ANNOUNCEMENT Mobile trading tool for Elite!

metzer

M
Fellow backers,

I've built a mobile-friendly web app to handle the number-crunching associated with finding the best trades. You're welcome to use it to assist your play.

http://roguevendor.com/eta

I still have to update the data manually; I'll do so once per day, probably around 8 PM Central time. Each market page shows the time I updated the app. Anyone who is interested in helping me maintain the data should post here for instructions. I have longer-term plans to crowd-source this task, but for now I'll maintain it myself.

I have more features planned, to solve problems like these:
  • I only have X to spend: what's the best trade?
  • I only have Y cargo space; what's the best trade?
  • I already have Z cargo: where should I sell it?
  • How has the price of X changed over time in a given market?

I'll add this stuff over the next few days, but I wanted to get this out to you as soon as it was working.

Feedback welcome.

Screens below:

screen1.png

screen2.png
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Sounds really cool.

Looking forward to using it whenever I can get my hands on my Premium Beta download.

But, how are the commodities and prices loaded? Do yo have some way to access the game database? Or are you doing them all one by one by hand?
 

Steve50

Steve50
Isn't that kind of a cheating aid?

Surely half the pleasure is finding lucrative trading routes and best profit cargo for yourself?
 

Jason S

J
It is not cheating but an aid and also FD should release something like this on Android and Ios and maybe windows phone. Or they should have this service in game.
 

Vhaegrant

V
While I appreciate the time and effort that goes into such an app to keep it up to date I can't help but feel it cheapens the trading experience.

Surely, part of the skill associated with the trading game is to develop the knowledge base of what the best commodities are and where they will produce the best profit.

Whether as a stand alone app or an in-game feature, it just seems to be an 'I Win!' button that takes away from the nuances of the trading aspect of Elite: Dangerous.
 

Luniticisi

Luniticisi
I think it's going to be a little hard to maintain once the game opens up fully ... 100,000 markets at least to update ... or is this just for the build as it stands?
 

metzer

M
I'm sympathetic to the view that having a tool to collect and analyze data takes the skill out of trading. I tend to agree. I hate trading, and this is my solution; sharing it with like-minded players is only slightly more effort than keeping it private, and promises to make the tool more useful to me at the same time.

My ultimate goal has very little to do with trading. My fantasy is that some day, players who enjoy trading will be faced with economic conditions that encourage them to hire other players as protective escorts, or form bands of pirates to prey on traders. I see this trading app as a first step in that direction. If the community embraces it, I'll extend it with new social tools to support a market for the kinds of player-funded interactions I crave. I hope I'm not alone in this.

A few people asked about updates. The current update process is completely manual and quite tedious. I have to visit each starport, use video capture to record the commodity tables, then review the videos and transcribe the data into a spreadsheet and transform it into JSON which I then embed directly in the application. The entire process takes about 2 hours, barring interruptions, interdictions, client crashes, and manual errors. I'm working on a process to reduce the effort and chance for error, but I don't yet have a plan to automate extraction of the data from the game. If anyone has viable ideas, I'm open to suggestion. My current work focuses on making it possible to upload data for a single starport at a time in a standard file format; then I will provide a way for other players to contribute data (and to screen out invalid or malicious contributions). I'm still considering ways to maintain the system once the game world scales beyond my ability to update it manually.

Finally, the current UI was designed to handle the game world we have, not the game world we've been promised. I haven't begun to think about how I might expose the same functionality once there are hundreds or thousands of starports. Again, if the community embraces the app I may solicit your suggestions, but my immediate priority is automating the update process as much as possible and I'm very interested in ideas in that area.

I did a couple of spot-checks to see how outdated the app is today, and it doesn't seem too bad; ~50 CR different on the most valuable trade at Freeport. I won't update the data today, in favor of working on the app itself. To be safe, I recommend checking that the purchase price of a commodity matches the app before making any big purchases. I will update the app tomorrow.
 

Slopey

Volunteer Moderator
Slopey
Jason S said:
It is not cheating but an aid and also FD should release something like this on Android and Ios and maybe windows phone. Or they should have this service in game.
Click to expand...


Android native one in my sig :)

And lets not do the whole "Are they good or bad" thing again - there are about 4 topics running on that already. The TL:DR is that you can't stop the signal - if you don't like them, don't use them.
 

_Flin_

_Flin_
metzer said:
The current update process is completely manual and quite tedious. I have to visit each starport, use video capture to record the commodity tables, then review the videos and transcribe the data into a spreadsheet and transform it into JSON which I then embed directly in the application. The entire process takes about 2 hours, barring interruptions, interdictions, client crashes, and manual errors. I'm working on a process to reduce the effort and chance for error, but I don't yet have a plan to automate extraction of the data from the game. If anyone has viable ideas, I'm open to suggestion.
Click to expand...

Isn't there a screenshotting mechanism?
I'd go for something like that:
1. Screenshot market
2. Run OCR Software over Screenshot
3. Convert digital market data into data format
4. Upload into database

If you manage to find a way to train your OCR well enough to be 99,75% accurate, you could transfer screeshots to a watch folder where a running batch OCR service grabs them and automatically transforms them and loads them into an online database, where your app gets the data from.

This, however, sounds like quite a project.
 

Slopey

Volunteer Moderator
Slopey
metzer said:
The current update process is completely manual and quite tedious. I have to visit each starport, use video capture to record the commodity tables, then review the videos and transcribe the data into a spreadsheet and transform it into JSON which I then embed directly in the application.
Click to expand...

If anyone has viable ideas, I'm open to suggestion. My current work focuses on making it possible to upload data for a single starport at a time in a standard file format; then I will provide a way for other players to contribute data (and to screen out invalid or malicious contributions). I'm still considering ways to maintain the system once the game world scales beyond my ability to update it manually.
Click to expand...

Crikey - that's a bit long winded!

For my apps, I have a mySQL database running on a webhost which I can connect to directly with a front end tool. Then I run ED in a window or on a second monitor (or a different PC), and update the data live in the database based off the market data on screen by simply scrolling over the commods and handballing it onto the other window/PC.

Updating your app to pull from a database means you don't have to jsonify and embed in the app the whole time. The app can then pull from the DB directly, or via an interim script which json_encodes it up for you.
 

Slopey

Volunteer Moderator
Slopey
_Flin_ said:
This, however, sounds like quite a project.
Click to expand...

It's actually quite easy - I'm doing exactly this just now, but the OCR is a bit patchy until I do some image processing on the screenshot.

Ideally, FD need to provide a market API, and then it'd be no problem (but then everyone would be up in arms about the availability of prices).

What would maybe be ok would be for the client to dump out an XML file of the market to your machine whenever you visited it. Apps could parse that repeatedly and upload, so you'd only get data on systems where pilots who opted into it were actually at.
 

Tacheel

Tacheel
Vhaegrant said:
While I appreciate the time and effort that goes into such an app to keep it up to date I can't help but feel it cheapens the trading experience.

Surely, part of the skill associated with the trading game is to develop the knowledge base of what the best commodities are and where they will produce the best profit.

Whether as a stand alone app or an in-game feature, it just seems to be an 'I Win!' button that takes away from the nuances of the trading aspect of Elite: Dangerous.
Click to expand...

A trader is a business man, i feel a real life trader would use whatever tools would help maximise profit, just like in the real world. Surely using a tool like this that is populated by other traders from the game helps you get into the role of what trading would be like in the galaxy of elite?
 

_Flin_

_Flin_
_Flin_ said:
1. Screenshot market
2. Run OCR Software over Screenshot
3. Convert digital market data into data format
4. Upload into database
Click to expand...

Thinking about it again, this is actually dumb.

Best thing would be to find out where in the client the market data is placed when it is displayed. Grab it from there and update the database. Write a little tool to do so and make it available for free. Then sit back and watch the data pour in.
 
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