Ship Tracker - C#

[coliver988]

Figuring as everyone else is posting software, I've been (slowly) reworking my Win32 ship tracking software to be UWP for an eventual goal of getting it into the Windows App store.

C#, XAML is the layout engine, uses the TravellerMap API (although I cache data once loaded into SQLite to reduce calls and allow this to be off-line as well).

Working on the cargo side of things, and trying to figure a way to allow the user to select which version of Traveller to use: Classic, Mongoose and T5 are what I'm planning on supporting. I did get the jump map display working today. A lot of user-entry screens so that users can enter trade codes, cargos, ship classes, all that.

Its on GitHub with an MIT open source license, all the tooling is free so anyone can play if they want.

 

[coliver988]

I'm actually about 80% there. You can search for cargo, look at the pretty TravellerMap jump map, jump to any system within your range, load and unload cargo and passengers, choose which version of Traveller (sort of), pick any TravellerMap supported milieu for the map (although I think the local cache will reflect which milieu you picked when loading it the first time), and a few other things.

UI still needs a lot of work, and obviously I am not going to make my beginning of the year plan of getting it into the Windows app store this year (the what are you going to do with Traveller this year thread). Next year, depending on if FFE will let me - when it gets closer to a real publication possibility I'll have to start that conversation).

source code is here: https://github.com/COliver988/Traveller - use the TravellerTracker repo as the others are dead ends. It is under an open source license, feel free to use. I do accept pull requests if anyone feels like making improvements.

blog with details (was also my game blog but as I've not played in too long ....) http://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/

There are basic directions on a post as to how to run this locally - as it is a Windows universal app, it is sandboxed and not installable as-is. But you can run it locally with a bit of elbow grease.

edit - I forgot I do include the git repo & blog in my signature...unabashed self-promotion!

 

[drofseh]

This is cool. Is there a compiled version I can download to check out?

 

[coliver988]

This is cool. Is there a compiled version I can download to check out?

Sadly, no. This being a UWP program in theory it can only be downloaded from the app store to run. However, one of my posts does explain how you can run this locally. Although it is probably more pain than it is worth unless you like to mess with code.

I would actually appreciate anyone trying - with no feedback on actual usage I am developing in my own echo chamber so may be missing something actually important.

I am making progress - hope to have the selling of speculative trade done today, at least for Classic. And I want to add images to either the logs or another table so you can link images to worlds or your ships. Then I really need to look at my wildly divergent UX and unify that. And then check with the powers that be to see if this is even releasable. It will be free but I may have to file off a few bits (although I am trying to set it up so that the user can set up the version stuff and how the rules work, at least in a limited fashion)

And once I do get this out, or at least to a finished state, I may look into the whole .Net Core thing on a Mac to see if we can do something there. Honestly a single codebase for Windows, Mac & Linux would be cool but I don't think the UI stuff is all there yet.

 

[drofseh]

I'm afraid I'm still on windows 7 which doesn't have UWP support, and I don't have plans to update to windows 10 any time in the near future.

 

[coliver988]

I'm afraid I'm still on windows 7 which doesn't have UWP support, and I don't have plans to update to windows 10 any time in the near future.

I have had several people pretty much say the same thing. I do want to get it into the App store, but once that is done, depending on time available (starting another degree in a few weeks so time may not be available for the next couple of years assuming I stick it out) I may write yet another version that would have the base code shared for Mac, Windows (all versions) and Linux. This is .Net which is its own can of worms, but they do have a version that runs on those 3 operating systems, and they are working on porting XAML (the mark up language used in the UI side of things, and it is vector based) to those platforms as well. So if all that did come together (and we are talking MS who loves to start huge projects then just drop them [but hey, so do all the tech companies]) then it should not be too hard to make this work on other OS.

And the source code is there. Although I've targeted UWP, the code would probably also work to make a straight Windows program with a little effort. I may fork the code at some time & see if that is possible. The API footprint for UWP is a subset of the Windows API, although it is actually growing pretty fast because MS really wants people to write UWP software and no one else wants to. So all the stuff in the code should work. The models and supporting classes are all POCO (plain old C# objects), the libraries in use (SQLite, Entity Framework and of course .Net) are all available for general Windows.

 

[coliver988]

alpha release

If you do have Windows 10 & want to test this very early version, here are the directions (and warnings): http://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2018/01/tracker-sideload-alpha-release.html

Just in case you don't want to do the whole let's download the source & compile this myself route (which is available as well as per the GitHub part of my sig below)