Elite Dangerous VoiceAttack Profiles

These are various profiles for VoiceAttack (VA) I use to enhance my Elite experience. They give me important info, facilitate day-to-day gaming and do some special things for Fuel Rats and Hull Seals work.

Each of the profiles is documented in docs/.

Available Profiles

• EliteDangerous: My main Elite VA profile. Here be dragons; things may be heavily tailored towards how I play the game and may not apply to how you play it. Included for reference and as a baseline or inspiration to create your own stuff.
• RatAttack: profile for interactions with the Fuel Rats’ IRC server.
• SpanshAttack: profile to plot and follow trips along the neutron highway using spansh.
• StreamAttack: profile for writing various things to files that can then be read by streaming software like OBS.

Requirements

• VoiceAttack: absolutely required (duh).
• bindED: required for EliteDangerous and SpanshAttack; makes anything involving hitting E:D key binds portable. You can also use my updated fork of that; read the README over there for more information.
• EDDI installed as a VoiceAttack plugin: required for EliteDangerous, SpanshAttack and Streamattack, optional for RatAttack.
• ED-NeutronRouter: required for SpanshAttack. Make sure to grab the pre-release 1.02 since 1.01 has a bug with a hardcoded 50 ly jump range.
• elite-scripts: required for EliteDangerous, SpanshAttack and StreamAttack, recommended for RatAttack (included).

Additionally, you need to have keyboard binds setup at least as secondary bindings in Elite’s controls options. VA cannot “push” joystick buttons for you, it can only do keyboard inputs. Hence its only way to interact with Elite is through keyboard emulation, even if you otherwise play the game with a controller or HOTAS. Or racing wheel. Or Rock Band set. Or bananas.

Installing

1. Install VoiceAttack.
2. Install the plugins listed in Requirements.
3. Download the profile package (alterNERDtive-voiceattack-profiles.vax) from the release page and import it as a profile into VoiceAttack. This will install all included profiles, the referenced sound files and the Python scripts.

(You can also download the profiles individually from the profiles/ folder on github.)

Getting Started

You will want to create your own profile and then import the downloaded ones into your custom profile. This way you can easily add commands (to your custom profile), change commands (by copying them into your custom profile and editing them) and change settings (by overriding them in your custom profile). Note that most settings can be changed with voice commands. If you find any that cannot but you feel should, please file an issue or report it on Discord.

Creating a Custom Profile

Hit the second button next to the profile dropdown menu and choose “Create new Profile”. Give it a name and add some commands if you want to.

You can also just keep using a profile you have already created.

Importing profiles

First off, create a startup command. You can name it anything you want, but I recommend calling it “startup” or similar, and to deactivate the “when i say” checkbox in the command options to make sure you don’t accidentally run it via voice. We will need this command later.

While editing the profile, hit the “Options” button. On the section labeled “Include commands from other profiles”, hit the “…” button and add all profiles (EliteDangerous, RatAttack, SpanshAttack, StreamAttack). All commands defined in these profiles will be available to you. Make sure that “EliteDangerous” is on top of the list.

Now switch to the “Profile Exec” tab. Tick the “Execute a command each time this profile is loaded” checkbox, and select the “startup” command you have created earlier.

Edit your startup command. Add a new action using “Other” → “VoiceAttack Action” → “Execute Another Command”. Choose “Execute by name (Advanced)” and enter “EliteDangerous.startup”.

Settings

All profiles will load sane defaults if you haven’t changed anything. You no longer need to fiddle with the startup commands of each profile, instead you can use voice commands to change settings! See the docs/ and the _configuration commands section of each profile.

Basically all the settings are available using the customize settings prefix, then saying [enable;disable] <setting> for on/off switches and set <setting> for text variables.

One caveat applies: settings will only be saved in the profile you have selected, but be preserved if you switch around.

Making changes

If you want to edit a command or add your own, do not edit the profiles directly. Instead create commands in your custom profile, and copy commands you want to change over to that before editing them. This will make sure no changes are lost if you update the profiles.

Because of limitations of VoiceAttack itself, only the first matching command found will be executed, including EDDI events. That means that if you create commands to handle EDDI events, you are going to have to check the imported profiles if they rely on these event handlers as well, and call them manually if they do.

E.g. if you want to create a custom ((EDDI Message sent)) handler in your profile, you will have to make it excute the EliteDangerous.EDDI Message sent and RatAttack.EDDI Message sent commands. Otherwise stuff will break.

If you have no idea what the previous two paragraphs were about, you can most likely just ignore them.

Updating

The Best™ Way

Say “check for profiles update”. If it finds one, say “download profiles update”. Restart VoiceAttack.

There will also be an update check every time EliteDangerous.startup is run.

Note: This is temporarily disabled because version 4.0 will introduce breaking changes that need manual upgrade steps.

The Manual Way

If you don’t like automation or do not use all provided profiles, you’ll have to update semi-manually.

Say “open VoiceAttack import folder”. Download the current release profile package, drop it in there. Restart VoiceAttack.

Note about Admin Privileges

The update process will run VoiceAttack with admin privileges. If you do not usually run VoiceAttack with admin privileges, do not have it start VoiceAttack for you after importing the profiles update. It will keep running with elevated privileges. Instead restart it manually. If you are not sure if you are running with elevated privileges check the “VoiceAttack Information” dialog in VoiceAttack General settings → “System Info >”. It will include a line about running with admin prvileges if it does.

Major Version Changes

If a profile’s major version number changes (e.g. SpanshAttack 1.x.x to 2.0.0) there will be changes to the profile that include one or any amount of the following changes:

• command names / command invocation have changed
• configuration variable name or format have changed
• features removed
• major features added

If you see a major version number change in the release notes, please pay attention to said notes to know what you might have to change to get it to work!

Need Help / Want to Contribute?

If you run into any errors, please try running the profile in question on its own / get a fresh version. If that doesn’t fix the error, look at the devel branch and see if it’s fixed there already.

If you have no idea what I was saying in that last parargraph and / or the things mentioned there don’t fix your problem, please file an issue. Thanks! :)

You can also say “Hi” on Discord if that is your thing.