control-tower

an elevated glass-enclosed structure which has an unobstructed view of a landing field and from which air traffic may be controlled usually by radio

A new wormhole mapping tool for EVE Online

⚠ Alpha quality software ⚠

Control Tower is a new mapping tool for EVE that is focused on mapping J-space and being familiar to existing users of Pathfinder. The motivation to write a new tool was a. for fun and b. because the Pathfinder codebase was hard to understand/modify. Complete feature parity is not the primary goal - but runtime speed and ease of deployment certainly are.

Current state:

Running

The github actions pipeline builds docker images for both the backend and frontend, currently only tagged :latest.

To run using docker-compose:

• Create a new EVE Application and note the ESI client id and secret
• Create the secret.env file by e.g. running ./scripts/generate-secret-env.sh > secret.env
• Update the secret.env with the values of your ESI client id and secret
• Run docker-compose up (look in compose.yaml for things you might want to tweak)
• Wait for the SDE import to run and go to http://localhost:8080 to login + create a map

Current minimum runtime requirements are 4GB RAM and 1 CPU, because the full SDE is imported and parsing hundreds of megabytes of YAML is memory consuming.

Features

The feature list is intended as an overview of capabilities and current roadmap - for more details see the project view.

Currently:

• Multiple characters can log in and share a session
• Each map has granular ACL permissions
• Map canvas supports moving systems, adding new ones, creating connections
• Jumps between systems are tracked (even if a character is not actively looking at the map)
• Selecting a system gives signature scan information
• Selecting a connection gives connection jump information
• There are keyboard shortcuts available to e.g. rename or delete systems

In the future:

• Right-click context menu for common actions (such as setting the size of a connection)
• Intel information is editable (e.g. system owner) and notes
• Route calculation
• Notifications for when systems become connected
• ZKill feed
• Thera feed

Developing

The project is almost exclusively written in the Scala 3 programming language with a functional style on the backend - a tutorial is sadly beyond the scope of this README. To get started with being able to run locally (e.g. to hack on the frontend CSS) on a Unix like system (tested on Linux only but should work in WSL 2 or on a Mac):

• Install mise (or asdf) and run either mise install or asdf install - this should bring in the JDK, sbt and npm
• Run sbt to bring up the build tool prompt and type ~ui/fastLinkJS to hot-recompile the frontend ui/ code
• In a separate terminal tab, run cd ui && npm run dev to bring up vite
• In a separate terminal tab, run sbt server/run (after having brought in all the appropriate environment variables)
• Open up http://localhost:8091/ - you should be able to see the login screen and your maps

The database used is sqlite and there are actually three separate databases that are created: sde.db, map.db and auth.db. Migrations are stored in db resources and you should be able to point any SQL client at the database files by running:

ATTACH DATABASE 'path-to/map.db' as map; 
ATTACH DATABASE 'path-to/sde.db' as sde; 
ATTACH DATABASE 'path-to/auth.db' as auth;

Updating static data

There are sources of data that are not included in the SDE:

• Signatures by group (e.g. Data site names) in ref_signature_in_group.csv
• Wormhole statics in ref_system_static_wormhole.csv

These have to be maintained manually.

Contributing

If you want to get in touch, report a bug or submit some code changes please either open an issue or start a discussion. A fuller DEVELOPING.md guide will probably be available eventually.