Release/5.8.0

[Athanasius]

As Windows 8.1 is now End-Of-Life we no longer explicitly support it, but for the time being it will likely continue to work. This is dependent on future Python releases not dropping support for Windows 8.1 in a manner that prevents it working. Any bug report made against Windows 8.1 use may be ignored unless reproduced on a supported OS.

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NB: THERE WAS A SLIGHT BUILD ERROR IN 5.8.0-rc3 WHICH MEANS ITS UPDATE CHECKS ARE NON-FUNCTIONAL. IF YOU INSTALLED THAT VERSION THEN PLEASE MANUALLY DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL THIS ONE TO ENSURE YOU HAVE WORKING UPDATE CHECKS.
Release 5.8.0

This release is essentially the same as 5.8.0-rc3 with only the version and this changelog updated.

It brings a new feature related to Fleetcarrier data, some convenience for Linux users, some fixes, and otherwise some internal changes that should not adversely affect either users or third-party plugins. For the latter, read below for some new/changed things that could benefit you.

• This release, and all future ones, now create two additional archive files in the GitHub release:

  1. EDMarketConnector-release-<version>.zip
  2. EDMarketConnector-release-<version>.tar.gz

  The advantage of these over the GitHub auto-generated ones is that they have been hand-crafted to contain all the necessary files, and only those files.

  If you use the application from source, and not via a git clone, then we highly recommend you use one of these archives, not the GitHub auto-generated ones.

  Anyone installing on Windows should continue to use the EDMarketConnector_win_<version>.msi files as before.

• New Feature - You can now have the application query the /fleetcarrier CAPI endpoint for data about your Fleet Carrier. The data will then be passed to interested plugins.

  Note that there are some caveats:

  1. This feature defaults to Off. The option is on the Configuration tab of Settings as "Enable Fleetcarrier CAPI Queries". It is advised to only enable this if you know you utilise plugins that make use of the data.

  2. These queries are only triggered by CarrierBuy and CarrierStats Journal events, i.e. upon buying a Fleetcarrier or opening the Carrier Management UI in-game. NB: There is a 15 minute cooldown between queries.

  3. If you have Fleetcarrier cargo which got into the cargo hold through a lot of individual transactions, or if you have a lot of separate buy/sell orders then these queries can take a long time to complete.

     If this happens with your game account then all other CAPI queries will be blocked until the /fleetcarrier query completes. 'Other CAPI queries' means those usually triggered upon docking to gather station market, shipyard and outfitting data. To ameliorate the effects of this there is currently a timeout of 60 seconds on /fleetcarrier queries, and will not occur more often than every 15 minutes.

     We plan to address this by moving the /fleetcarrier queries into their own separate thread in the future.

• The code for choosing the 'Output' folder is now simply the tkinter function for such a dialogue, rather than a special case on Windows. In the past the former had issues with Unicode characters, but in testing no such issue was observed (on a supported OS).

• There are two new items on the "Help" menu:

  1. Troubleshooting -> Wiki:Troubleshooting
  2. Report A Bug -> Issues - New Bug Report

• Translations have been updated. Thanks again to our volunteer translators!

• If we ever activate any functionality killswitches, the popup denoting which are active has been made more readable.

• There's a new section in Contributing.md - "Python Environment". This should aid any new developers in getting things set up.

Linux Users

We now ship an io.edcd.EDMarketConnector.desktop file. To make use of this you should run scripts/linux-setup.sh once. This will:

1. Check that you have $HOME/bin in your PATH. If not, it will abort.

2. Create a shell script edmarketconnector in $HOME/bin to launch the application.

   NB: This relies on the filesystem location you placed the source in not changing. So if you move the source you will need to re-run the script.

3. Copy the .desktop and .icon files into appropriate locations. The .desktop file utilises the shell script created in step 2, and thus relies on it existing and on it being in a directory that is in your PATH.

Once this has been completed any XDG-compliant desktops should have an entry for "E:D Market Connector" in their "Games" menu.

Fixes

• The tracking of a Cmdr's location that was being performed by the core EDDN plugin has been moved into the Journal monitoring code. This results in the tracking being correct upon application (re)start, reflecting the state from the latest Journal file, rather than only picking up with any subsequent new Journal events.

  This change should remove instances of "Wrong System! Missed Jump ?" and similar sanity-check "errors" when continuing to play after a user restarts the application whilst the game is running.

  Plugin developers, see below for how this change can positively affect you.

• The name of the files written by "File" > "Save Raw Data" now have a . between the system and station names.

• Use of CAPI data in EDMC.exe when invoked with either -s or -n arguments hadn't been updated for prior changes, causing such invocations to fail. This has been fixed.

Plugin Developers

• Each plugin is now handed its own sub-frame as the parent parameter passed to plugin_app() instead of the actual main UI frame. These new Frames are placed in the position that plugin UI would have gone into. This should have no side effects on well-behaved plugins.

  However, if you have code that attempts to do things like parent.children() or the like in your plugin_app() implementation, this might have stopped working. You shouldn't be trying to do anything with any of the UI outside your plugin anyway, but if you definitely have a need then look things up using .nametowidget(). There are examples in the core plugins (which DO have good reason, due to maintaining main UI label values).

  All of the plugins listed on our Wiki were given perfunctory testing and no issues from this change were observed.

  This is a necessary first step to some pending plugin/UI work:

  • UI: Alllow for re-ordering third-party plugins' UIs
  • UI: Allow configuration of number of UI columns.
  • Re-work how Plugins' Settings are accessed

• New - capi_fleetcarrier() function to receive the data from a CAPI /fleetcarrier query. See PLUGINS.md for details.

• It was found that the ShutDown event (note the capitalisation, this is distinct from the actual Journal Shutdown event) synthesized for plugins when it is detected that the game has exited was never actually being delivered. Instead this was erroneously replaced with a synthesized StartUp event. This has been fixed.

• As the location tracking has been moved out of the core EDDN plugin, and into monitor.py all of it is now available as members of the state dictionary which is passed to journal_entry().

  This both means that no plugin should need to perform such location state tracking itself and they can take advantage of it being fully up to date when a user restarts the application with the game running.

  A reminder: When performing 'catch up' on the newest Journal file found at startup, the application does not pass any events to the journal_entry() method in plugins. This is to avoid spamming with data/state that has possibly already been handled, and in the case of the Cmdr moving around will end up not being relevant by the time the end of the file is reached. This limitation was also why the core EDDN plugin couldn't properly initiate its location tracking state in this scenario.

  See PLUGINS.md for details of the new state members. Pay particular attention to the footnote that details the caveats around Body tracking.

  Careful testing has been done for only the following. So, if you make use of any of the other new state values and spot a bug, please report it:

  1. SystemName
  2. SystemAddress
  3. Body (Name)
  4. BodyID
  5. BodyType
  6. StationName
  7. StationType
  8. (Station) MarketID

• There is an additional property request_cmdr on CAPIData objects, which records the name of the Cmdr the request was made for.

• FDevIDs files are their latest versions at time of this version's build.

• examples\plugintest - dropped the "pre-5.0.0 config" code, as it's long since irrelevant.

Developers

• If you utilise a git clone of the source code, you should also ensure the sub-modules are initialised and synchronised. wiki:Running from source has been updated to include the necessary commands.

• The coriolis-data git sub-module now uses an HTTPS, not "git" URL, so won't require authentication for a simple git pull.

• If you have a dump directory in CWD when running EDMarketConnector.py under a debugger you will get files in that location when CAPI queries complete. This will now include files with names of the form FleetCarrier.<callsign>.<timstamp>.json for /fleetcarrier data.

• All the main UI tk widgets are now properly named. This might make things easier if debugging UI widgets as you'll no longer see a bunch of !label1, !frame1 and the like.

  Each plugin's separator is named as per the scheme plugin_hr_<X>, and when a plugin has UI its new container Frame is named plugin_X. Both of these start with 1, not 0.

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This discussion was created from the release Release/5.8.0.