What Is Elite Dangerous Market Connector?

Elite Dangerous Market Connector ("EDMC") is a third-party application for use with Frontier Developments' game "Elite Dangerous". Its purpose is to facilitate supplying certain game data to, and in some cases retrieving it from, a number of websites and other tools.

To achieve this it utilises the Journal Files written by the game when played on a PC. It also makes use of Frontier's Companion API ("Frontier's CAPI"), accessible once you've authorised this application.

EDMC has a plugin system which many other developers have made use of to extend its functionality.

Find out more on the EDMC Wiki.

NB: This application is of no use with a Console game account. We now test against, and package with Python 3.9.9. As a consequence of this we no longer support Windows 7, due to Python 3.10.x itself not supporting Windows 7.

As has become routine now, various anti-virus software are reporting a false positive on our installer and/or files it contains. I've pre-emptively uploaded the installer to VirusTotal if you want to check what it's saying. Please see our Troubleshooting/AV-false-positives FAQ for further information.

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NB: This version is not yet being pushed through the in-application update check.

Release 5.3.0

As has sadly become routine now, please read our statement about malware false positives affecting our installers and/or the files they contain. We are as confident as we can be, without detailed auditing of python.org's releases and all the py2exe source and releases, that there is no malware in the files we make available.

This release is primarily aimed at fixing some more egregious bugs, shortcomings and annoyances with the application. It also adds support for two additional EDDN schemas.

• We now test and build using Python 3.10.2. We do not yet make use of any features specific to Python 3.10 (or 3.9). Let us restate that we absolutely reserve the right to commence doing so.
• We now set a custom User-Agent header in all web requests, i.e. to EDDN, EDSM and the like. This is of the form:
  EDCD-EDMarketConnector-<version>
• "File" -> "Status" will now show the new Odyssey ranks, both the new categories and the new 'prestige' ranks, e.g. 'Elite I'.
  NB: Due to an oversight there are currently no translations for these.
  Closes #1369.
• Running EDMarketConnector.exe –reset-ui will now also reset any changes to the application "UI Scale" or geometry (position and size).
  Closes #1155.
• We now use UTC-based timestamps in the application's log files. Prior to this change it was the "local time", but without any indication of the applied timezone. Each line's timestamp has UTC as a suffix now. We are assuming that your local clock is correct and the timezone is set correctly, such that Python's time.gmtime() yields UTC times.
  This should make it easier to correlate application logfiles with in-game time and/or third-party service timestamps.
• The process used to build the Windows installers should now always pick up all the necessary files automatically. Prior to this we used a manual process to update the installer configuration which was prone to both user error and neglecting to update it as necessary.
• If the application fails to load valid data from the NavRoute.json file when processing a Journal NavRoute event, it will attempt to retry this operation a number of times as it processes subsequent Journal events.
  This should hopefully work around a race condition where the game might not have yet updated NavRoute.json at all, or has truncated it to empty, when we first attempt this.
  We will also now NOT attempt to load NavRoute.json during the startup 'Journal catch-up' mode, which only sets internal state.
  Closes #1348.
• Inara: Use the <journal log>->Statistics->Bank_Account->Current_Wealth value when sending a setCommanderCredits message to Inara to set commanderAssets.
  In addition, a setCommanderCredits message at game login will now only ever be sent at game login. Yes, you will NEED to relog to send an updated balance. This is the only way in which to sanely keep the 'Total Assets' value on Inara from bouncing around.
  Refer to Inara:API:docs:setCommanderCredits.
  Closes #1401.
• Inara: Send a setCommanderRankPilot message when the player logs in to the game on-foot. Previously you would HAVE to be in a ship at login time for this to be sent.
  Thus, you can now relog on-foot in order to update Inara with any Rank up or progress since the session started.
  Closes #1378.
• Inara: Fix for always sending a Rank Progress of 0%.
  Closes #1378.
• Inara: You should once more see updates for any materials used in Engineering. The bug was in our more general Journal event processing code pertaining to EngineerCraft events, such that the state passed to the Inara plugin hadn't been updated.
  Such updates should happen 'immediately', but take into account that there can be a delay of up to 35 seconds for any data sent to Inara, due to how we avoid breaking the "2 messages a minute" limit on the Inara API.
  Closes #1395.
• EDDN: Implement new approachsettlement/1 schema.
• EDDN: Implement new fssallbodiesfound/1 schema.
• EDDN: We now compress all outgoing messages. This might help get some particularly large navroute messages go through.
  If any message is now rejected as 'too large' we will drop it, and thus not retry it later. The application logs will reflect this.
  NB: The EDDN Gateway was updated to allow messages up to 1 MiB in size anyway. The old limit was 100 KiB.
  Closes #1390.
• EDDN: In an attempt to diagnose some errors observed on the EDDN Gateway with respect to messages sent from this application some additional checks and logging have been added.
  NB: After some thorough investigation it was concluded that these EDDN errors were likely the result of long-delayed messages due to use of the "Delay sending until docked" option.
  There should be no functional changes for users. But if you see any of the following in this application's log files PLEASE OPEN AN ISSUE ON GITHUB with all the requested information, so that we can correct the relevant code:
  • No system name in entry, and system_name was not set either! entry: …
  • BodyName was present but not a string! …
  • post-processing entry contains entry …
  • this.body_id was not set properly: …
  • system is falsey, can't add StarSystem
  • this.coordinates is falsey, can't add StarPos
  • this.systemaddress is falsey, can't add SystemAddress
  • this.status_body_name was not set properly: …

You might also see any of the following in the application status text (bottom of the window):

• passed-in system_name is empty, can't add System
• CodexEntry had empty string, PLEASE ALERT THE EDMC DEVELOPERS
• system is falsey, can't add StarSystem
• this.coordinates is falsey, can't add StarPos
• this.systemaddress is falsey, can't add SystemAddress
• Ref: #1403 #1393.

Translations

• Use a different workaround for OneSky (translations website) using "zh-Hans" for Chinese (Simplified), whereas Windows will call this "zh-CN". This is in-code and documented with a comment, as opposed to some 'magic' in the Windows Installer configuration that had no such documentation. It's less fragile than relying on that, or developers using a script/documented process to rename the file.
• As noted above we forgot to upload to OneSky after adding the Odyssey new ranks/categories. This has now been done, and some new phrases await translation.

Plugin Developers

We now test against, and package with Python 3.10.2.

• We've made no explicit changes to the Python stdlib, or other modules, we currently offer, but we did have to start explicitly including asyncio and multiprocessing due to using a newer version of py2exe for the windows build.
• We will now include in the Windows installer all of the files that py2exe places in the build directory. This is vulnerable to a later version of our code, python and/or py2exe no longer causing inclusion of a module.
  We have endeavoured to ensure this release contains at least all of the same modules that 5.2.4 did.
  We are looking into including all of Python stdlib, but if there's a particular part of this we don't package then please ask us to by opening an issue on GitHub.
• We now have an .editorconfig file which will instruct your editor/IDE to change some settings pertaining to things like indentation and line wrap, assuming your editor/IDE supports the file.
  See Contributing.md->Text formatting.
• As noted above, prior to this version we weren't properly monitoring EngineerCraft events. This caused the state passed to plugins to not contain the correct 'materials' (Raw, Manufactured, Encoded) counts.
• config.py has been refactored into a sub-directory, with the per-OS code split into separate files. There shouldn't be any changes necessary to how you utilise this, e.g. to determine the application version.
  All forms of any import statement that worked before should have unchanged functionality.
• We now include FDevIDS as a sub-repository, and use its files directly for keeping some game data up to date. This should hopefully mean we include, e.g. new ships and modules for loadout exports in a more timely manner.
  Developers of third-party plugins should never have been using these files anyway, so this shouldn't break anything for them.
• It's unlikely to affect you, but our requirements-dev.txt now explicitly cites a specific version of setuptools. This was necessary to ensure we have a version that works with py2exe for the windows build process.
  If anything this will ensure you have a more up to date version of setuptools installed.