It's been a long time and we've had a lot of trouble. The demise of EDDB really hit us hard. Let me explain:
Trade Dangerous was originally written way the heck back in Beta, maybe pre-beta I can't remember. I do remember using it when we had the mini bubble and most of the galaxy was locked. It was never really designed to work with a server, always relying on some kind of external data source to feed it. We've lost a couple along the way and it's always cost us, because TD needs data from somewhere. TD is, ultimately, a piece of client software.
We do have a server solution, which does use the zmq data provided by EDDN, but again, TD wasn't really designed for this kind of operation and we've been without a solid data source for a while. Thankfully the data now provided by spansh, coupled with the EDDN feed, has us back in business.
Yes. We are back.
Bringing this back been a lot of work from a number of individuals, maximum credit as ever to eyeonus on the development side, I guess I must also credit myself making the necessary changes to the server end (and hosting it!). A well deserved big shout out to goes to Mihail "lanzz" Milushev for his work developing a new plugin for importing spansh data. We are also very grateful to spansh for their helpful input and support.
There are, of course, a lot of online trading tools, which are quicker, prettier, easier to use and probably more reliable than Trade Dangerous in its current form, but still TD is the only tool which can ask such complex questions of the data. Trading may well not be the best money spinner, but if you want a relaxing and profitable run around the galaxy throwing a few commodities hither and thither, TD is going to give you the most interesting, unusual and profitable routes. The parameters you can give it are quite incredible. It may well be clunky, hard to learn and maybe a bit slow (it's old) but that's because it's the most powerful trading tool there is. Still. And it's also one of the very first such tools for E
and worth keeping alive for that reason alone. We're very proud of the work we've done.
For clients, you shouldn't need to do anything new. All the necessary work has been done on the server side. The spansh plugin is available to clients, but we recommend continuing with the eddb plugin. This will still contact my server and download the lastest available data, which is regenerated every 5 minutes or so. This also means that if you had TDHelper running, you can just use that and it won't need to be changed. We've done this to keep it backwardly compatible (at least) until we have the native GUI completed.
I guess it's a labour of love as much as anything, but we think it's worth preserving this, so we've put in the work, once again, to keep TD available to those who want to use it.
Welcome back to Trading Dangerously.
"Just want to thank you guys for keeping this alive for the players" - Oliver "KFSOne" Smith