Wingman

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Wingman is a powerful desktop companion application specifically crafted for Discovery Freelancer. Intended to be a modern addition to the venerable FLStat and Freelancer Companion, it seeks to bring a wealth of new features to the community.

Wingman features:

• Navmap: a beautiful navigation aid integrating and extending @Error's Online Navmap
• Merchant: a powerful trading assistant
• Roster: a record of your in-game characters and their attributes
• Database: an information-dense overview of the game's world
• Augmentation of the game client, including clipboard access, named screenshots and new commands
• Display of infocards with full rich text formatting, plus TGA icons
• Full cross-platform support, with downloads for Windows and Linux

Under the hood, Wingman combines my two libraries for Freelancer - flint (to read the game's static data) and flair (to hook the client) - with a rich graphical interface implemented in PyQt.

Wingman is free software, released under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0.

Suggestions

See Issues for a list of new features that are currently planned. To be maximally useful Wingman should be community-led, so please feel free to make your own either in the project thread or here on GitHub.

Installation

Installing on Windows

The minimum supported Windows version is Windows 7.

Download and run the installer. After installation Wingman can be launched from the Start Menu.

Alternatively, if you have Python 3.7 or higher installed, you can use the installation instructions for Linux (ignoring those about native styling, since this is not an issue on Windows). However, this will not create a Start Menu entry or desktop icon and you will need to start the process as administrator manually, or create a custom shortcut.

Installing on Linux

Assuming you have Python 3.7 or higher installed and available as python3, simply run python3 -m pip install wingman.

After installation the application should be available either from your desktop's application menu or, if you ran pip with sudo, by running wingman in a terminal.

To upgrade, run python3 -m pip install -U wingman. To uninstall, run python3 -m pip uninstall wingman.

Note that the latest version available on PyPI may not match the latest version number for Windows because minor bugfix releases that only affect Windows are not published on PyPI.

The application will probably be installable on macOS using the above commands but I'm unable to test this platform myself. If someone was able to try it out that would be great.

Native styling

Because the PyQt wheels do not include platform-specific style plugins, Wingman will run with the default Fusion theme when using pip-installed PyQt5. This works OK, but if you prefer native theming (e.g. Breeze on a KDE system) you need to install the PyQt5 packages from your distro's package manager rather than pip. Unless you want to build PyQt from source, this is only possible if your distro provides a PyQt5 package for Python 3.7 or higher. This rules out Ubuntu LTS, as at the time of writing packages are built only for Python 3.6.

• Uninstall the PyQt5 and PyQtWebEngine packages with pip
• Install python-pyqt5 and python-pyqtwebengine (e.g. if you use pacman) or python3-pyqt5 and python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine (if you use apt) with your package manager

Building and packaging

CI

A workflow exists that produces automated builds for Linux and Windows.

Local

Prerequisites (for all platforms)

Ensure the development dependencies in requirements.txt are installed. To build on Windows you will additionally need to install the requirements of the application itself listed in setup.py.

For Windows

From the root directory, cd packaging/windows.

Run build.bat to build a one folder application and an installer. The application is built against Python 3.8, the last version to support Windows 7.

For Linux

From the root directory, cd packaging/linux and run build.sh to build a source distribution.

To install your locally-built distribution, run pip install dist/wingman-*.tar.gz.