single step build process on if you want to build it yourself.
It's still an early and incomplete implementation and is should be regarded as being in early access but it's a little different to anything that currently exists so I thought I'd share progress as I go. If you do install it, note that it will check for updates at startup and give you the option to install them, and that you should be able to upgrade from any pre release build to newer builds, including the full release when it is available.
I'll be using this thread to continue to post updates until it hits v1.0 release then I'll make a new thread.
Screenshots
These are examples of screens from ICARUS Terminal. The interface is designed to work well on displays of all sizes and orientations, to be fully saleable and to be responsive and animate smoothly on inexpensive devices (e.g. Amazon Fire tablets, other Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks...).
ICARUS Terminal icon font
To assist with developing the UI, I've also created an Elite Dangerous font leveraging remixed assets from edassets.org as well as all new icons.
You can find the icon font in the GitHub repository.
Credits
ICARUS Terminal would not be possible without work from dozens of enthusiasts and hundreds of open source contributors.
- The name ICARUS was suggested by SpaceNinjaBear on Reddit
- I'd like to express appreciation to Serge Zaitsev for his work on the WebView library
- The loading animation is by James Panter
- ICARUS terminal includes original icons, icons modeled on in-game UI elements and icons based on those from edassets.org
- Uses stellar cartography data from the wonderful EDSM API
- Uses data collated and provided by EDCD
- The Jura font is included under the Open Font License
I am extremely grateful for the existence of the Journal and JSON API and level of support third party developers have been afforded by Frontier. This is open source hobby project and it is not commercial software. While this has been created entirely in good faith, it would be great to get a steer from anyone officially as to what is permissible in practice. I'm of course more than happy to make any changes requested by Frontier. I am able to receive messages here or at me@iaincollins.com.
Feedback
I'm interested in feedback about if you are having problems running the software for reasons outside your control (e.g. it's not detecting game files or is crashing or is not working on a device it could reasonably be expected to work on or the information displayed seems corrupted or the UI is doing something that seems janky). Thank you to those who have reported issues, and included screenshots to illustrate issues.
I'm not currently looking for bug reports about things like incorrect or missing metadata for ship modules, star systems, materials, blueprints (etc) - there are known issues and at this stage in development things change so quickly it's not worth tracking them. That sort of info will be useful to track closer to release of v1.0. I will update this section when we get there.
Regarding the technical implementation, nobody is interested in hot takes like 'you should have used X framework instead of Y' or 'you should have written the code like this instead' armchair software development - don't be that guy! Well informed / constructive feedback is welcome though (e.g. 'you might find this library useful' or 'you can find data for X here').
Future Plans
It's always fun to explore ideas and make suggestions for improvement, discussion about ideas and features is always welcome!
Examples of things on the immediate horizon are improvements to the Engineering panel to list and track Blueprints and Materials collected for them and to expand the UI with more information (e.g. Commander stats, Credit Balance, Backpack / Suit and Personal Weapon Engineering, additional Navigation data, etc).
In the future, I'm interested in adding a 'Comms' or 'Home' panel with information about community groups, such as Fleet Carriers for support via the Deep Space Support Array (DSSA) or trips by members of Fleet Carrier Owners Club (FCOC).
In the longer term (beyond the scope planned for v1.0, over the course of 2022) I would like to add more features for deep space exploration, trade, mining, community goals, active participation in the background simulation and am particularly interested in exploring possibilities for player generated missions.
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