Online station (no need to dock in!) and system browser @ EDCentral

CMDRKNac

C
http://www.elitedangerouscentral.com (route planner, trading tools, system browser and more -always adding features-)

11 Jan 2015

First of all, if you experienced some service interruption during the last two days I want to apologize, as I was running tests and had to be done on the live server.
After much exploration, playing 'sysadmin', testing and fighting with different technology stacks, server side, client side, writing code and what else; I've found a more or less permanent solution to some of the problems (and potential problems) of running an intensive app on limited resources without much control over the server (using a Openshift PaaS for the curious techies)


While I can do some minor polishing regarding the automatic deployment in case of failure or server restart (there may be temporal outages of some services if this happens, but shouldn't, at least too often), I'm comfortable enough with the current set up. And apparently it has been running for a day w/o much problem.
From now on I will be making some of the features 'asynchronous', what this means for you is no frustrating time outs, in fact works would survive even a computer crash on the client side (but you won't be able to retrieve them, not with some additional coding on my part and some session cookies voodoo, which I don't find worth the effort right now). This also means the app will be able to scale easily (I plan to support it with my local machine after some investigation hopefully) in case I changed hosting and could process thousands of tasks in parallel plus some other 'cool stuff'.


Hopefully this will free me in the future of having to fight hardware or hosting service limitations(at least somehow), give you a better service, and free me to do add features without having to worry about some things (unfortunately, not all, as the db may end up being overrun time to time). For now just the current trade calculator is asynchronous, but the route planner will follow soon. As well as some other potential tools in the future which would require some processing time etc. If you experience problems let me know as I'm uncertain yet how well this will work (but for now seems to be doing ok). Cheers!
 
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{SAS}Stalker

{SAS}Stalker
There's a problem with the registration system on there Knac, I entered username and hit tab to move to the next box, it then opened a dialogue box to say I had successfully registered. I entered no password or email address. If I then try to re-do it with the missing bits it tells me the UN is in use :S
 

CMDRKNac

C
{SAS}Stalker said:
There's a problem with the registration system on there Knac, I entered username and hit tab to move to the next box, it then opened a dialogue box to say I had successfully registered. I entered no password or email address. If I then try to re-do it with the missing bits it tells me the UN is in use :S
Click to expand...

PM me your username and I'll delete it so you can register properly again (or try with other username and e-mail).
 

Metamartian

M
Hey CMDRKnac,

Like the look of the site, nice and clean.

will use it over the next few weeks (I finish work today for the festive period) and will supply feedback, issues or questions as they appear in my head!

I did PM you a question about prepopulating the update system fields with existing entries already but I also would like to know if you plan on having a module/ship availability section for each station too? and maybe a notable feature of the system or some other general notes section?

I'll go away now.
 

CMDRKNac

C
gazelle said:
I keep track of some station and system attributes while I travel through the Elite universe.

For that I extended my TradeDangerous database with additional tables (Attributes, SystemAttributes, ...) which are not part of the official master branch.
You can use the data if you want. They are in my "private" branch of TradeDangerous:
The used values are pretty self-explanatory I think.
Click to expand...

Thanks man, I'll import all the stuff when I can, shouldn't take long to build a parser.

Metamartian said:
Hey CMDRKnac,

Like the look of the site, nice and clean.

will use it over the next few weeks (I finish work today for the festive period) and will supply feedback, issues or questions as they appear in my head!

I did PM you a question about prepopulating the update system fields with existing entries already but I also would like to know if you plan on having a module/ship availability section for each station too? and maybe a notable feature of the system or some other general notes section?

I'll go away now.
Click to expand...

Sent you a PM with details. Prepopulating fields from systems is doable and will come in, it will also reduce confusion.

As for module section, it can be added if there is demand for it, if you got any suggestion on how to implement are welcome because there is great variability on what a station can have and how to present the information. The problem is, though, that adding features has to be cost-effective, what I mean is that manual input is time expensive and if those have to be added by hand very few people will end up using it so the developing time may not be worth it (does not mean I cannot add it at some point, but would be low priority). Ie. I planned to have a 'facilities' field (which would be a list of the facilities) but I didn't see much use for it as the most important data already is in (has a blackmarket, and commodity data if available) so to keep data as clean as possible I haven't added it yet.

In contrast if the data can be fetched by some third party tool (like EliteOCR) I'll try to support it ASAP as it's more probable it will be used (including by myself :)). That said, I could add an other string field for 'modules' or a more general 'Additional notes' field very easily and you can use that if you want to include any additional data (would that work for you?).
 

Metamartian

M
CMDRKNac said:
Sent you a PM with details. Prepopulating fields from systems is doable and will come in, it will also reduce confusion.

As for module section, it can be added if there is demand for it, if you got any suggestion on how to implement are welcome because there is great variability on what a station can have and how to present the information. The problem is, though, that adding features has to be cost-effective, what I mean is that manual input is time expensive and if those have to be added by hand very few people will end up using it so the developing time may not be worth it (does not mean I cannot add it at some point, but would be low priority). Ie. I planned to have a 'facilities' field (which would be a list of the facilities) but I didn't see much use for it as the most important data already is in (has a blackmarket, and commodity data if available) so to keep data as clean as possible I haven't added it yet.

In contrast if the data can be fetched by some third party tool (like EliteOCR) I'll try to support it ASAP as it's more probable it will be used (including by myself :)). That said, I could add an other string field for 'modules' or a more general 'Additional notes' field very easily and you can use that if you want to include any additional data (would that work for you?).
Click to expand...

I totally see where you are coming from. I'll give it some thought over the next couple of weeks as I use the site.
 

CMDRKNac

C
It gets already fetched from the csv files, are already there! But the stock information is mostly irrelevant because is per user (specially after today patch).

BTW 'prepopultion' is almost done, just finishing stations (which are a bit of a PITA) and will update in the next half hour probably.
 

CMDRKNac

C
Pushed update with 'prepopulation' of form fields. Everything will get prepopulated if data is available except the 'system name' field. That's generated dynamically through JavaScript and uses AJAX so is a bit tricky to do, I'll fix it in the future, meanwhile at least every other field will have the previous information so hopefully this helps and reduces confusion.
 

Metamartian

M
CMDRKNac said:
Pushed update with 'prepopulation' of form fields. Everything will get prepopulated if data is available except the 'system name' field. That's generated dynamically through JavaScript and uses AJAX so is a bit tricky to do, I'll fix it in the future, meanwhile at least every other field will have the previous information so hopefully this helps and reduces confusion.
Click to expand...

prepop works fine, update a couple of stations on my normal 'not got much time to play run'. I'll have a few more systems updated tomorrow as I run around a little.

I meant Stocks Rare Goods like a tick box for example, so that it could form part of the system/station search criteria.
 

CMDRKNac

C
Oh I see, yes can be done, will add it to the backlog. Although if I add more criteria for search I will have to write a proper query wrapper because what I've written for 4 parameters is a bit lackluster and not scalable.


I'm about to push an other update compatible with the last version of OCR (and fully functional with the new version of EDDN, with forced schema for valdiation) . This means that if a station does not exist in a system, it will be created automatically from the .csv file, which now will require to include system name. last version of EliteOCR is amazing btw, has almost 100% success chance and does all the job for you.

Soon I'll add functionality for loading data to the database from EDDN automatically too (hopefully can do it tomorrow), so that means faster population of the db too.
 
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CMDRKNac

C
Just want to let you know that a couple minor bugs were introduced with "prepopulation" but I think every exceptional case I got fixed now (there shouldn't be more 'blank stations' created either, I'll clean up the one that was still around). That's what you get for rushing things without proper test cases lol.

I'm aware that you can only update some fields from automatically created stations and going to fix that next (should be fast), but wanted to push this update as it was rather critical in some cases (giving error 500).

If you find any extra bug let me know please.
 

Juvecu

J
Been searching for a tool that can do route planning over long distances as this is lacking from the in game galaxy map. Your site does it very well, thank you for the effort. I like to explore so will contribute when I find systems not yet on there.
 

CMDRKNac

C
[h=4]30 Dec 2014[/h]
Hi all, I've added new functionality and did some back-end work for mission & trade aid tools using the database.


This is just initial deployment, as of now I'm caching some resources and will overhaul the tools to make use of the new cache. This will mean faster route calculations, but also less resource consumption and faster calculations when implementing future tools. Once the cache is built (probably later today) and I've some time (next year) I'll activate new functions like commodity search per region, long-range trading routes etc. The overhauling of the route planner will come later on, but will come.
As always I'll be iterating on this features until these are polished, so feel free to report bugs or suggestions. However I will probably be pretty busy until mid February 2015, but will try to keep an eye and rapidly fix any thing.


In other news the work to integrate the website with EDDN and EliteOCR has paid off, commodity data is coming at a steady pace, at this rate I expect to have all the inhabited space in-game covered in few weeks/months. The latests versions of EliteOCR (I recommend you to use it if you want to help) can export to EDDN directly, meaning data relaying is picking up quite fast. To take advantage in 2015 I'll try to implement historical data recording, some fancy graphs as well as developing an API for 3rd party tools to query the database when they need.


To end, I wish you a happy New Year and thank you for using the tools I've been developing over time and all the suggestions that have helped improving the website. I know there is space for polishing and some stuff you have suggested has not been added, but believe me I've taken note of everything and with due time it may be added (is a matter of priorities and limited time/resources). Have a great New Year and fly safe commanders!
 

CMDRKNac

C
First of all, if you experienced some service interruption during the last two days I want to apologize, as I was running tests and had to be done on the live server.


After much exploration, playing 'sysadmin', testing and fighting with different technology stacks, server side, client side, writing code and what else; I've found a more or less permanent solution to some of the problems (and potential problems) of running an intensive app on limited resources without much control over the server (using a Openshift PaaS for the curious techies)
While I can do some minor polishing regarding the automatic deployment in case of failure or server restart (there may be temporal outages of some services if this happens, but shouldn't, at least too often), I'm comfortable enough with the current set up. And apparently it has been running for a day w/o much problem.


From now on I will be making some of the features 'asynchronous', what this means for you is no frustrating time outs, in fact works would survive even a computer crash on the client side (but you won't be able to retrieve them, not with some additional coding on my part and some session cookies voodoo, which I don't find worth the effort right now). This also means the app will be able to scale easily (I plan to support it with my local machine after some investigation hopefully) in case I changed hosting and could process thousands of tasks in parallel plus some other 'cool stuff'.


Hopefully this will free me in the future of having to fight hardware or hosting service limitations(at least somehow), give you a better service, and free me to do add features without having to worry about some things (unfortunately, not all, as the db may end up being overrun time to time). For now just the current trade calculator is asynchronous, but the route planner will follow soon. As well as some other potential tools in the future which would require some processing time etc. If you experience problems let me know as I'm uncertain yet how well this will work (but for now seems to be doing ok). Cheers!
 

wolverine2710

Tutorial & Guide Writer
wolverine2710
In the past your excellent tool, thread has been added to EDCodex. Before EDCodex was released on the 17th of August you have received in the period 5th - 10th of August a PM with an invitation and a special link. After registering and logging in you would automatically become owner of your entry. According to the admin tool(s) you haven't used the special link (yet). Perhaps you have missed the PM or have been (temporarily) away from ED. Its also possible you choose not to claim your entry. Note: Its also possible to assign another commander editing rights for your entry. In either case please send us a PM. You can find your EDCodex entry here.

Alternative way to get ownership
The special link will cease to function in the (near) future, for security reasons. Should you after that point want to become owner of your entry you can use the "Claim ownership" button. In that case please send biobob or myself a PM with the email addressed you used for registration - for verification. You can also use this procedure if you no longer have the PM.

What is EDCodex:
Its a website with a database of currently approx 215+ tools,threads,websites,videos for ED. Any one can and is encouraged to add entries there. EDCodex is and should be community-driven. EDCodex companion thread. Its equally suited for PC's, tablets and smartphones and has RSS feeds.

With kind regards,
Biobob
Wolverine2710
 
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