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Today we had the mighty round table about the API topic. Compared to the last fanfest in 2009 I can say: THANK YOU. This year we had 5 3rd party related sessions and round tables. A whole bunch of CCP Developer are actually working around and with the API or thinking outside the box and the 3rd party development future.
Here are a few topics that I really wanna mention.
1) Developer Program / Monetization
CCP announced a developer program for 99$ per year, so 3rd party developer are legally allowed to gain revenue out of their work. That means: You can now sell your application or your premium service for real money. But there are more ways to gain revenue: Advertising and donations is money as well. Even ingame money is technically real money, cause you can buy it with real money. This is a real problem and really needs some proper definition, cause otherwise every alliance or guide/info page which funds their infrastructure through player donations and advertising would be illegal (if you don’t pay the additional 99$/year). Until CCP releases the proper license description and information what you’re allowed to and what not, we can only spin our head around it.
2) Devs are actually using the API them self
CCP Atlas started a small tech demo on what’s possible to create with the combination of ingame browser and the Eve API. He wanted to create an enhanced asset viewer for the ingame browser and some other stuff. In that progress he actually came a cross a lot of missing IGB Javascript hooks and various API problems. It’s nice to see that CCP Devs actually using the API them self and finding bugs and adding features cause they see a need them self. CCP Atlas’s project will be available for download as well.
CCP Atlas: I can do better than that.
3) More Sessions / Round tables / Devs
As already mentioned: the number of roundtable and learning sessions has increased. You could actually see CCP Developer (old and new faces) having interest in the 3rd party dev community, their projects and needs. Compared to 2009 we had just people that took notes and no dev was felling responsible for it. Nowadays you’ve at least 2 people assigned to the API: CCP PrismX (DB Developer), CCP Stillman (QA) and more people that sound like having an interesting the community and their work.
4) Waiting for soon ™
Of course: A lot of issues and feature requests have been made and put into a long long waiting queue aka backlog. But for the moment we’ve to wait until CCP got the new customizable API Key system ready. While doing the last changes (memcache, etc) on the API itself, CCP came a cross various problems with the API in general and couple database performing issues, leading to the blockage of the CharacterName API. Before adding new features to the API they wanna fix the old stuff first, making everything more stable and create the new api key system. After that we can defiantly see more stuff coming in the future.
Conclusion
It really feels that there’s actually some movement going on in CCP in reanimating the forgotten API System and their users. We had a couple API Changes in the last weeks/month. Together with the discussion rounds and sessions I’m really looking forward to see actual changes, improvements and new data.
What and how this will affect DOTLAN EveMaps currently is unsure (money stuff), but for the rest: I really can’t wait to see new data coming out of the API, being presented and tracked on my page.
