v1.2.4 - Count++

Three, count them, three bugfix releases since 1.2.0!

Some small issues were identified with 1.2.3, so we're up to four!

Simple audio chimes are now available for notifications as well, for those who wanted some kind of audio alert, but didn't care to have them spoken.

This update also includes a refactor of the plugin settings window. It should now be somewhat more compact and behave better on differently sized displays.

• Added "Chime" option for audio notifications
• Major refactor of plugin settings window
• Fix an issue where numeric plugin settings could cause an error if they specified a minimum value above 0 (fredjk)
• Added DirectoryInfo as a valid datatype for plugin settings
• Corrected behaviour for internally focusing a plugin while popped out (fredjk)
• Restore missing "Plugin Folder" button
• Corrected handling of application audio to not mess with windows mixer
• Update behaviour when installing plugin from double-click of .eop file to automatically restart Observatory
• Expanded framework notifier interface to include necessary information for persisted notifications
• (1.2.4) Fix an issue in Botanist where re-played journals without accompanying Status file data could cause errors
• (1.2.4) Relax "on screen" requirement when restoring plugin popout locations to be in line with those of the main window

v1.2.2 - Sizing It Up

A quick bug fix for two small issues which most people may never notice, but are critically debilitating if you're affected by them.

• Fixes sizing issue on some lower resolution displays
• Restores functionality to change journal path by double-clicking journal folder location

v1.2.1 - For All

This is the public release of v1.2.0 and also fixes several bugs which were identified with that version.

Enjoy!

v1.2.0 Release Notes

Version 1.2.0 is a significant UI refactor based on post 1.0 feedback and a number of long standing requests. The "Core" tab has been completely reworked to present the plugin list in a more useful fashion, and each has its own menu button for common functionality rather than the unintuitive need to select items before hitting the buttons below. Core application settings have also moved out into their own window to reduce core tab clutter.

IMPORTANT: This update breaks compatibility with many plugins. It will be necessary to update them before they will work correctly.

Also, of particular note is native support for popping plugin tabs out into separate windows, which is a request that goes almost as far back as the initial release of Observatory Core.

Finally, this update unfortunately removes the Observatory Herald plugin from the installation bundle. A recent increase in popularity of both Observatory and Elite Dangerous in particular led to a significant increase in costs for the Azure-provided voices and it was no longer sustainable to cover those costs myself. In lieu of Herald voices a long standing issue where native voice notifications do not show all installed Windows voices has been fixed. Herald will likely return in the future as a Patreon backer perk.

• Refactored "Core" tab
  • New plugin list
  • Plugins which fail to load will now still be listed with a status of "Error"
  • Plugin-specific actions have been moved from separate buttons to a menu button on the plugin list
  • Application settings are now found through the "Core Settings" button instead of displayed at all times
  • Basic monitoring stats added to the bottom of the tab
• Implemented plugin "popout" feature
• Added right-click context menu to plugin tabs with "popout", "settings", and "open data folder" options
• Botanist now displays distance from previous biological samples on its overlay popup
• Explorer custom criteria expanded with new annotations for handling more events, for details see the custom criteria documentation
• Expand native voice selection
• Fix issue where having no audio devices could cause a crash on startup
• Fix issue where starting minimised would cause errors (/nomin startup option no longer required for min-ed-launcher users)
• Added list of patreon supporters to "about" info
• No longer check or enforce plugin signing

v1.2.1 Bug Fixes

• Fixes scaling issues in several places when display scaling was not set to 100%
• Correctly saves and restores if plugins have been disabled
• Added warning when enabling an out of date plugin
• Fix issue where the panel content left behind when a plugin was popped out would not resize with the application window
• Prevent single plugins with both "worker" and "notifier" interfaces from being listed twice
• Save locations of popout windows when they are closed and re-opened
• Ignore and proceed in odd edge case where the crash log could not be written to prevent actual error from being masked by crash log write failure
• Add a placeholder "no devices present" entry for the audio dropdown when no audio devices are present at all
• Stop processing of new "Jump", "Discovery", "BodySignals", and "AllBodies" custom journal processing when custom criteria are disabled
• Correct issue where plugins could no longer correctly set plugin focus when target plugin was popped out

Non-Blocking Error

Another quick fix for an issue where the new non-fatal error message box could block the thread which triggered it, causing execution to stall until its responded to.

• Make non-fatal error message non-blocking

Quick Ascendancy Bugfix

Quick fix for crashes while in the bubble for players pledged to powers, plus some error handling improvements in general. More likely coming soon as the full scope of changes to the journal for Ascendancy are implemented.

• Handles legal status Allied in status.json
• More graceful handling of errors while reading journals in general, will now attempt to fall back to JournalBase before failing.
• Error logging improvements

Minor Botanist Fix

Fixes a minor issue in Botanist where the UI would not update after scanning a body.

Make it Pop!

You can find a WINE-friendly build for use in linux on the experimental build page.

Some more functionality for pop-up notifications in this one, with options for independent scaling of the text, and disabling the transparency effect. This latter option can improve the readability of the text in some situations, and may also serve as a workaround for some visual issues that had been reported with the popup notification.

In addition there is now a /nomin command line argument which will prevent Observatory from starting minimized. This too is a workaround for some strange behaviour that was discovered when launching Observatory via min-ed-launcher. For those of you using that you can update the Observatory entry in your ed-min-launcher settings.json file and add "arguments": "/nomin" to the Observatory entry in the processes array. E.g.:

"processes": 
  [
    {
      "fileName": "C:\\Program Files\\Elite Observatory\\ObservatoryCore.exe",
      "arguments": "/nomin"
    }
  ]

---

• Add /nomin launch option
• Send notification from explorer individually when multiple criteria trigger on a single body
• Potential minor performance improvement to grouped item handling
• New setting for popup notification font scale
• New setting for popup notification transparency

v1.1.0 - Centered and Signed

One minor new feature in this one, hence the bump to 1.1.0 instead of 1.0.5. Native popup notifications now have centered location options available.

Of important note in this release is that signature checked has had a fix which should now allow it to work at all, so users with additional plugins will see one time warnings about signature validation. You can choose to accept this and you will not see the warning again for that plugin, or preferably for any plugins by that author if the author is signing their plugins.

For plugin authors there is an update to Framework which adds a ThemeChanged method to the plugin interface, allowing your plugins to immediately handle changes to the application theme.

• Popup notifications now have cenetered location options
• Settings should now persist across updates for the portable build
• Added ThemeChanged method to IObservatoryPlugin
• Fix issue where journal files with duplicate timestamp parts could cause application errors
• Fix issue where sufficiently large on foot combat bond totals was not properly handled
• Corrected behaviour when a plugin has overridden native notifications and another plugin specifies native notification only
• Fix signature checks

v1.0.4 - About Bugfixes

Another small bugfix, and a minor new feature where plugins and the core application can now open an "about" box with details about themselves.

• New "About" boxes for core and plugins
• Fall back to first audio device when saved audio device selection missing or invalid
• Fix settings loading issue in portable version

v1.0.3 - Bugfix 3

Another small set of bugfixes for Observatory Core 1.0.

• Handle case when Windows default audio device doesn't present through NAudio as device index -1.
  • Also rename "Microsoft Sound Mapper" device to "Default Audio Device" to improve clarity
• Improve settings loading failure UX by falling back to a sensible default for several issue-prone settings, should prevent seeing this error repeatedly after restarting application
• Rudimentary handling for display scaling in plugin settings window
  • Hoping to improve the appearance of this window further for all users, it's currently pretty awkward

Note: The portable bundle in this release has been refreshed with a minor post-release bugfix:

• Fix handling when loading StringCollection values from the portable config file.