DOTLAN EveMaps

This is a short service announcement: 2 days ago I updated the eve database to reflect the changed jump fuel consumption numbers that came with the latest Eve Online expension Crius. But I forgot to change to change the (hardcoded) volume size for the isotopes which I fixed today. Additionally I corrected the fuel calculation for normal jump bridges.

• Crius Patch Notes

After a long and emotional discussion in the eveonline forums the game design department decided in a meeting that their will remove the kills statistics for all wormhole systems in the eve online maps api. This change went live on the 3. June 2014

2.5 years ago CCP already removed the Jumps data from the api for all wormhole. Why nobody removed the kills at the same time is unknown. Anyway … Unknown space is meant to be unknown and since there is now ingame equivalent present in the game to gather npc kills statistics for wormhole systems I can understand the decision.

I know that other may have a different viewpoint on this but that’s the decision from CCP and we’ve to live with it.

• Announcement and discussion
  

Nothing is better for the economy and industry in Eve Online rather then big and driving conflicts. CCP Foxfour released couple days ago the new war CREST API Endpoint which lets you extract all the juicy war details outside of eve. After various initial attemps and bugfixing I’m done with the whopping pile of 366k wars which took me around 20 hours.

Since I also found a bug in CCP’s owner cleanup process (yes it’s bug reported already) I thought the numbers are quite impressive and worth sharing

Basic Numbers

• 366,320 total wars
• 3,741 active wars
  • 1,949 mutual wars
  • 2,600 wars with less then 50 pilots  involved (counting aggressor, defender, allies)
  • 480 wars with more then 500 pilots involved (combined)
  • 1,806 wars declared more then a year ago
• 773 active wars with at least one side has closed it’s business (corp closed, but war still active, yes that’s the reported bug)
• Kills (only available since mid-2011)
  • 853,049 Kills
  • 38,309,752,911,445.19 ISK destroyed (38 trillions)
• first war declared at 2003-05-16 09:38:00

Wars declared by Year

• 2003: 841
• 2004: 3,873
• 2005: 7,356
• 2006: 10,256
• 2007: 23,437
• 2008: 21,708
• 2009: 32,353
• 2010: 36,629
• 2011: 45,138
• 2012: 103,735
• 2013: 52,740
• 2014: 28,254

Most Deadly Wars (ship kills combined)

I guess RvB can be happy to take 7 out of the top 10 slots in this ranking. Especially the number of kills is impressive. But CCP Foxfor told this already on the API / 3rd party presentation on Fanfest 2014

I’ve now started tracking all active wars, continuously filling my database and making my thoughts on the integration into the sites. I guess you can expect a “Wars” tab within the Alliance/Corp section, war history for each alliance and corporation and integration in the live ticker (rss feed)

Long time ago that the navigation tools received a major update. The most recent one is already live for a couple days, so I tried to find some spare time to actually write about it. (TL;DR below)

Couple people approached me before and during fanfest and asked if I could add “one tiny” *caugh* feature to the jump planer: The ability calculate a route and take alliance cyno beacons and cyno alts into the route calculation and prefer them if possible.

This would/could be a major improvement for those entities, pilots and fleet commanders that have access to a large network of cyno beacons and/or cyno alts to place. The calculation wasn’t easy! Up until now the route calculation was based on 3 weights: The number of jumps, the traveled distance and the distance to the destination to get a result (within a reasonable time for a webscript) to show. Adding more weight factors in could make this calculation even more complex. After some couple thoughts and failed attempts I came up with a modification on how to make certain midpoints more expensive or cheaper without hopefully screwing up one of the most used feature on DOTLAN EveMaps.

Similar to the already existing “bridge network” feature, I created the “Beacon Network”: A share-able listing of your beacons and cyno alts. Similar to the Bridge Network you can share, export and import (even copy&paste from the capital navigation window) the beacon list. Additionally to the unsexy list of system names and comments you can open up a map that shows you all possible jump paths are highlighted. If you’ve a bigger and wide spreaded network this can look quite funny and maybe point out where you’ve some

The beacon navigation is now a well integrated into the jump planer. Based on your selected beacon networks, the preferred waypoints will be taken used for the route decision and used if they could benefit the direction you want to Go. I you want to select a different midpoint other reachable beacons or cynoalts will be highlighted as well.

Cause I was doing some changes on the weight calculation I touched a few features as well: I changed “Use Station only” to “prefer station systems” and the same applied for regions or systems to avoid. But the most unique feature is now the ability to avoid constellations that are currently having incursions (and are cynojammed therefore). But don’t worry: Even if you don’t select the “Avoid Incursion” option, you still get the little skull/boss icon that indicates in the route listing that in one of the waypoints is an incursion active.

Dream: Maybe one day CCP releases the list of active cyno beacons along with the other public map statistics from the ingame map. The those beacon networks or the use of the jump planer can be adapted again to directly use what is exist live in the game: 

The 3 screenshots that shows how the result could possible look like (yes it was only done for presentation only and does not reflect the actual game).

And before you ask: Yes someday ™ I’ll rewrite the Share function and replace it with some nice group management feature where get better control over who can access your shared bridges, beacons, notes, etc. One day(tm) I’ll find the time 🙂

TL;DR:

• Added Beacon Network (similar to Bridge Network) to manage your cyno beacons and cyno alts
• Beacon Networks can be shared (public via access token), exported and imported (copy&paste via Capital Navigation Window)
• Beacon Networks can be taken into the jump route finding decision (and will be prefered)
• Systems with Beacons or CynoAlts will be hightlighed on the “Select alternative midpoint” listing.
• “Avoid Incursions” option for jump planner
• “Use Station Only” will change to “Prefer Station Systems”

This year we’ve decided to explore the country apart from the usual fanfest activities. Don’t get me wrong, the golden circle tour is still covers very nice places to see but it feels more like a very funny and cool school excursion with lots of your (adult) eve buddies :-). This year the golden circle tour was even shorter due to the Eve Monument ceremony, but I managed to get a few pictures here as well.

Renting a car and doing your own trip has lots of advantages over the bus trip: You can have a break where ever you want, decide when you want to make a coffee break and you don’t have to take care about the usually very tight bus schedule. The only downside of our trip: It was a very long trip, time and distance wise.

So where did we go? I had about 4 major way points planned in advance which I wanted to see:

• Seljalandsfoss: That’s the waterfall where you can walk behind. Pretty impressive if you’ve the right waterproofed clothes with you.
• Black Back around Vik/Reynishverfisvegur: This black beach (based on basalt/volcanic sand) is very impressive with it’s massive basalt rocks. I took a couple long exposure shots, got my shoes, socks, trousers and tripod soaked with salt water, but was was damn worth it.
• Svartifoss/Skaftafell: This (yet another) waterfall needs a 2 km hike up the hills. If you’ve good weather conditions it’s well worth a trip and getting out of your car after a couple hours drive will be refreshing. The waterfall itself in this basalt canyon is impressive as well.
• Jökulsárlón: This is the glacier lagoon where all the ice rocks that broke of the glacier try to travel towards the ocean.

It’s a 400 km ride but you can’t compare this distance with a highway in Germany where you’ve no speed limits. So take your time, look left and right, make a few unplanned stops here and there to get in touch with this wild and incredible nature.

Thanks to Marco, Georg, Brad, Zach and David who made this trip a very enjoyable, laughable and interesting trip! Every time again, hopefully next year.

Hope you enjoy my pictures (click read more):

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Impression from the Eve Online Fanfest 2014, the Events, Pub Crawls and the Party at the top of the world around it. If you prefer facebook, you can watch them there as well.

The 3rd party track wasn’t as long compared with last year but I’ll try to summarize with as few words as possible:

• Current state: Authenticated Crest not ready yet: EVE API == authenticated stuff, CREST == public data
• Limited SSO test will be coming soon for a few selected neutral sites to begin with
• Developer license is nearly ready and all devs I’ve spoken with are very happy with it (sounds like no bullshit this time)
• Industry API will change (of cause) due to the upcoming expansion
• NEW War API will provide all (even historical) wars, including details, stats and all killmail references, RvB has a stupid amount of kills 🙂
• SOON(tm) we’ll get new APIs for all the stats you can see on the ingame map (not yet defined further)
• Planetary Interaction API will be available, but it only gets updated once you check it ingame (due to database updates)
• Killmails: zkillboard dec’13 vs killmails in CCP’s database == 96,4% complete, but people in the intel tools roundtable had arguments against making all killmails public by default.
• More yaml files? (Wasn’t it the other way around last year)
• The new permaband song is my current favorite tune!

I got interviewed by EVE TV again. This time together with Reza Najafi (PL) and Carneros (LI3). Was a got talk and we didn’t got interrupted by the next upcoming session like my first interview 2011.

That’s basically my top things to remember from Fanfest’14. I’ll post pictures of our Icelandic trip across the southern part in a separate posting. Hopefully I’ve time next year for the next round.

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One year has already passed since my last visit of Iceland for the fanfest 2013. Currently I’m on the road to get to the airport. I’m looking forward to meet lots of new faces. A bit sad that few of my friends at CCP moved on to new adventure but that’s live.

If you have any kind of feature request or question look out for the guy in the DOTLAN shirt or jacket. It’ll either be my friend or me. Otherwise you find me on the usual social events like golden circle, pub crawl or blue lagoon party. I haven’t decided which sessions I want to attend but I’m more relaxed this year as I don’t expect any major change regarding CREST or any other API service anyway. 2 years ago CCP told us that CREST will be ready for summer, but they forgot to mention which year 🙂 okay we got a few public CREST calls that are awesome  and a few more are in the pipe. IMHO they did the right hing and started with public calls instead of a half baked private call set which wouldn’t be ready or opens to many security or legal questions. But I don’t see the SSO coming anytime soon.

I’ll post a summery next week. If you want to reach me you can do this via the social media channels like twitter, etc.

This is a short service announcement: DOTLAN EveMaps is now reachable via native IPv6. The server and network was prepared for the IPv6 capabilities for quite some time but I always forgot to enable it and add the DNS records.

If you’re one of the few that enjoy a native or dual-stack IPv6 connection, enjoy it. You probably won’t have noticed it anyway 🙂

Couple days after CCP introduced the new Incursion CREST API, the old and long ignored Faction Warfare API got updated and now reveals the current Victory Points and Thresholds. With the help of this information we’re now able to determine the contested level in percent and even calculate the influence of DUST district ownership. The only information missing to be inline with the in-game militia dashboard is the upgrade level. But maybe this will change someday.

Special thanks to Jason Parks (the developer of Aura) who gave me some insight about faction warfare gameplay and what you guys really need to be shown.

Here’s the feature list:

• Updated recent occupancy changes list
• Faction page showing the owning systems and occupied systems of the factions territory
• Faction stats (pilots, systems, victory points) are included as well (long time not used yet).
• Showing state, contested level and dust influence
• System pages are now showing occupancy changes similar to sovereignty changes for nullsec systems
• System statistic pages are now showing long term stats for victory points, victory threshold, contested level (percent) and dust influence
• on maps the contested systems is showing showing the contested level as a progress bar within the background color of the system (svg maps only atm)

Screenshots:

CCP deployed the CREST endpoint for Sansha Incrusions today. I updated the site! Lets see how the progress tracking of the sansha influence looks like. On sisi there wasn’t so much activity.

Right now I’ve not yet decided where to put this incursions section into the site navigation. Maybe Universe. Any suggestions?

Links:

• Active Sansha Incursions