Pre-Release 5.3.0-beta7

[Athanasius]

Pre-Release 5.3.0-beta7

NB: Due to this issue with GitHub's Actions
we were unable to build this version on GitHub. THE INSTALLER FOR THIS
RELEASE WAS BUILT ON A DEVELOPER'S OWN MACHINE. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE
THAT THIS IN ANY WAY INCREASES THE RISK OF IT ACTUALLY CONTAINING MALWARE.

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 of
the py2exe source and releases, that there is no malware in the files we make
available.

• 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.

• "File" -> "Status" will now show the new Odyssey ranks, both the new
  categories and the new 'prestige' ranks, e.g. 'Elite I'. 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.

• All communication with remote web servers and APIs now uses the same custom
  "User-Agent" header to make attribution to this application clear.

• 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.

  This should cause Inara and EDMC to agree on the Commander's current total
  assets credits figure, and thus prevent it bouncing between two values.

  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: We will now send the new idea of "credits in the Commander's wallet"
  when the delta from the last sent value is either 5% or at least
  10 million. It used to require a strict 5% difference, which meant needing
  very large deltas if you had a large credit balance.

  The intention of the 5% is so that newer/poorer commanders still get
  updates at an acceptable frequency, with the 10 million alternative trigger
  allowing richer commanders to also experience more frequent updates than
  was previously the case.

  Close #1255.

• 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: 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.

Plugin Developers

• 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.

• We will now include in the Windows installer all of the files that py2exe
  places in the build directory. We still do not yet include all of the
  Python 'stdlib', so open an issue on GitHub if something you need is
  missing.

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This discussion was created from the release Pre-Release 5.3.0-beta7.

[Athanasius]

See also: #1440 and #1448 - Use -beta10 rather than this version.