wingman 0.1.0

A companion for Discovery Freelancer

Wingman

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.

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, simply run

python3 -m pip install wingman

After installation the application should be available either from your desktop's application menu or by running wingman. (You may need to log in and out to get the icon to show.)

To uninstall, run python3 -m pip uninstall wingman.

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. many

• 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

Prerequisites (for all platforms)

Ensure PyQt5 is installed. The included pyrcc5 utility is required for building.

For both platforms (Windows and Linux), the first step is always to compile a fresh copy of the Qt resource file containing the icons and text files the application needs, using pyrcc5. From the root directory, run pyrcc5 src/resources.qrc -o src/wingman/resources.py

For Windows

From the root directory, cd packaging/windows. Ensure that PyInstaller is installed, in addition to the application itself's requirements.

Now run build.bat to build a one folder application and an installer.

For Linux

Again from the root directory, run python setup.py sdist to build a source distribution.

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

Suggestions

These are features I plan to implement in the future. To be maximally useful Wingman should be community-led so please feel free to make your own.

Navmap

• Run the Online Navmap locally so the application does not require an internet connection
• Provide detailed route planning and navigation

Merchant

• Make contraband selector functional. Currently this doesn't matter as contraband scans are disabled on the server
• Rigorously test results!

Roster

• Record the ship types of characters
• Handle character update commands (e.g. /sendcash, /movechar)
• Allow character data to be imported as well as exported

Database

• Toggleable "dev mode" filter which hides items not available to players to reduce clutter
• Bribe information on Factions page
• Rumours page
• Split guns into missiles and possibly turrets
• More statistics for guns, countermeasures, mines etc. (things with munitions/consumables)

Miscellaneous

• (Windows) relaunch and ask for administrator permissions only when flair features are turned on
• (Linux) install in virtualenv
• Fix very strange selection visual behaviour on QTreeView
• Automatically restart if path changed/preferences reset