In regard to the route planner...I admit I find most of my trades through the round finder, so I have less experience with the route planner.
This might be a question for Stumpii, but Eventure might answer as well.
Is the use case for the route planner that you're going from point of origin to some star X LY away (multiple jumps), and you want to trade along the way? How would you know in advance what you want to trade? Can TCE route planner help with that...some sort of column that populates when you click on station #2, what the best trade is from station #1 already selected?
Yes, so it works actually:
You select the first station (which is most of the time your current one) and TCE showing you, what commodities have a high discount (avg. price - current price). Most of the time, you select the commodity with the highest discout.
After that, TCE is looking, what stations in the vicinity want to buy the commodity. After selecting a station (mainly close to your current star system), TCE showing again the commodities with the highest discount.
This continues for every station you add to the register until you have reach a point, that your can return to the origin station (loop route) or a system, you want to travel.
Or is the use case that you already know where you are going to dock AND sell/buy along the way, and you're just setting up TCE to show you as you go? If this is the case, then that's cool and I have no questions/input.
This is hardly to project, i think.
I feel like there should be some sort of integration between the route finder/planner, but that sounds complex just saying it, let alone having to code it. Maybe it's more of a case of using the "trade" button and then trade advisor. Like if you're doing "route planning", the "trade" button (top middle of UI) and trade advisor (middle of trade overview panel) picks up the two stations from your route planner, and you can see what the best trade would be, then select the commodities at the planner.
That's is partially in, when starting a route from the Route Finder panel, you could review the route at the Route Planner panel too. Both panels sharing the same variables.
I also noticed that the "sort by distance" button in the planner didn't seem to sort properly, and you could not sort by data age.
The sort by distance is working here, but if you have many many stations in database, it can require some seconds to update the list of stations. The 'Update' column hasn't a sort function yet, which I will add with the update of the panel.
The true problem of the route planner is, that you have no control, where the route come to an end, you only following the best prices of commodities.
With the change to select the 'End Station' directly after the 'Start Station', TCE would now take care of stations, which lie between these two stations.
How is that done?
TCE spans a bubble around these two stations with a radius of the distance of the stations. Stations, that lie in the intersection of both are moved to the pool of stations, which come into consideration for TCE to make a suggestion to the player.
This reduces the number of possible stations to select from and could lead to a better performance of the panel when it comes to displaying/sorting thousands of entries. That's my hope.