bcplus

Personal goal reached: Know Go language and have an overview of what pure HTML/CSS/JS can do! Web frontend definitley needs better structure.

Currently I'm trying to have a more modular structure of BC+ and playing around with that. This will reset new commits of BC+ to unusable state before I start with building new things up.

Reworking the thing is currently in rather slow progress…

BoardComputer+ for E:D

Binary Downloads – Documentation Index

BC+ evaluates the player's journal and serves web pages with useful informaton. I.e. one can easily access BC+ from any computer, tablet or smartphone without ATL-TAB'ing away from E:D.

Currnetly information for long distance tarvel is supported - I was on the way to Beagle Point when I startet working on this. It displays estimations based on the recent jump history along with your galactic position:

As well as the availability of raw materials on scanned bodies in the current system:

Installation

BC+ currently is only provided for E:D on PC – though it compliles fine on Linux (my dev platform). It can be run from any directory as long as the directory with necessary assets is accessible in the same directory.

If you download the binary distribution, just unpack the ZIP file. This will create a BCplus folder containing all things you need.

Running

With a standard E:D installation from Frontier it should be perfectly fine to just double-click the BCplus.exe. It should find the journal files in the standard location. If you don't have a standard filesystem layout, there are some command-line options that let you change directory paths and other things.

After running the program a web-server is running on your machine (that's why the windows firewall will ask you if BCplus is permitted to access the network the first time you run the program). You can open the web pages with your local browser on http://localhost:1337. If you want to run the browser on another device in your network you can do so, if you know how to address your E:D host, e.g. by IP like 192.168.0.2. Then you would enter http://192.168.0.2:1337 in the browser on the other device.

Options

First, option syntax is not Windows standard – BC+ is written in Go and uses Go's standard command line parsing package. So be prepared to start options with '-' not '/'.

• -j <directory> set the path to the directory containing your journal files. (default: %HOME%\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous)

• -p <port> set the port on which the web server is listening (default: 1337).

• -d <directory> set the directory where BC+ collects its data (BC+ handles multiple commanders)

• -h show help information, i.e. the complete and up-to-date list of options.

Building from Source

To build it BC+ source you need

1. A proper installation of the Go SDK. The download will take you directly to the installation instructions. On Windows the installer should do the necessary things for you.

2. BC+ has/had/ will have dependencies that use cgo. For cgo to work one needs a working C compiler. Details can be found on the cgo doc pages. I use MinGW-w64 to build BC+. More details can be found on the MinGW-w64 project page.

If you have things set up correctly go get github.com/CmdrVasquess/bcplus should build the executable without errors. However this does not create a setup where bcplus.exe finds necessary resources. So, clone the repository, cd into the directory and use go build. Now you can run directly from the repo.

Credits

1. Thanks to the Go community to provide such a nice programming environment (BC+ primarily exists because I needed a project to learn Go).

2. Frontier Development for the nice game.

3. Elite Dangerous Assets site for providing useful visual stuff.

4. The creators of Vue.js as it became an important part of the Web UI.

5. All the people who are giving us incredible technology stacks like the Web, OS'es and Tools and many many more without the ulterior motive of spying on us for their own profit. – Being it payed or free software, this addresses all who respect their users.

Disclaimer

Board Computer plus was created using assets and imagery from Elite: Dangerous, with the permission of Frontier Developments plc, for non-commercial purposes. It is not endorsed by nor reflects the views or opinions of Frontier Developments and no employee of Frontier Developments was involved in the making of it.