Have you ever seen and Exo then someone posts they have scanned the planet? Do you know what the means and why they do it? Ever wonder if it’s something you could do or have interest in, well I plan to detail it out a bit here, even though it has been posted a few times.
The great @Angellus has created what he calls the Boundless Proxy UI you can read all about it and download it from his post here - Boundless Proxy UI
A quick TLDR: This tool basically scans the planets for us so that it updates the colors on the Boundless Information Station.
Lastly, in order for the Boundless Forums to update, you need an image of the actual world from the game. In order to do this, you need to take a screenshot of the planet from the Sanctum in Boundless and then crop the planet using an image editor such as: Photoshop or use an online tool such as Crop a circle in image online - free tool
Choose the image you created and cropped earlier and Save it and you are done.
All that said… if you have questions there are quite a few people more knowledgeable than I when it comes to scanning, but I feel the more people doing it the better information we have so I wanted to share.
You should not have Boundless open when you run the Proxy UI, if you do it will shut down Boundless anyways.
If you have the scanner running and close it with Boundless open, it will again shutdown Boundless.
The Proxy makes changes to your Windows hosts file, some people do not like this and some of you won’t even know what this means. I just post it as I have had people ask about that.
At times I have had some portals not open for me (not often) when the Proxy is running. I usually just have to shut down Boundless, close the Proxy and then relaunch Boundless.
I have at times not been able to log into Boundless after using the Proxy UI. It is pretty rare, and I may have had it happen 3-4 times, but it can happen. It is usually due to the changing of the Windows hosts file and it not reverting those changes for whatever reason. (Proxy not shut down properly, etc.)
You should add info on actually to a guide for how to actually crop an image for a world and add it to the forum post.
Boundlexx is scans the forum post for an image to upload it and it is designed around the image being added by the same person that scans the Exo (that is how myself, Kass and Soju did it). If you do not add the image, it does not update the forum post or sent the follow up notification until the world has been out for at least 12 hours.
While we’re at the topic of scanning, is this the same tool used to scan shops? I’m not up to date on these but way back before, I think people manually visit shops to scan? I don’t know if the devs already provided an API that made the old way obsolete.
I believe shops automatically update when someone visits one and it takes a little bit of time to update. I am sure someone else can chime in if I’m incorrect.
Shop data is actually available directly from an API served from the game server itself. The API is rate limited, though, so both of the apps that use it have their own local cache of the data they pull from the game server. At that point, method and rate of caching is up to each app dev.
Ahh I see, yeah I’ve read something like that before and bits of info everywhere but can’t seem to put two and two together. Made me also confused when I read people refer to their shops as not being “scanned” yet. So the current shop system is fully automated with just some delay when updating. One thing to keep my mind off when I build a shop. Thanks!
I have been extremely busy with my color storage (I think I’ve said this hundreds of times) but every few weeks I was scanning nearly every sovereign I could. This includes me visiting every homeworld and staring at the sky and warping to every planet I did not find a portal for.
It is quite tedious and if we have more people scanning those that’s awesome.
I guess that explains why I go up there to scan and it doesn’t update? Because of my poor vision, the very last part of the scanning screen that shows it as having been scanned is cut off so I don’t get any obvious confimation.
If there is an image but no scan, can I delete the image and reupload it to have it trigger the scan?
It is not perfect. There are times where I have uploaded the image and have to manually update it. If you run into that issue just DM me and I can explain it or.manually do it. It’s a little tedious.
