ed-fast-travel

Luzifer / ed-fast-travel

ed-fast-travel is a small helper utility to plan long-distance travels inside Elite: Dangerous.

Facts

• It uses the nightly database dump from EDDB
• The database is cached locally in ~/.local/share/ed-fast-travel
• It works better when calculating stops in 100 Ly or more distance on the route
• You can plot courses with more than 25000 Ly distance in ~3m

Difficulties

• Maybe the system you want to travel to is not yet known in EDSM/EDDB

As of today 0.001313% of the galaxy has been discovered on EDSM, it will take 132,444 years, 4 months and 19 days to discover it entirely.

• Calculations with ~25 Ly stop distance might work but maybe they contain jumps >30 Ly distance as of above reason
• Calculations with <20 Ly distance might even run into an endless loop as of above reason
• Inside is no real route-planning engine but only a simple vector calculation to find stops on a linear axis

Usage

You can download pre-compiled binaries on Github releases for your system.

Web-Interface

Starting with version v0.7.0 ed-fast-travel does contain a GUI to be used through your browser. To use that one just start the command without any arguments (you may want to see the parameters for more adjustments but the defaults will work for most people) and it will listen on port 3000 on your local machine. To access the GUI just access http://localhost:3000/ and you can start using it:

On the first start the initialization will require a few moments as the database needs to be downloaded and loaded into the application.

For all parameters available please execute the utility with --help parameter.

CLI / Text Route-Planning

To get a route in plain text format you need to execute the tool using the console / cmd prompt:

As you can see you only need to know from where you're starting and where you're going. The number (500 in above case) is the distance the stops should be calcualated. I used 500 Ly as that's a good distance for the ingame route engine to calculate a more detailed route.

Updates

ed-fast-travel contains an own updater and will print an information if an update is available:

2016/09/11 21:46:09 An update to ed-fast-travel is available. Run ./ed-fast-travel --self-update to update.

Database Updates

To update the local database with a fresh nightly dump from EDSM just add the flag --update when executing the utility:

# ./ed-fast-travel --update
2016/09/11 17:21:56 No local EDSM dump found or update forced, fetching dump...
Usage: ed-fast-travel <start system> <target system> <distance between nav points>

Example: ed-fast-travel 'Sol' 'Dryooe Prou GL-Y d369' 500
  This will calculate stops on your route from Sol to Dryooe Prou GL-Y d369 every 500Ly

The usage explanation appears because no parameters for routing are passed in that execution but the database now is refreshed. Please be nice to the servers and refresh only if you are sure you need to get new data and that there is new data. Refreshing multiple times a day does not give you any advantages as the database is only updated once a day.

Build from source

• To build this utility from source you need to have a working go1.7 environment.
• Execute go get github.com/Luzifer/ed-fast-travel and you will get the ed-fast-travel binary inside your $GOPATH/bin/ directory