BioScan 2.10.1

2.10.1 Hotfix

This is a 'hotfix' update to patch a bug in the number formatter when shortened number displays are not enabled.

This would cause BioScan to crash and not report any results.

I also added some additional number localization to a few other components that hadn't been properly localized.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Translation Support

2.10.0 brings translation support to BioScan, using the same translation schema as core EDMC. Currently Spanish, French, and German are supported. Submissions welcome. (German translations likely have issues, sorry.)

Special thanks to Malt Drinker for help with the French translations.

7/4/2025 - Russian translations added as additional download. Thanks to Иван Сусанин. Put the 'ru.strings' file in the L10n directory inside the plugin files.

Overlay Radar

There is now an optional radar display for the overlay. This draws a radar that contains active scan locations and any waypoints set for the current planet. You can configure the center point and size (radius) in the settings, as well as the maximum distance value. (Scans and waypoints exceeding this distance still draw at the edge of the radar.) There are linear and logarithmic scaling options.

The radar orients itself to your current facing direction. That is, the front of your ship, SRV, or helmet. You can also optionally display your ship location. Note that this requires certain events to pick up. If you start EDMC already landed, leaving or entering your ship should set the ship location.

With no active scan, all waypoints will display in white with the genus indicated by three letters (e.g.. Bacterium = BAC). Once you start a scan, other waypoints will dim to gray while the relevant waypoints will highlight green. The minimum sample distance will show on the radar in orange (assuming the radar distance is large enough) as well as any existing scan locations. Just like the heading display of yore, waypoints that are too near a scan location will be pruned. Completed species will no longer display.

Other Changes & Fixes

• Added status flags introduced by ED 4.1.0.2 to avoid crashes in the Status.json parser
• Added option to shorten number displays. (e.g. 19,010,800 becomes 19.01m)
• Added line spacing configuration for overlay text displays
• Add planetary nebula "Shrogeau QO-R e4-711" to the list
• Add major silicate vapor volcanism to blatteum sinuous tuber criteria
• Add major rocky volcanism to viride sinuous tubers criteria
• Fixes for initialization if cmdr or ship name not present

NOTE

edmcoverlay2 (with the X11 renderer) lacks proper support for vector markers, which are used heavily by the radar. Use the attached patched version to correct this issue. (You don't need this if you use Windows.) And you'll need to follow the install instructions from that repo.

BioScan 2.10.0

Translation Support

2.10.0 brings translation support to BioScan, using the same translation schema as core EDMC. Currently Spanish, French, and German are supported. Submissions welcome. (German translations likely have issues, sorry.)

Overlay Radar

There is now an optional radar display for the overlay. This draws a radar that contains active scan locations and any waypoints set for the current planet. You can configure the center point and size (radius) in the settings, as well as the maximum distance value. (Scans and waypoints exceeding this distance still draw at the edge of the radar.) There are liner and logarithmic scaling options.

The radar orients itself to your current facing direction. That is, the front of your ship, SRV, or helmet. You can also optionally display your ship location. Note that this requires certain events to pick up. If you start EDMC already landed, leaving or entering your ship should set the ship location.

With no active scan, all waypoints will display in white with the genus indicated by two letters (e.g.. Bacterium = BAC). Once you start a scan, other waypoints will dim to gray while the relevant waypoints will highlight green. The minimum sample distance will show on the radar in orange (assuming the radar distance is large enough) as well as any existing scan locations. Just like the heading display of yore, waypoints that are too near a scan location will be pruned. Completed species will no longer display.

Other Changes & Fixes

• Added option to shorten number displays. (e.g. 19,010,800 becomes 19.01m)
• Added line spacing configuration for overlay text displays
• Add planetary nebula "Shrogeau QO-R e4-711" to the list
• Add major silicate vapor volcanism to blatteum sinuous tuber criteria
• Add major rocky volcanism to viride sinuous tubers criteria
• Fixes for initialization if cmdr or ship name not present

NOTE

edmcoverlay2 (with the X11 renderer) lacks proper support for vector markers, which are used heavily by the radar. Use the attached patched version to correct this issue. (You don't need this if you use Windows.) And you'll need to follow the install instructions from that repo.

Shoutout to CMDR Fizzief for writing a tool that helped identify several outliers leading to many of these criteria updates.

This release includes many criteria updates that should refine many predictions particularly at the extremes of viable conditions. I will highlight the major changes below.

This release also contains a few QOL improvements that were requested on Discord and elsewhere.

QOL Updates

• Allow users to configure the scrollbox height, in case they have more screen real estate to work with
• Fixed a bug causing some startup display issues due to a bad initial value
• Improved handling of ships in the ship whitelist
  • Uses the internal ship ID
  • Able to update ship names when changed
  • Ships are removed if lost or sold
  • Unnamed ships handled properly
• Fixes for scan state handling across restarts
• Add option to shorten credit values, like Pioneer (eg. 19.8 MCr)

Criteria highlights

Many changes were small adjustments in criteria ranges, but a few more significant fixes include:

• Clypeus - Lime was assigned incorrectly to Wolf-Rayet stars when it should have been white dwarf stars
• Additional missing nebulae were added to the nebula checks and the large nebula range was increased to 150 ly
  • Missing nebulae include: Blau Aescs OO-H d10-109, Lyaisoo XL-D c28-163, Prue Dryoo HN-S e4-0, Cepheus Dark Region B, and Coalsack
  • An additional new planetary nebula was discovered but lacks coordinates: Shrogeau QO-R e4-711
• Anemone star checks were updated to remove extraneous types and check any star in the system
• Horizons bios generally have had their 'no atmosphere' requirements removed
• Bacterium informem may have volcanism on icy bodies, but not on other types
• Bacterium omentum can appear in nitrogen atmospheres
• The 'body with life' requirement was removed for Lividum and Aureum brain trees
• Frutexa metallicum can appear in methane atmospheres
• Fumerola nitris can appear in neon atmospheres
• Fungoida setisis volcanism requirements have been adjusted
• Fungoida stabitis can appear in argon (and argon-rich) atmospheres
• Fungoida gelata appear exclusively with major volcanism pertaining to the atmosphere type

EDSM Import Changes

The EDSM import was moved into ExploData. Additional hooks were added to appropriately update the interface when the import is complete. This data is shared with Pioneer. Rings / belts should also be included in the imported data.

Fixes & Improvements

• Fixed an issue with the 'current scan' variable causing waypoints to fail to display until at least one bio scan had been made
• Utilizing the lat/long coordinates from CodexEntry events which should provide more accurate waypoints; particularly when in flight
• Minor adjustments to number formatting, particularly to help overlay formatting on Linux machines
• Added coordinate checks to named nebulae as the region name checks were insufficient
• Removed atmospheric requirement from anemones; they do rarely appear on planets with atmosphere
• Journal parsing hooks were updated to refresh the data and interface when journal importing is complete. If you happen to be in a system that was included in the import, the displayed data should update appropriately.

Flatpak Release

BioScan will now include a Flatpak release for ExploData. This includes precompiled SQLAlchemy packages that should be compatible with the current EDMC release. Note that any changes to the Flatpak Python version may cause issues with the packaged libraries. (Though this is also true of the Windows version.)

This is a patch release to fix an issue where the database version check was only checking if ExploData was higher than BioScan.

It should now ensure that the DB versions are identical. Running an ExploData version that's incompatible with the current release will almost always result in unexpected behavior if not outright failure.

This is a relatively minor release with two fixes.

Black Holes

After inspecting a couple more complex black hole systems with bio signals, I was able to refine the black hole code to account for local stars and barycenters more accurately. This should allow for better predictions.

Focus Mode Display

The 'Never' setting for the focus mode caused the planetary detail / scan progress display never to show up. This has been corrected.

In addition, the code for these checks was consolidated and modified so that the 'On Surface' setting would also display the planetary detail / scan progress display whenever lat/long coordinates are available. (This is identical to the 'On Approach' setting.)

That means that the list will still only be filtered when on the surface of the planet but the progress/detail display will render when 'on approach'. I felt like displaying this info only when on the surface made it a bit useless if you ever had to take flight to reach a new sample / species.

The toggle of these displays will still match your defined altitude for 'near surface' as it just personally feels better that way.

ExploData 1.2.3

This release includes a small update to ExploData which improves the handling of JSON parsing errors when importing journals. This update is fully compatible with the latest Pioneer release, and the ExploData files have been updated in the latest release version.

This update brings parity with EDMC 5.11, updating deprecated methods. There are a few tweaks to black hole and nebula checks. Finally, there is an additional ship whitelist option for the overlay.

This may requiring updating EDMC if you haven't upgraded to 5.11+ yet.

Overlay Changes

Ship Whitelist

There is now a commander-segmented overlay setting to add ships to a whitelist. Only these ships will display the BioScan overlay. If the whitelist is empty, it is effectively disabled.

Additional Exclusions

When your ship is in 'normal space' and not in the vicinity of a planet (with lat/long coordinates), the overlay will be hidden.

Rules Tweaks

• Better detection of parent black holes for color determinations
• Expanded the search radius for large nebulae

This release includes a refactor of the settings code, some final updates for sinuous tubers, various small ruleset tweaks, and the addition of a minimum signal filter for the details.

Sinuous Tubers

• The Inner Scutum Centaurus Arm B zone actually consists of two overlapping shells
• Roseum tubers appear with rocky magma volcanism on HMCs
• Added '=' tag for volcanism criteria in order to match an exact volcanism string

Settings

• Refactored globals so they can be shared between classes / files
• Moved settings into new class file and separated sections into tabs
• There is now a general and overlay tab
• Added tooltip support and tooltips to some of the settings labels (?)
• A new setting will allow you to set a minimum signal count to display predictions (the details will still show if you approach a filtered body)

Criteria Updates

• Moved some named planetary nebulae so they would be included in bark mound checks
• Updated osseus pumice on argon rich atmospheres

This release includes various fixes and tweaks. It also brings support for DB 8 and parity with the latest Pioneer release. This update will require reimporting journals to have accurate scan level data for historic systems.

Fixes

• When overlay scrolling is triggered, the last line should no longer be cut off
• Formatting fix for extreme gravity flag

Requirement Updates

• Various sinuous tuber volcanism requirement changes based on found data
• Tweaks to minimum gravity for some fumerola nitris atmospheres
• Removed system body requirements for ostrinum brain trees

• Refined tuber zone for Empyrean Straits
• Add import fallback so both EDMCOverlay and edmcoverlay will work
• Simplified parts of the rule check code
• Added 'not' type for volcanism checks
• Require volcanism other than metallic magma for sinuous tubers other than Roseum
• Workaround for possible star check issue in systems with nonstandard star names