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This repository has been archived by the owner on Jun 20, 2023. It is now read-only.

How it works

Fi0x edited this page Jul 16, 2021 · 5 revisions

GUI

Filters

Min quantity

This text-field only accepts numbers. If a station that sells a commodity has a lower supply of that good than the number you entered in this field, it won't be shown in the results. This is expecially useful if you want to fill your carrier at a single station instead of jumping around to fill up your entire capacity.

Checkboxes

  • Fleet carriers: If this box is checked, fleet carrier markets are shown in the results
  • Surface stations: If this box is checkked, markets of stations on the surface of planets are shown in the results
  • Small pads: If this box is checked, markets of outposts are shown in the results, even if the station has no large landing pad
  • 0 demand: If this box is checked, markets with 0 demand are shown in the results
  • Odyssey stations: If this box is checked, markets of stations that only exist in odyssey are shown in the results

Min gal.Avg.

This text-field only accepts numbers. If a commodity has a lower galactic average price than the number you entered, it won't be displayed as a result. This is useful if you want to set higher trade prices on your carrier, since you can only select prices from 5%-1000% of the galactic average.

Buttons

Web-calls

  • Error button: Displays the last error that occured and opens a browser page with an explanation of that error. Is only visible after an error
  • Report a bug: Opens the GitHub issue page. Please add your version number to any report you make
  • Get new version: Opens the GitHub release page. Is only visible when a new version is available

Control

  • Reload Trades: Updates the results. Does not make any web-requests
  • Previous Commodity: Displays trade results for the previous commodity. The max-profit of that commodity is higher than the current one
  • Next Commodity: Displays trade results for the next commodity. This commodity has a lower max-profit than the current one
  • Previous / Next Station: Displays another station that sells / buys the current commodity. Stations are ordered by profit

Results

Commodity

At the top of the result area are the commodity information and controls. The buttons can be used to switch to another commodity. The displayed information shows the name of the current commodity and the profit that can be made when traded through the stations displayed below. Here you can also find the distance between these stations.

Stations

There are two spots for station information. One at the left that sells the commodity and one at the right that buys it. At the bottom you can change the stations individually if you don't like one. Displayed in the station areas is also the system and station name, what type of a station it is, what the largest landing pad size is, how much the commodity costs and how much supply / demand the station has and also how old the information about this station is.

Background logic

This section is only for those who are interested in the technical details of this tool. If you only want to use it, the sections above should give you plenty of information

INARA

When the tool is first started it has an empty database. To fill that database with relevant trade information, the tool makes multiple requests to the INARA website and stores the results locally. Each request provides either buy or sell information for a single commodity. Since there are currently 231 commodities, the tool makes 462 requests at the first launch. These requests get delayed for 250ms after each commodity, so it takes at least 1 minute to finish this step (Usually it takes 5-10 minutes). Don't worry, this initialization is only required on the first launch

INARA also provides the commodity IDs and names that are being used in the database.

To keep the local database up-to-date, it is not enough to use EDDN, because you only get updates while you run your application. To solve this issue, a thread in the background downloads trade data from INARA each 10-15 seconds. The commodity that gets updated is always the most outdated one. In addition to these updates INARA is also used to get detailed station information for the trades that are received over EDDN.

EDDN

An EDDN connection is opened as soon as the INARA initialization is complete. This provides the newest commodity information by receiving messages from players that are currently docked at stations. To store the information correctly in the local database, an INARA call is made to get details for the station, like landing pad size and station type.

Local Database

The local database is used to provide quicker results to the user. It stores data from INARA and whenever EDDN provides new information.

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