Auto-Jimmy v0.9.1: Now with custom sector support

[CthulhuStig]

The time has finally come for me to release the next version of Auto-Jimmy. For those that don't know, Auto-Jimmy is an open source app for Windows, macOS & Linux. It provides a selection of tools for Traveller players and referees, some of these are aimed at people using the Mongoose rules, but many can also be used for other Traveller variants.

This release adds a few new features, the most notable of those being custom sector support. Just to try and temper everyone's expectations slightly, this isn't a full-blown interactive sector editor. You'll still need to create T5 column/row sector files and corresponding XML/JSON metadata. If you've ever used the Traveller Map Poster API to generate images of a custom sector, then it's the same files you used for that.
The sector files can be imported into Auto-Jimmy to allow it to include the data in features such as the jump route planner and trading tools. In addition to this, Auto-Jimmy will use the Traveller Map Poster API to generate a set of images of the sector. Then, as Traveller Map requests the tiles it uses to display the universe, Auto-Jimmy will live composite the posters onto the tiles so that your sectors are (almost) seamlessly integrated into the rest of the Traveller universe. As I said, the compositing isn't quite seamless, but hopefully it's good enough that people will find it useful. The kind of thing you might notice is visual artifacts around the edge of custom sectors, or slight pixelisation if you zoom in as far as it will go.

Release Highlights:

• Custom Sector Support
  • Custom sector data integrated into all tools
  • Posters of custom sectors automatically generated and overlaid onto Traveller Map views
  • Support for T5 Column & Row sector files and XML & JSON metadata
• Improved Tile Caching
  • For improved performance, Auto-Jimmy will now maintain a cache of the tiles Traveller Map uses to display the universe
• Fuel Based Jump Route Calculation
  • Jump route calculation now takes ship fuel capacity and fuel usage per parsec into account when calculating the best jump route
  • Improved lowest cost route calculation
  • Improved support for ships that can jump further than their jump rating without refuelling
  • Support for ships that don't use the standard amount of fuel per parsec
• Faster Universe Updates
  • Update time down from multiple minutes to just a few seconds
  • Automatic universe update check at startup
• Interface Scaling
  • A scaling factor can now be set for the user interface to aid readability

Unfortunately, documentation for Auto-Jimmy is still pretty limited, I've been too busy doing feature work to improve it much. I highly recommend you read the welcome messages that are displayed when you first open a feature window, they should cover everything you need to know. Hopefully better documentation will be coming soon. If you do hit a problem you can't get round, leave a comment here or raise an issue on the github project, and I'll see what I can do.

If you're going to use the Windows installer, I should warn you that it's not digitally signed (as that costs money). This means your browser may warn you about it not being a frequently downloaded program and/or make you confirm that you want to download it. Also, when you run the installer, Windows will almost certainly warn you that it's an unknown app and make you jump through hoops to install it.

If you've previously cloned the Auto-Jimmy repo or downloaded the source from github, you'll need to re-run the command to have pip install requirements.txt as the new version pulls in additional Python packages. There is also an optional (but recommended) step to install the Cairo library for better results when compositing custom sectors. Detail on how to do both can be found in the installation instructions in the Auto-Jimmy repo readme.

Project Links:
Source and Docs: https://github.com/cthulhustig/autojimmy
Windows Installer: https://github.com/cthulhustig/autojimmy/releases
Screenshots: https://github.com/cthulhustig/autojimmy/blob/main/docs/screenshots.md
Known Issues: https://github.com/cthulhustig/autojimmy/blob/main/docs/known_issues.md

Finally, a massive thanks goes to Joshua Bell from Traveller Map for his help making the custom sectors possible.

 

[Spinward Flow]

I've been too busy doing feature work to improve it much.

Speaking of Feature Requests™ ...
(this is your obligatory warning)

Would it be possible to use this tool to implement a different set of world icon colors?

1. Specifically, the set of world icon colors I used in my New Colors for Travellermap Resources project that yielded a demo using the Spinward Marches?
2. Could this tool be used to implement additional font style modes (italics and underlined italics specifically) for use in the presentation of mainworld names?

 

[CthulhuStig]

@Spinward Flow if what you're looking for is something that will generate maps using the icon set you linked to, then unfortunatly not. There would be significant technical issues with doing that level of customisation to what is being generated by Traveller Map. What Auto-Jimmy is currently doing is relatively simple (in concept at least), it's effectively copying and pasting sections of the poster images onto the tiles as Traveller Map returns them, it's not doing any of the actual drawing its self.

What woud be possible, would be to add the ability to import pre-rendered sector images and have them "copy/pasted" into the the correct place in the Traveller Map universe, along with having the world positions/information added to the Auto-Jimmy data so things like route planning etc would work. However, you'd have to manually create the sector images and, for it to look right at different zoom levels, you'd probably want to create multiple images at different scales.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

The time has finally come for me to release the next version of Auto-Jimmy.

I have it running on my computer. Do you have a YouTube video showing its use? I don't have metadata files, so I can't try the import
sector feature with the sector files I've generated over the years. I was curious how they'd look in your app.

 

[CthulhuStig]

@ShawnDriscoll sorry there isn't a YouTube video, although it's a good idea so something I might have to look into.

This is an example of the minimal metadata you would need for a custom sector. It gives the position you want your sector located at on the map and the name of the sector. You can place your sector wherever you want, if you specify the location of an existing sector it will be repalced by the custom one. The example has the sector positioned to replace Foreven which is a sector specifically set asside for referees to customise https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Foreven_Sector.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Sector xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" Tags="Preserve OTU"> <X>-5</X> <Y>-1</Y> <Name>Sector Name</Name> </Sector>

The metadata allows you to set things like routes and borders, you can find more about the format here https://travellermap.com/doc/metadata. If your looking for examples you can find the xml files for each of the stock Traveller Map sectors in the Auto-Jimmy repo https://github.com/cthulhustig/autojimmy/tree/main/data/map/milieu/M1105.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

The metadata allows you to set things like routes and borders, you can find more about the format here https://travellermap.com/doc/metadata.

That is my next project. To generate metadata files from my sector gen app.

 

[CthulhuStig]

I case anyones having issues creating custom sectors, I've added some additional documentation https://github.com/cthulhustig/autojimmy/blob/main/docs/custom_sectors.md

 

[Kilgs]

What trading ruleset is this for?

And can it access the other eras available on TravMap?

 

[Kilgs]

On a sidenote, the Trade Simulator is... interesting. The first time I ran it all it did was Black Market goods. The 2nd time I ran it... I started out with 25kcr and by Day 4, without leaving the planet, it increased that to 112,500cr through a number of trades which apparently were on-planet.

All in all, its pretty awesome. I am curious about my questions above (Trade Simulator clearly notes MTrav2E).

 

[CthulhuStig]

What trading ruleset is this for?

And can it access the other eras available on TravMap?

It can be configured to use Mongoose, Mongoose 2e or Mongoose 2022 rules for trading. It also supports all the eras/milieu currently supported by Traveller Map. The rules and milieu can be configured from the configuration dialog (you need to restart Auto-Jimmy for the changes to take effect).

The Trade Simulator can give some unexpected results. For example, due to the way the buying and selling modifiers are calculated, it means it is technically possible to make a decent profit buying then reselling goods on the same planet. At least it can for the Mongoose 2e rules, off the top of my head I can't remember if that is the case for the other rule systems.

When choosing goods to buy, the simulator just picks the one(s) that, with average dice rolls, would make it the most profit. However, there are a lot of factors that come into play as to which trade could make it the most profit, such as, the number of credits you have available for trading, the trade codes for the world your on, the trade codes for all the potential sale worlds within the surrounding area, your broker/streetwise skill, the broker/streetwise skill for the randomly generated seller on your current world, the potential broker/streetwise skill for buyers on the sale world, if you're using a 3rd party broker for buying or selling, the cargo capacity and fuel usage of your ship and probably some others factors that I can't remember right now. The trade estimation engine in Auto-Jimmy uses the rules for these different factors to calculate what profit you're likely to see based on if you were to make average, best case and worst case dice rolls for the entire trade. The calculated values aren't expected to be values you'd realistically see but the do allow you to rank one trade realtive to another based on its potential.

The best and worst case values are based on if you were to roll 6 or 1 respectively for all dice rolls involved in the trade. The calculated profits for these values aren't ones you'd ever expect to see but they do give you an absolute best and worst case profits.

The average profit will be closer to what you're likely to see but, given the number of factors involved, it's unlikely you'd see exactly the profit estimated. Calculation of the average case is a little more complex than the other cases due to it not being possible to actually roll an average 3.5 on a D6. Instead, the estimations are pessimistic so bases the calculation on a roll of a 3 or a 4 depending on which would be worse from the player's point of view.

 

[Spinward Flow]

off the top of my head I can't remember if that is the case for the other rule systems.

There are a few edge cases in CT where the DMs for buying and selling of a category of goods are not an inverse of each other (+2 to buy/-2 to sell) so there were opportunities for same planet arbitrage even back in CT.