A short™ survey

[Biggles]

For the past year or so I've been developing a desktop application which I hope will be a useful utility for players of Discovery (and possibly other Freelancer mods) named Wingman. The vast majority of this time has been spent on parsing the game files and other behind-the-scenes things, but now it's time to start thinking about exactly which front-end bells and whistles to add. It makes sense to ask the people it's actually aimed at, so here we are.

>>>> Click here to access the survey <<<<

The survey is intended to give me an understanding of the setups and use-cases of the community so I can target development more accurately, and should only take about a minute to complete. Wingman is due to be released in May this year, and will initially support Windows and Linux. Some of its more interesting features are:

1. An augmented chat, with access to the system clipboard and customisable abbreviations (useful for prepending character names to messages, for example), and a significant expansion to FLHook's commands, including things like /givecashtarget and /sector <object> (returning the navmap sector of the given object)
   
2. A navmap based off @Error's excellent Interactive Navmap, that follows your ship (switches to a system as you enter it), and is fully controllable from within the game using chat commands
   
3. An "account manager" which automatically keeps track of your accounts and characters, including information such as their name, system, credits, and the date they were last logged. It will also warn you when a character is approaching an inactivity wipe
   

Results of the survey will be made public for all to use whenever responses stop trickling in (April this year by the latest).

Thank you for your time.

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Aurora — Wingman — Forumlancer — ALG

[Durandal]

This is extremely ambitious but I do hope it goes somewhere, I hope you find my survey answers useful!

[Freeport7]

This sounds very cool!

[Biggles]

This is extremely ambitious but I do hope it goes somewhere, I hope you find my survey answers useful!

The most ambitious components have already been implemented (and work!) as part of the "behind-the-scenes things" referred to in the original post. The application uses a combination of reading from process memory, the registry, DSAce.log, launcheraccounts.xml and listening to and simulating keyboard input to "hook" into the game and provide its major functionality.

I should also mention that the application will be entirely open-source, since I seem to have forgotten to mention that in the original post.

Thank you everyone for your responses, the feedback has already been very interesting.

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Aurora — Wingman — Forumlancer — ALG

[Petitioner]

Submitted the form with lots of feature suggestions. Hopefully it's not too annoying/too ambitious I can't wait to see this program released.

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[Syrus]

Done.
Feedback given.

Good luck with your project!

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[Biggles]

As promised, attached are the results of the survey as of today, in the CSV format. As a disclaimer in the interests of transparency, responses spamming "remove core" and the like have been purged.

Attached Files

  Results.zip (Size: 4.48 KB / Downloads: 24)

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Aurora — Wingman — Forumlancer — ALG