Got sick of taking screenshots and then alt-tabbing like a madman then pen, paper and a calculator working out best margins on trade commodities.
So I looked around for 3rd party tools - found the online ones, but felt that was cheating the game somewhat. Plus some very simple tests showed that the data in the tools was not reliable. I had my own data, but using it was a chore!
So I started writing a simple OCR program to make CSV files from my screenshots folder using Google Tesseract.
Got quite far writing what I wanted but, then realised EliteOCR already had done exactly that. Grabbed EliteOCR, made some local CSV files of my screenshots folder and wanted something to then do the heavy lifting for me.
Every windows PC has Powershell built-in, so I used that.
Wrote a simple Powershell script that :
- Reads your own local CSV files (as generated by the awesome EliteOCR)
- Shows you a list of stations asks you to pick a source and destination
- Works out the margins of all items that are possible to trade between the stations
- Soon as I drop new CSV station data in to the source folder, it picks it up
- Shows you in plain English where the profit is