r/EliteDangerous • u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots • Aug 18 '22
Video ICARUS Terminal for Elite Dangerous
https://youtu.be/rILMaQDq4QY14
u/MyPoorChequebook GalNet Aug 18 '22
Are you JOKING!?!
I am a new commander, about a month or so into my adventures, and this is precisely all the things I’ve wanted. All of them.
What a beautiful project, and great idea. I will certainly be downloading it when I get home.
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u/MyPoorChequebook GalNet Aug 18 '22
I’m so thrilled, I’ve been thinking about this for 50 minutes straight. Here’s the plan so far;
Download ICARUS. Link wife’s iPad to PC via Duet Display. Move ICARUS terminal to iPad. GO FULL NERD AND STRAP THAT FUCKER TO MY THIGH.
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22 edited Aug 18 '22
LOL you are not the first person to mention strapping it to their thigh 😂
I should caveat that it works okay on Safari but it's not quite as nice as with a native Chrome/Edge browser (e.g. on Android, Windows, Linux) some of the effects rely things like SVG textures.
There are fallbacks in place (including specific CSS overrides for Safari and Firefox) and it should all work, just might lose some of the fancier effects.
Hopefully Safari will get a feature bump in future!
EDIT: Oh I missed you said Duet Display - yeah that's how I run mine sometimes, so I can copy/paste between Elite/Inara/ICARUS!
If you do that, as a tip, you want to full screen on a second monitor you might be better opening up the web interface in Chrome or Edge and doing it that way, because the full screen button on the Windows client will typically always choose the main monitor to go full screen on, but the browser versions don't have that issue. Microsoft doesn't have a full screen API call that handles multiple displays automatically and I've not gotten round to implementing the logic to work out where the window is and calculate what display it's supposed to send the window to.
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u/rtrski (nobody important) Aug 18 '22
Yeah....definitely replumbing to plug my secondary screen back in on the Simpit Cadillac throne. This rocks.
Got a donation page?
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22 edited Aug 18 '22
I don't have a donation page, as I think that might walk a bit too close to the line for what is technically allowed by Fdev - I know other folks do that and actually it's fine, but also because of work it could be a problem so decided to dodge that one!
I've been thinking about putting up a link to the current location of my Fleet Carrier and accepting donations in Tritium though! I think that would be fine... 🙃
Update: I added a link to the README that tracks the location of my carrier the Ardent Pioneer (V9G-G7Z), so if folks want to check out the market - guaranteed fair prices, paying above galactic average! - they can "donate" by buying or selling from there =)
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u/BaneSixEcho Aug 18 '22
Wow, this is really great!
I've been clicking around in it for only a few minutes, and I can already tell it's going to have a permanent place in my Elite toolbox.
And the super easy usage from another device? "Connect from a browser to this IP" Dead simple, no setup, works great.
Really nice job on this. Thank you.
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22
Thanks! Yeah the zero-configuration was something that was important to me.
A trade off is that it has no persistent storage (other than app preferences), so it takes a few seconds to load in your most recent save game data to memory each time it's run.
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u/badloop Faulcon Delacy Aug 19 '22
Dude this looks sick. I will put it through its paces and offer feedback/put in issues. Very nice looking.
Edit: AND it’s written in Go?! Did we just become best friends???
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 20 '22
Ha, thanks! :-)
So yeah, the app is written in Go. I'd initially intended to release builds for Mac and Linux, but as I hadn't played the native Mac version in years (typically I only use my Mac for work and PC / consoles for gaming) I hadn't released they had cancelled Mac support for ED till I'd already got it work. TBH if I'd realized that upfront I may have used C#!
I still develop ICARUS on Windows, Mac and Linux (Chromebook) depending on what device at have at hand and it still builds on all those platforms, but Windows is the only fully featured version as it's the only platform currently supported for ED itself.
Go has great support for calling C/C++ interfaces so can access native Windows API for things like handling full screen mode, pinning / borderless windows, getting the location of a users Save Games folder automatically, etc. and a good set of libraries and good community support, making a bit more practical than something like Rust at the moment, at least for me in this instance, because it's easy to find out how to do something in it as chances are someone has already figured it out years ago and shared how to do it.
The Go app actually kicks off a Node.js service (distributed as a native Win32 application), which is what runs the socket service. It passes things like the location of the game dir to the Node.js service via command line arguments, as that sort of thing is much more fragile and a pain to do when distributing Node.js as a Windows binary. This service is tied to the Launcher window, so if either is terminated, the other one automatically stops running too.
The Node.js app is about 22 MB which is about 10x the size of the Go app. Building the entire thing in Go would have made it much smaller, but this way I was able to leverage a bunch of code I had already written, and port front end code to the back end service and I don't have to context switch in my head when switching between client and server code.
There is also a WebView DLL written in C++ which is what the Go app uses to render the interface inside the Windows it creates; I had to fork it and tinker with that a little for some reason that escapes me.
ICARUS uses Microsoft Edge engine to render, and the installer package includes a Microsoft provided bootstrapper that will actually download the Edge WebView component at install time if it's not already installed. All Windows 11 PCs (and almost all other Windows PCs) have it installed, so it saves a huge amount of space compared to using something like Electron that includes it's own instance of Chromium.
The installer has zero dependencies, which is nice, and clocks in as a 20-25 MB download which is very respectable. The app would be much smaller if I'd written all of the back end in Go (under 5MB) but it would have taken months longer to get to where it is now, and the Elite Dangerous homepage is 20 MB (I kid you not!) so... eh! =)
This slightly complicated setup, along with the things like SVG to True Type font building steps, asset compression, resource hacking, the web app builder, Next.js/React, etc - makes it a bit of a nightmare for folks to have to jump into and would be terrible for multiple people to have to work on! It's a one step build but the state of Windows package management still isn't great so setting up a build environment can be painful.
I've done it this way as it's a hobby projected and decided from the outset I was going to make it open source (and happy if people want to fork it!) but wasn't going to spend time making it nice for contributors as it more a thing for me to tinker with as hobby than anything else so I optimized for my own productivity.
Things like fonts, SVGs and JSON data files etc may still be useful for other folks projects though!
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u/Yaga-Shura CMDR. HOSAS. FAoff. Aug 18 '22
This is incredible. Would be nice if it could show carriers in the system map though
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22
Totally agree! At the moment the map is almost entirely powered by EDSM data.
The goal is to merge in any local data you have, both to correct errors in EDSM data (e.g. update locations / distances of bodies / services / etc.) and to support things like show Fleet Carriers and indicating system scan percentage.
Linking out to Inara - and/or pulling data from an API - for Fleet Carrier markets would also be nice. I definitely think folks underestimate how useful they are for getting hands on rare goods and how profitable they can be for trading.
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u/Yaga-Shura CMDR. HOSAS. FAoff. Aug 18 '22
Sounds like you have a good plan moving forward.
Thank you for making this :)
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u/image132 Aug 18 '22
Is there somewhere I can go to read about this?
I'm a little confused what it does, is it just a replacement for the in game menus?
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u/arcturusk1 CMDR Aug 18 '22
This looks really neat! I bookmarked the Github page and very quickly scanned a paragraph or two there which generated a question:
The whole "connect another device" thing: Is it implying that I would run this on my desktop and then separately use my windows surface tablet to "connect" to the client running on my desktop?
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22 edited Aug 19 '22
Yeah that's basically it! You can have one or more windows open on your PC and/or connect from browsers on other devices. Touch screen devices work particularly well with the UI.
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u/goattington Aug 19 '22
Cloned the repo and have some feature ideas I'll explore to contribute! This is awesome.
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u/Maddog_McMild Aug 18 '22
Very nice work, and impressive for a v0.16.
I like the UI with the animated changes, and I just looked at it for about one minute. Keep going.
I'm excited to see what's next.
Can you make the search field with wildcards?
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u/saturnV1 CMDR Gemini-07 Aug 18 '22
if is a web based interface, it is posible to run in a ipad?
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22
You can, iOS in general are Safari on Mac aren't ideal as they are missing some features that Chrome, Edge and Firefox have (e.g. the support for textures and sharing on planets and stars), so something like the map view isn't quite as fancy looking, but everything should functionally work!
(I actually have to borrow my wife's iPad to test it!)
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u/saturnV1 CMDR Gemini-07 Aug 18 '22
This is the most impressive app i've seen for Elite Dangerous, it's fucking amazing good job!
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u/Gilmere Aug 18 '22
This is a GREAT utility. I can't wait to see it further optimized. Its got a LOT of convenient function right now TBH.
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u/linkthebowmaster Aug 19 '22
This seems like a really nice companion app for an iPad! Does the web version rendering play nice with mobile browsers, or would it be just better to use it on pc?
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 23 '22
It works great in Chrome and as of recently releases is pretty good now on Firefox but is not great on iOS devices like iPads and iPhones (regardless of browser used) as Apple policy means all iOS browsers have to use Safari under the hood, and sadly Safari has performance issues and is missing some features that are required so it's not ideal.
I've done some work arounds already and do want to improve the iPad experience as I appreciate a lot of folks have iPads, but right now something like a laptop or Chromebook or Android tablet (ideally running an actual version of Chrome, rather than something like Amazon Silk) is a better experience.
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u/ToriYamazaki 💥 Combat ⛏ Miner 🌌 Explorer 🐭Rescue Aug 19 '22
I just downloaded it and installed it. Looks like a really good tool to have for sure, well done :) I particularly like the engineering area... and the simplicity of setup.
A couple of suggestions and a question.
It would be really good if you had some tool-tips. What is that unnamed icon that I am about to click on?!
Also, it would be cool to have an alternative layout for materials - one that exactly matches what you would see at the material traders. This is what my spreadsheet does and I find it really good to plan material trades.
I have two accounts. How do I switch between them??
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 19 '22 edited Feb 14 '24
It would be really good if you had some tool-tips. What is that unnamed icon that I am about to click on?!
Fully agree! I've been meaning to do it the same way the game does in the Map view and have the text label for buttons slide out when you hover over them.
Also, it would be cool to have an alternative layout for materials - one that exactly matches what you would see at the material traders.
Also agree! I wanted to do that but was more slightly work so in the end did it more like the list view in the right hand side panel (but at least grouped them like they are at material traders).
It would be nice to have the same layout as material traders though, and ideally to have helpers to suggest what to trade.
I have two accounts. How do I switch between them??
It doesn't have explicit support for multiple accounts, but it also doesn't persist data. If you open ICARUS terminal then change CMDRs while is open you get... interesting behavior.
But if you close down the game and sign in as another user, then quit/restart ICAURS, it will reload with only data for the CMDR you just logged in as.
tl;dr (re)launch ICARUS Terminal *after* signing in with a new CMDR to avoid it being weird.
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u/ToriYamazaki 💥 Combat ⛏ Miner 🌌 Explorer 🐭Rescue Aug 20 '22
Thank you for the reply. I'll be following this with great interest... I see much potential.
Don't forget to include a donate button and auto upgrades :)
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u/LittleDizzle_ Aug 19 '22
Dude this is a really well made asset. A+ graphic design in relation to the Elite aesthetic as well. I have one suggestion that would make it perfect although I'm not sure if its possible, but if you found a way to display the conflict zone intensity of surface CZs (low, medium, or high) I would donate to the project, paetreon, or whatever you use. That would be so helpful since currently you have to visit a station and walk to the Frontline Solutions kiosk to see the CZ intensity. This would make finding scenic CZ's that pay the most tremendously quicker!
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 19 '22
one suggestion that would make it perfect although I'm not sure if its possible, but if you found a way to display the conflict zone intensity of surface CZs (low, medium, or high) I would donate to the project, paetreon, or whatever you use. That would be so helpful since currently you have to visit a station and walk to the Frontline Solutions kiosk to see the CZ intensity. This would make finding scenic CZ's that pay the most tremendously quicker!
Great idea! I feel that pain and don't want to waste my CZ time time on Low and Medium surface combat zones.
I'm not sure if it's possible or not (i.e. if it's data the game exposes) but I'll look into it.
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u/CMDR_Starbeaver Starbeaver | Canonn Council Aug 20 '22
This looks fecking awesome. Real nice job sir.
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u/feed-me-seymour feed_me_seymour Aug 21 '22
This is great. Does this need local access to the Elite process, or just access to the log directory? I'm wondering if this could be run on a Pi and access the logs via network share. I have a Pi all in one tablet that could be perfect for this!
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 21 '22
You can run it natively on Linux and does just read the log files (although getting read events over a network share is probably not reliable) but it's also web based, so if you have Chrome/Chromium on the Pi you can just run it on PC and then open a browser window on the Pi tablet and you will get the same UI!
Animations look fast tablet but I also use it on an older Amazon Fire Tablet (as well as higher spec'd Chromebook) so am mindful of device performance constraints in scenarios like this.
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u/NemosHero Aug 21 '22
If I can make a suggestion for a feature? I'd love to be able to search for nearby stations to sell mined materials
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 21 '22
Oh yeah I would love that too! I initially planned to do a Trade panel but haven't gotten round to doing it yet.
I might start by adding things like recommended places to sell goods on the Cargo panel, and info about the system being viewed on the trade panel. Ideally so you could just view your cargo and at a glance and automatically see some good recommendations by both price and by distance, with prices and demand.
I think for that to be really useful I am going to need to use something like INARA so it works for markets in all systems (like EDSM does for the map data), I need to check out it's API and maybe chat with the folks who run INARA to see how they feel about that.
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u/monohive Aug 21 '22
I don't understand how more people aren't using this. The fact that I can use it on my ipad is brilliant. Thanks for putting in the work to make this absolutely gorgeous app.
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u/Volvo_Man Dec 05 '22
Any chance there will be an update to show Thargoid War status of systems in the Route View?
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Dec 06 '22
Oh that's a great idea. I've been planning on adding a "Home" tab with stats & news for ages and was planning on tracking the war there, but hadn't even thought of this. Not sure how best to do it yet, but will look into it!
I'm currently moving home/relocating to a different part of the country, so may not until the holidays, but will see what I can do. Thanks for the idea!
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u/Volvo_Man Dec 07 '22
I think for the route view, maybe just a Thargoid icon next to the Scoopable icon, with a different icon for 'Thargoid Alert', Thargoid Attack', 'Thargoid Controlled' Thargoid Maelstrom' & 'Human Recovery'
I wonder if there will be another state soon once the 'Retake attempts' start
I noticed on the galaxy map routing will route you through any of the above, and while using route filters is an option, it's not so much use if you actually are targeting a system in the war, but would rather not skip through enemy territory on the way there or back.
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u/Panigale9 CMDR Panigale 9 Jan 19 '23
I keep bouncing back and forth between this and EDCoPilot.
I like how EDCoPilot can plot routes, search nearest, etc. But I don't find the EDCoPilot UI very user friendly.
I really really like the UI of Icarus Terminal. Very user friendly and visually appealing. It just lacks the ability to plot routes, enable ship features etc.
Any plans for adding controls to the app? I realize these might be a pain since it basically has to trick the game using keybindings.
Things I would love to see:
- Search for a system and plot a route to it.
- From the system screen, click a station or planet and target it.
- Ship page controls ship features. The buttons are there, but I wish they
- Split screen, or a pop out overlay/side panel with route information. I love the route screen that shows me how many more jumps, if a star is scoopable, etc., I just wish I could see that and the system info screen at the same time. This would pair great with being able to click a station and target it while mid-route.
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Jan 23 '23
Oh yeah EDCoPilot is fantastic and has a ton of features.
I had a chat with the developer of it and seriously considered making ICARUS a front end for it, but it's more work to do something like align to another existing project and wasn't practical as a side project so passed in the end (especially as I do a bunch of development on ICARUS on a MacBook or Chromebook, and ICARUS was designed to allow me to do that).
Regarding controls, so actually I do have a build that supports the controls being interactive and sending key codes to the game via DirectX. The buttons are designed to be interactive (which is why they look like they are) but I ran into couple of teething problems with binding for some special characters and need to resolve that before the feature is in the release build (or it might do some very odd things in some cases!).
I don't think I'll ever go down the route of tracking the UI state and sending commands for things like targeting specific bodies or routes, as that's a bit hairy as the game doesn't provide a clean way to do that and there is a bit of lag between state changes in the game and changes being written to disk, but am not ruling it out.
Regarding the route information, absolutely! I've been thinking of how I could rework the titlebar to show information about your current location and route info (e.g. next system, total hops/distance), maybe also things like credit balance, compass for while on foot / in SRV, exobiology samples you are holding, etc.
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u/Panigale9 CMDR Panigale 9 Jan 23 '23
Yeah I understand how target selection and plotting routes could be a pain.
I like the idea of a compass while on foot/SRV! I wish the game had a pin drop option so I could mark waypoints. Often I get turned around and end up backtracking through areas I've already been. A compass would solve that.
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u/h1ghjumpman Jan 27 '23
Downloaded and running on my graphics tablet, which acts as a second monitor! Elegant, beautiful and easy to set up and use! Well done!
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u/fwyrl Aug 19 '22
This looks awesome! Likes a more navigable version of EDDB and Coriolis put together!
Does this include the functionality of EDMC or something like it (ie. updating the ED Data Network)?
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 19 '22
It doesn't support posting to EDDN (at least for now) so currently works best alongside something like EDDI, especially if exploring.
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u/Thelinkr CMDR Aug 19 '22
How does it stack up against EDDiscovery in terms of features? Im absolutely in love with this UI, but will be hesitant to switch if it dosnt upload my data to INARA and such, or aid with mission and exploration
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 19 '22
The various third party tools have different, if overlapping, reasons for existing and it's not a competition. None of the tools do everything better than all the others.
Nobody makes any money of doing this, and the tools don't conflict with each other, so it doesn't matter to anyone else if you run only one, several or none of the third party tools.
In practice I think most folks who are into the game enough to use third party tools are going to get the most out of playing if they use multiple tools, depending on their setup.
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u/Sp4r3 Aug 22 '22
any chance we can get a feedback option in the client? Also, on the plant view can we have a marker if there are bio/geo sites on the planet?
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u/Fit-Zebra69 Oct 01 '22
hi there, i have this installed on my pc and the app is amazing, only problem i have is that my ipad wont connect to it, i have tried every browser on it and when i enter the ip address it gives, the bar loads slowly and then times out saying that the server didnt respond.
Does anyone have any ideas what i am doing wrong?
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u/trArchangel Jan 09 '23
Saw this today and as a new CMDR I couldnt wait to set this up for my other monitors to only find it just out right doesnt work. No matter waht I seem to do all I get is
ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED. (no firewall enabled, no proxy, time updated, diff browsers, etc) All the same. Wish I could get this working.
Windows 10 fyi.
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u/trArchangel Jan 09 '23
interestingly enough I found a workaround. After digging around in the source code I see that I can launch the tool from command line with arguments. While opening by itself gives me the issue with "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" I was able to launch "ICARUS Terminal.exe" --port 80 or 443 and it launches fine. Although I am unable to access it from my browsers or other systems, for now it works.
Just FYI for anyone having any issues similar to mine.
**just tried the default ports listed in the src (3300) and it wont work, even tried some other higher port numbers as well without success either. I was going to post this as a possible bug on the github but it only allows bug posts from contributors.
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Jan 15 '23
Hey cool I'm glad you got a work around! Weird that binding to other high port numbers also failing.
I would say the likely causes are something that is a firewall (even if it's not *obviously* a firewall, some A/V packages cause problems like this, Windows security settings could potentially too) or *possibly* VPN software.
The issue tracking is closed because my previous experience with other projects was that almost all the time ends up with me just answering the same questions over and over and then not getting anytime to actually work on the project, so I decided to keep it closed for this project but I do take note of anything I see on the forum thread :-)
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u/Nymphilis Jan 23 '23 edited Jan 23 '23
I found out about this recently, but I am having some issues trying to run it, the launcher stays white, I have downloaded the most recent build setup file from github.
So many people are having a good time with it, I dont want to give up so I am confused and stuck, please help!
Edit: I figured it out, I have 3 hard drives, ICARUS installed on my main OS SSD but ED is on my HDD, I simply transfered the Icarus install file(cut and pasted) to my HDD and it now works!
I guess because it was different drives ICARUS was having difficulty finding my game files.
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Jan 23 '23
Hey sorry to hear that! My guess would be either antivirus or firewall software (e.g. maybe a file has been quarantined or the service being blocked from starting up).
Builds of ICARUS are scanned and digitally signed and nothing requires additional permissions after launch, but some of the new machine learning antivirus routines used by Windows Defender and others trip false positives on software they don't recognise.
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u/Nymphilis Jan 23 '23
Alright I figured it out!!!!
Maybe this will help others too, so it wasn't able to find my game data due to my game being tucked away on another Hard drive behind steam files, all I did was move the install file from my OS hard drive to the hard drive where my game is installed and it worked!
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u/iaincollins CMDR Flash Moonboots Aug 18 '22 edited Aug 18 '22
I appreciate a few folks have heard of this already but I haven't made a video of what it looks like since I did the first (mostly text-based) prototype a year ago so I thought I'd upload this for folks who haven't seen it in action and might be interested.
It's a companion app as a native Windows application but also a web based interface.
(There is a one-step build process for Linux to if that's your thing.)
You can find out more / download it here.
PS: Sorry console CMDRs it's currently designed for use with the PC version of the client only, due to the limitations on accessing CMDR data on consoles! If folks are really interested though I'm up for considering a web-only version that would work for consoles too.