Maybe if you are good at modding, you might as well make it run inside Freelancer. It will be much better than using that stupid point and click Nav Map thingy. Once you sell something, it takes hours to search for a good trade run. You don't know where's the next cheap stuff is.
What was Bill Gate thinking?...
Is he going to sell a patch to fic that up?

go to the download section and download the freelancer cargo calculator -- it rocks. just ALT-TAB to it, figure out what your trade will be, and ALT-TAB back... better than nothing!

no way you can estimate the trade time though, coz there are of course unexpected guests

lex, if you are still looking, you can rip all the coords out of FL-Datastorm (see the sticky). When you first run it, it makes an Access .mdb of all kinds of stuff, including X,Y coords on everything.

Unless it's been updated and I missed it, FL Cargo Calc. has lots of prices wrong. I don't even use it anymore.

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I'm sick of seeing all your signatures and not having one of my own

Strangely enough, FL Datastorm also seems to have at least some incorrect coordinates...my guess is a junky algorithm used to calculate the A-1 style coords from the numbers that FL uses internally...

The one map tool which I've found to be fairly invaluable is Freelancer Database. It's almost complete (only a couple things missing), and works as well in SP as in MP. If you know how to read the in-game maps, it's simply quite a bit easier to use, IMO, than Datastorm is.

bbrock, I recently compared FCC (1.1.0.7) data to commodity info snarfed from the LR site, and found over 400 errors in FCC (and about 30 on LR; this is out of the 6118 datapoints; 161 bases x 38 items). I checked all the discrepancies against the game and sent corrections to Darren, the FCC author... he says he'll put them in there. Look for an update soon. I also asked him for a bunch of tweaks, like the ability to filter out factions; I hope he can do some of them. Darren says he got his info out of the official strategy guide, so we can blame it. Also I sent fixes to Christian for the LR site... he's moving IRL so it may take a couple days.

About the same time, Holger of Datastorm told me how the pricing info is sitting right there in Datastorm as an Access .mdb I can open up... it reads info directly from the game and was a great final check that I (and thus, soon, FCC and LR) have all the commodity info right. Actually there's some little rounding error in calculations that cause 265 of them to be low by 1 but that may be fixed soon.

I am toying with the idea of finding a way to calculate travel times, either with FreelancerDB or Datastorm... the idea of making a pathfinding app is probably way more than I can do, but at the least, it ought to be possible to use them for 'measurements' and then relate them to in-game terms (e.g., it takes x minutes to go y km in free space or trade lanes or whatever). Then, some time could be spent turning 'highly travelled' main lines (e.g. Tokyo to Berlin etc.) into approximate times... and after a while, a person could probably get to where they are just taking segments of already-computed routes and then calc a final leg, as they consider the time for particular routes that look promising already on e.g. FCC. It won't be perfect, and it would still be a goodly amount of 'manual' work, but it would probably beat trying to fly all those routes, lol. For that matter though, somebody who simply wants to spend a day flying around and using a stopwatch on 'mainlines' would approximate a lot of the same info... if you know e.g. how long it takes to move through NY going from Colorado to California, it becomes a 'known quantity' for any routes that use it.

An even rougher approximation is to simply make a table of how many systems each system is from the other, and use that as a rough approximation of 'time'. (E.g., London is 4 systems from NY.) Maybe double it for systems without tradelanes, and call a route between bases within a system, 0.5, or something... anyway, it'd be rough, but it could would probably lead to some interesting possibilities that could be checked in the game. Unfortunately, it would be a matrix of, what are there, 43 systems?... 43*42/2=903 datapoints to fill in, lol. I told Darren that if he promised to include a "profit/systems" in FCC, I'd make the matrix for him, but only if he promised, since it's so much work, laugh... if anybody else wants to make it, I have profit info in an Access db and will be happy to swap tit for tat

Okay, enough rambling for now,

CAPT H

thats the exact same thing i am wanting to do.

we would have to use the set best path (legal and illegal) inis from freelancer plus an algorithm... and i got NO idea how to do THIS...

Let me clarify somethnig about the matrix before I commit to make it.

You're asking for a two-way table (matrix) with the systems across both sides. Each cell, then, is the number of systems between the two system identifiers?

EG:
<pre><font size=1 face=Courier> NL NT NY NB
NL 0 5 3 5
NT 5 0 3 4
NY 3 3 0 4
NB 5 4 4 0 </font></pre>

Those numbers are the number of intervening systems. EG - the shortest route from London to York is London -> Manchester -> Cortez/Magellan -> California -> York. I drop both the origin and destination systems, which leaves 3 intervening systems. Is that the number you're looking for?

Edited by - Nightsilver on 17-04-2003 00:48:34

Edited by - Nightsilver on 17-04-2003 00:49:19

Edited by - Nightsilver on 17-04-2003 00:49:46

Edited by - Nightsilver on 17-04-2003 00:50:18

That'll be great if you can do it, Nightsilver. Yes, that's what I'm looking for, except for one thing... the number for London to New York would be 4. Don't drop the destination system. (Otherwise the matrix will say zero for NY to NY, AND say zero for NY to Colorado... it should say zero for NY to NY, but say 1 for NY to CO. See?)

There are 43 systems. If you want, I can send a list of them to you in whatever format (text, excel, dbase, access). I can also send you either an Excel matrix, or a database, of the 903 combinations needed... whatever you want. Playing with the data is easy... filling in 900 datapoints by hand isn't, lol.

By the way... above, I said that such a matrix might e.g. count systems without tradelanes twice, to approximate how they will take longer. But I don't recommend that for your matrix... just do 'straight' counts. Later, we should be able to add a toggle where folks can add extra 'time' if the start or end system doesn't have trade lanes. I think that that will be simpler than having fudge factors in the raw data itself.

Rock on! -- H

well, the "ultimate" trade calculator would be something like this:

calculate best path from starting point to end point.
calculate the distance from starting point to tradelane start with a speed of 200 if the distance is below 3k and with 300 if above.
calculate the distance from tradelane start to tradelane end with speed pf 2533.
tradelane => jumphole 200 or 300
jumphole: some seconds (dunno how much)
and so on and so on and so on...


quite complicated, but as ive said, that would be the "ultimate trade calculator"

the xyz coordinates are in the datastorm database, the set best path is in the shortest_(il)legal_path.ini and the formula would be "distance = SQRT((x1 - x2)^2 + (y1 - y2)^2 + (z1 - z2)^2)"

now, is there anybody that wants to do this

Heya sp00n,

You left off one really cool "ultimate"... also find the best profit 'return' item, either between the same start and end base, or same start and end system (as a toggle I guess), and compute profit based on the total roundtrip.

I took a look at data\universe\shortest_legal_path.ini (etc.) but couldn't make much sense out of it. Anybody know its coding, or have a decoder? It's interesting to see that it's fixed (i.e. hasn't been updated), so they must have it all figured out

Otherwise my mind boggles at the idea of coding pathfinding, so I wouldn't be able to do the first part of what you say But I've been looking in the Datastorm .mdb and can see all the positional data (for trade lanes, jumpholes, bases, etc.). It's easy to figure the distance, as you say, using our good friend pythagoras' little equation... but making something that will even let a person e.g. click on 'next go here' (and keep a running tab of the distance/time as they click each next jumphole, tradelane, or whatever) is a bit more than a body could do in a couple hours I can't do graphics for squat anyway, so it'd have to be some sort of VB pull-down applet... it'd be struggle to make it be semi-intelligent ("now show me New York stuff, since I just jumped in there"... hey I'm purely an amateur coder. Although not an amateur data analyst, laugh.

A quick note... If Nightsilver (or anybody else) wants to take the time to to figure out all the system distances, it'd be easy to pop them into a profit table, so... go for it if you want.

Thanks. I'll check this out. I'm just getting around to this now, been busy. I plan to put a cargo calculator website up soon. (and hope to add distance/time estimates) ))