DOTLAN EveMaps

With the public available, not official (sql) data about wormholes I updated my pages. The region listing and the system details will now list their anomalies and the corresponding effects (like bonus to remote repair, armor, damage, etc). I hope I interpreted the data correctly, otherwise let me know and I’ll fix it.

• Region Listing
• System Details with anomaly/effects

Additionally I added an overview for the wormhole classes including their time and mass restrictions.

• Wormhole Listing

Some weeks ago I already reported problems with sovereignty calculation. Yesterday during the deployment CCP did the same failure again. CCP calculated which system gained sov (0 -> 1) and which system lost sov (3 -> 0 or 3 -> 1) but they forgot to check which system should get a sovereignty upgrade (1 -> 2 or 2 -> 3).

In my database I counted 30 systems which had their sovereignty level (1 or 2) for 13 days and yesterday (day 14) they should get their upgrade which sadly didn’t happened. Which means all sovereignty upgrades in the next upcoming 14 days will get delayed for 1 day. (Example: if you expect sov 3 on Thursday, don’t wonder when you’ll get sov 3 one day later (Friday)).

In the Apocrypha 1.3 Issues Thread I (and in the bug reporting tool) I reported this Issue including the list of 30 systems which they forgot to upgrade. Let’s see if CCP is reading it. It really seems that they’ve some errors in their maintenance scripts for the extended downtime or failures in the procedures which needs to be done during it.

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Site Navigation Update

One week ago I did a few minor upgrades to the site navigation because the top navigation got overbloated with the new navigation feature. To make it short.

The following menu entries has been merged:

• Maps + Regions => Universe
• Corporation (Changes) + NPC Corporations => Corporations

You’ll find them now in the sub navigation once you entered this part. Additionally I changed the navigation point. You’ll directly start with the Jump Planner (which is more used) instead of the Route Planner.

New Combined Map

Due to a request and a donation (thanks :-)) from Tomcat (W.I.) I created a new combined map for the 2 regions: Vale of the Silent and Geminate. Have fun using it. I also added a combined region map for Etherium Reach and Insmother I created some weeks ago.

Etherium Reach, Insmother
Geminate, Vale of the Silent

Jump Bridge Maps

What about Jump Bridge Routes on those combined and the common region maps. Sure you can add them with a custom made URL. The syntax would be:

https://evemaps.dotlan.net/special/Vale-Geminate.pdf?path=<jumppath>
https://evemaps.dotlan.net/pdf/Catch.pdf?path=<jumppath>

The path variable is using the same syntax of the route planer sys1:sys2::sys3::sys4 (: = Gate2Gate, :: = Jump To). Multiple jump bridge chains  can be separated by , (Comma)

A full jump bridge map link would look like this:

https://evemaps.dotlan.net/special/Vale-Geminate.pdf?path=P3EN-E::0MV-4W::TVN-FM::T-ZWA1,Q-L07F::Y0-BVN::ZLZ-1Z::JZV-F4,EOA-ZC::39-DGG::K25-XD::P-E9GN
(That’s just an example and doesn’t reflect the current situation)

Fly safe

Some of you might already have seen the new menu point in the top navigation panel. If not – now is the best time to check out the new features. After about 2 weeks of many headaches about routing and path finding algorithms (A*) and browser issues (f**k IE),  I’m happy to be able to announce the new section on my evemaps page: Navigation.

This includes a jump planner for capital ships journeys including fuel consumption, a jump range tool to see what systems are in range (incl jump bridges) and last but not least a routing planner for gate to gate navigation. The routing planner has the ability to including possible jump bridg jumps and a calculation for the liquid ozone consumption. To able to visualize the jump and gate routes I also included a new map that will reflect the real New Eden layout additionally the routes are integrated into the already known maps.

Feel free to test it, break it and please give me feedback if everything is working as intended or if something is broken. Many thanks to all who I talked to while getting headaches and those who already tested it.

Here are some screenshots. Enjoy

Quote from the Eve-Online Evelopedia

Sovereignty 2: Requirement : Territory level (1) Sovereignty undisrupted for fourteen days.
Sovereignty 3: Requirement : Protectorate level (2) Sovereignty undisrupted for fourteen days.

As we usually know and expect, it always takes 14 days to upgrade the system from sovereignty level 1 to 2 and 14 days as well to finally reach level 3. But under unknown circumstances it seems CCP may has problems doing their calculation right. It looks like 14 days in real life aren’t always 14 days in New Eden. Even if we nearly using the same calendar.

I’m storing the sovereignty history of each system in my database. When I started to do some sovereignty calculations, I found some  irregularities which were really strange. It looked like that sometimes a systems holds sov 1 for 13 days and ticks over to sov 2  in the next downtime (which is the normal case) and sometimes after 14 days  (plus the next downtime).

After some short queries 🙂 I found those funny sovereignty entries in my history table.

+--------+---------------------+---+------------+------------+----+----+------------+
| System | Alliance            |Sov| Start      | End        |Days|Next| Next Start |
+--------+---------------------+---+------------+------------+----+----+------------+
| L-M6JK | C0VEN               | 2 | 2009-05-12 | 2009-05-26 | 14 |  3 | 2009-05-27 |
| 2-WNTD | Legion of xXDEATHXx | 1 | 2009-05-12 | 2009-05-26 | 14 |  2 | 2009-05-27 |
| C5-SUU | Sc0rched Earth      | 1 | 2009-05-12 | 2009-05-26 | 14 |  2 | 2009-05-27 |
| 3-3EZB | Red Alliance        | 2 | 2009-05-12 | 2009-05-26 | 14 |  3 | 2009-05-27 |
| M-XUZZ | Red Alliance        | 2 | 2009-05-12 | 2009-05-26 | 14 |  3 | 2009-05-27 |
| I0N-BM | Shadow of xXDEATHXx | 2 | 2009-05-13 | 2009-05-26 | 13 |  3 | 2009-05-27 |
| 9D6O-M | Sons of Tangra      | 2 | 2009-05-13 | 2009-05-26 | 13 |  3 | 2009-05-27 |
| ZA9-PY | T o r m e n t u m   | 1 | 2009-05-13 | 2009-05-26 | 13 |  2 | 2009-05-27 |
| BB-EKF | Atlas Alliance      | 1 | 2009-05-13 | 2009-05-26 | 13 |  2 | 2009-05-27 |
| DZ6-I5 | AAA Citizens        | 1 | 2009-05-13 | 2009-05-26 | 13 |  2 | 2009-05-27 |
+--------+---------------------+---+------------+------------+----+----+------------+

As you can see, we’ve systems that got their sovereignty upgrade both on the 26 May 2009 but got the previous sov level on the 12th and 13th. Didn’t we had a patch day somewhere in that area. It really looks like that CCP has some problems calculating their sovereignty during extended downtimes, but that’s only an expectation.

This might not be a problem for people who’re upgrading from sov 1 to sov 2, but alliances who’re doing their calculation right and waiting to login after downtime for onlineing in their cyno generators might have problems with this.

Additionally: on the 26th May 2009 CCP didn’t had a single sovereignty upgrade (expect one sov 4 upgrade) as well as yesterday, the 1st June 2009.

I’m still working on the intel manager and improving it with a few testing alliances. In the conflict between IRC/ED and RA they started a tower spamming in one of our station systems (IRC) while they’re still fighting in ED‘s home constellation. After this tower spamming, RA was holding the tower majority with all moons taken in RK-Q51.

Due to strategy plannings and personal interests, I wanted to know the exact day when the Sovereignty could flip. With multiple towers, placed in multiple timezones and combined with towers placed before and after downtime, it’s getting interesting to do the calculations in an excel spreadsheet. To do this with 15 moons seems to be pretty easy in the beginning, but thinking about systems with more then 50 or moons sounds just like heavy work.

Here comes the intel manager into play. As we already used it to track hostile posses and timers, it was an easy task to take this infomration base and develop a module to take those posses and the online timers into the calculation to get a forecast system.

Here are 2 screenshots how this module looks like:

After having a bug report open for 8 month in CCP’s bug tracking system without getting updates about the progress I’ll try to sum up the problems and give my readers some information about my problems with updates, sovereignty API and background work.

The Problem: Outdated exports:

I usually start 2 hours after downtime to load sovereignty and alliance information. I found out that it’s pretty common that CCP don’t flush their API caches during downtime and even up to 4 hours after the official downtime, their servers are still delivering outdated sov data from the day before. With a CachedUntil Timer for 6 hours for the sov data, this server/ip isn’t allowed to query anymore. To fix this issue I’m happy that to be able to use several IP addresses to query the API Servers without running into a cached -until-loop. I’m starting with 14 GMT time and then retry each hour until midnight or I got a valid and udpated sov export from the new day.

The XML Files are looking something like this in such cases.

<currentTime>2009-03-02 14:00:12</currentTime>
<dataTime>2009-03-02 08:51:25</dataTime>
<cachedUntil>2009-03-02 20:00:12</cachedUntil>

That’s the reason why it sometimes took hours until my websites gets updated.  This bug was reported 8 month ago, it’s  attached to a known defect, which is still open.

The latest issue: Wrong data exports

After my scripts are doing several requests, spreaded over several ips (the api caches are per ip-only) I could lean back and start ignoring CCP’s lazyness to fix this problems. But yesterday I CCP was delivering false data. At 14 o’clock I got a valid sovereignty export with a DataTime stamp as well 14 o’clock. Sounds good? Of course … but the main issue was that this data which was tagged as updated after downtime were the unchanged sovereignty situation from the day before.

This caused my database to update the history table and ends with no sovereignty changes for day 27.05.2009. A manual sov import some hours later ended in really strange results and forced me to load a sql backup from the day before and reimport the current sovereignty export.

<currentTime>2009-05-27 14:00:09</currentTime>
<dataTime>2009-05-27 14:00:09</dataTime>
<cachedUntil>2009-05-27 20:00:09</cachedUntil>

Dear CCP

Please fix your API Servers. Restart/Reload the API Servers or just flush the caches during or after downtime will do the job and everybody who’s using sovereignty data will be happy. It’s one simple cronjob … oh I forgot you’re using windows, but there’s  a task/schedule planer too :-))

No i’m not dead. I’m just really busy currently in real life. I didn’t had the time to work on bigger updates or even had the mood to write blog postings. But I think, it’s time to write about a few stats about what I’m really happy and the small things I’ve done in the last days.

The traffic and visitor counts are growing and growing every month currently. Sometimes because of new features (like the Flash Maps for IE users), javascript additions and sometimes just new visitors 🙂 Here are the raw numbers.

With all the new features, javascript additions here and there I know I had to work on. That’s where i started to optimize stuff. Merging multiple javascript files, removing white-space from js  and css files to reduce their filesize, setting explicit expire timers and max-age cache control headers with mod_expire static images, css and javascript files. The result with tuning those parameters was great. But can only be measured on a long term basis.

The POS Intel Manager is already heavly used by my current Alliance aswell as some other test users. But I need to find some time to go on with programming, tuning, etc.

I’m still thinking about stuff that can easily be added and or modified on the maps. Does anyone has a list of static plexes (with name and description/ded level if possible), cosmos systems and perhab agents in space that are worth to be added? Those are not included in the real static database export from ccp.

I just finished the database update for the current Eve-Online expansion ‘Apocrypha’. Some agents have been updated, but the most important part is the integration of the wormhole region, constellation and systems.

You can search for the system name and you should be able to see some statistics (npcKills, Jumps, etc) as well as the celestials (planet and moons). You’ll also see the wormhole class in which you’re located. For more features I’m currently unsure what to do with the wormhole space because it’s too much changing data (new and collapsing wormholes, etc)

Fly safe

I’ve created a new combined map for the Catch, Impass and Tenerifis Regions which I would like to share with you.

Catch, Impass, Tenerifis

@AAA: I hope you can identify your space now and btw. nice dead-end systems in Impass. If you find this map usefull, I’m always happy about donations 🙂

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Did anybody tried out the Intel Manager? I still would like to get some feedback from my readers/testers.