Neptune's Pride Agent v2

[Osric]

I’ve been enjoying adding a swath of new features to Neptune’s Pride Agent αλφα Edition and at last these seem ready enough to be promoted to the stable channel and are available as Neptune’s Pride Agent v2.1.0.

For version 2 of the extension, I asked for and received permission from Jay to release it as open source. Feedback and feature requests are welcome here or on github.

The HUD now displays territory for the owner of the currently selected star as a translucent haze in that player’s colour. This can be used to focus the correct star to get good Scan ETA readings from the HUD, or to find difficult to visualize paths into the enemy territory:

In messaging, writing [[Tick #n]] will now get translated into the receiving user’s preferred time format, where the choices can be cycled through using the % hotkey. You can see times in relative real time (the game’s default), absolute real time in your own timezone, relative ticks from now, or absolute tick times. This new time format is used by all the reporting so that you can view reports in the different time formats, and is used on the HUD, so that all times respond to the % hotkey throughout the UI.

Also in the map display, if you press w your colour will be changed to white so that it is easy to distinguish yourself from same-colour allies or enemies on the map.

Inside messaging, the autocomplete feature sometimes would not trigger if you typed [[0]] for example extremely fast. This bug is fixed, and [[] will now always autocomplete to the player you are referring to making it easier to avoid typos. In addition [[#0]] will expand only to player #0’s icon for cases where you want to send very dense information and don’t need the alias repeated.

Also inside messaging, links like [[https://i.imgur.com/qY3K26V.png]] will expand the image inline; imgur and ibb are supported.

NPA’s UI can now be invoked by pressing the backtick hotkey. This combines well with many other hotkeys which prepare reports, so you can press the two-key combination to jump to viewing the report instead of mailing it (you can still invoke the report and paste it to mail it, for all reports). A new accounting report is bound to the a hotkey to enable you to see if you owe other players money or tech and a new tech trading report is bound to the e hotkey so that you can review who has tech you might want.

API key support allows you to more easily look at and interact with your allies. Any key you have previously merged is now shown on the API key report, bound to k and on the tech trading screen your allies are shown in their own table to make it easier to ensure tech is shared throughout the alliance. In addition, the ( hotkey will merge everyone’s API keys at once for you. API key information is remembered across sessions so when you reload the page or refresh after a tick a single keystroke can recover your merged view of all the scan data.

Although not very well tested, the extension has updates in it for proteus to make the battle calculator correct for that game mode and enable the w hotkey to work even if users have chosen different shapes and colours.

A crude Controls report is available to expose all functionality bound to hotkeys as buttons that can be pressed on mobile devices that lack keyboards. In addition the buttons are displayed in the help screen and can be accessed from there.

Finally, the new version is supported on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In particular, you can install the firefox nightly build on Android and use that to install the extension on your Android phone, and you can use the userscripts open source extension on Safari to install the extension on iOS for iPhones or iPads.

Feedback is welcome!

Osric

[Osric]

Today I promoted αλφα Edition v2.1.6 to stable as v2.2.0. The main new features in v2.2.0 are live research progress, trading shortcuts and the auto ruler.

The new live research report looks like this:

and it uses the API keys of your allies to get live research data for each person and display their ETA, progress, science infra, and number of required upgrades to deliver sooner. You can mail this report, but if you do the science infra is assumed to be unchanged and so while the times will update they may get increasingly inaccurate depending on whether the empire is gaining or losing science; it’s still better than a static estimate.

Even if you don’t use API keys with your allies, if you generate your own key this is useful for sharing your own science progress with others. As with all the screens in NPA they are designed to be sendable as in-game messages so that you can view the screen for yourself, then go into a message and press the “Intel” button to paste your report for sharing with allies.

In the trading screen you can click on the numbers in the “Send all” line (circled below):

in order to get prompted and transmit all the tech that player is missing:

Similarly on any tech summary if you click on a green level discrepancy it will prompt you to send that tech, but in that case it sends only a single level of the type you clicked on. Red text represents money owing or required, and can be clicked on to send the amount listed. Again, this will show you a confirmation prompt before transmitting to the other empire.

The auto-ruler lets you quickly assess defence and attack opportunities. I find it especially helpful in turn based, where counter-intuitive cases like this come up:

Normally you’d think Alniyat could defend, but the auto ruler points out (by greying out the vector) that even though ships can move invisibly between those systems, your attack will appear too close to the destination for a defence to be possible (the carrier will first appear at the crossing arc on the red vector, only 7 ticks away from the destination). The same applies in real-time games but is much less frequent.

This release also contains some bug fixes, including performance enhancements, more accurate battle HUD reporting with fleet delay support, and fixes to put the submit buttons on the proper layer for turn based games.

For fun here’s a short youtube trailer you can share with people to promote NPA:

Neptune’s Pride Agent v2 2

Osric

[macewindu]

I just want to say that I think Neptune’s Pride Agent is fantastic and my use of it has made my decision making much more streamlined. I will say that for all the features it was tricky for me to understand everything that the extension does, (I’m using Agent Alpha). For instance I’m in a game with formal alliances and have generated my own API key to share my research ETA with my allies. That being said I don’t know how to view my allies API keys and while the help document is good it could be more fleshed out.

I’d love to help set up a wiki or some form of documentation that might be easier to understand for noobs.

[Osric]

Thanks for the offer of help documenting! More documentation is definitely the biggest missing feature. I was planning to put together a video series on how to use all the features, but a website or wiki could also be good!

For API keys, typing k and then backtick will bring up the list of keys, and clicking on the ‘merge’ links will merge their map data with your own. Once you’ve merged your allies’ keys once, on future reloads the ( hotkey will merge all keys you’ve merged in the past, so when you come back to the game you can just use that hotkey to merge everyone at once.

[macewindu]

Okay so here’s my confusion. I type k then backtick

Here’s my formal allies page:

How do I get my allies API keys to show up? Do I ask them for a message? Or do they need Neptunes pride agent for it to work?

[macewindu]

Hey, sorry I just found the answer somewhere else in the forum

“When you type [[api:APIKEY]] into a message it will convert it into a button that allows you (or other users of this extension in your message) to either see their scans or merge both scans.”

By the way I’d love to join the discord if you want to send a link! The discord link you have in this forum post is expired

[Osric]

Dang I really dislike how those links expire Neptune's Pride Agent

[Osric]

Apparently the fix is to make it a “community” server, so we now have a non-expiring invite link!

Join the Neptune's Pride Agent Discord Server!

[Num7]

I noticed that the agent’s W hotkey for switching between white mode and color mode, overlaps with the waypoint hotkey for fleets. They’re both W.

Is this something you could fix? Hope this helps.

Thanks. Love the agent!

[Osric]

Yes, this is a feature I could fix. I can’t decide if I like it or not, the idea being you can set your waypoints with white on and turn it off afterward.

The current workaround is as follows: w (lowercase) does both; W (uppercase) does only the in-game waypoint feature.

Thanks for the bug report!