Eve Online is getting Microsoft Excel support
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's been a long time since I played but there was also a good range of tools to snarf in world data. For example as you navigated your spaceship around & looked at the various regional markets, the game would download effectively csv files, which were easy to look for & read. This lead to a market-data-gathering service called Eve Market Data Relay[2] where these files would be shared. And a website EVE Central for viewing. A couple years latter EVE created official API endpoints for this, but there still are third party services for market data[3]- tbh Im not sure why. Notably this wiki page already has advice for Excel integration!
Creating game-worlds which, like the real world, can often expose & share & make connectible their data & mechanisms is a frontier I keep hoping we see expand. Being able to modify & expand our experiences of gaming feels like a more unbounded creativity that I hope we get to play with.
I do wish CCP would make a server where people were free to explore bots & hacking the game client. For a while the python interpretter running the game client could be accessed & you could directly script you ship. "Go to this warp gate. Jump. Approach this enemy. Lock. Fire." The idea that we could learn programming & explore artificial agency in such a rich universe was hughly compelling to me, is a vision I hope eve or some.other game eventually offers options in.
[1] https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Swagger_Interface
[2] https://github.com/gtaylor/EVE-Market-Data-Relay
[3] https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/API_access_to_market_data
The game itself also made me into somewhat of a cynical and incredulous person - I'm undecided whether or not that's something negative :)
Though, as you can probably imagine, some of the most successful strategies would be quite illegal in real life.
Best thing that came out of it by far, was the software dev shop that I ended up starting and am still running today. Never would have happened without EVE and it's API.
One example would be having an "alt" character be accepted into a rival group, and then just monitor their private chats and asset listings (through that API) for any opportunities to act upon. Think resource transports, infrastructure vulnerabilities, strategic assets mistakenly placed in generally accessible storage, etc.
So really quite similar to how these things work in real life, and nothing that directly involves any trading in and by itself. Mostly market and environment control for better success rates and increased profit margins, but at lower cost and with more leeway for mistakes/timings.
I will never play EVE again - not my thing - but I'm frequently tempted to write _something_ that uses the Destiny 2 APIs.
I use the official app to get my bounties, that's it.
And then, I assume, since everyone uses DIM, there's not a lot of reason to build it into the game. Everyone already uses DIM, and it could be construed as stomping over the community. And also like it is sort of dev time wasted; you're reimplementing something that already exists, when you could be building more stuff.
I love their API docs though. Everything is an item. Gah!
(typed while I load into some legendary campaign farming, ha!)
A shame X4 moved to a terrible XML based scripting language. Still can do all those things, but a lot less approachable.
It's _very_ funny in parts, and gives a great sense of the insanity that game can contain.
The way of defending a fortress that led invaders through a corridor with a lava tube underneath, which made the corridor so hot that the fat in the bodies of the invaders would melt, something the AI didn't know about.
For those scared of or put out by the same, the upcoming Steam release might be the ticket: https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/975370
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/975370/view/30990438...
That's always was in the back of my head while playing EVE in various trials.
Edit: I stand corrected. Thanks guyz.
The combat logoff timer was introduced as a countermeasure to the "logoffski", a tactic employed by Russian players involving deliberately disconnecting in the middle of a fight to avoid losses.
If you're in something big and expensive (i.e. a black ops battleship), there's still a good chance you can get probed down and turned into a big fat juicy killmail before that timer expires.
If you log off in a game-generated station you're safe. As well, if you successfully log off in space you will also be safe as I recall.
But if you log off somewhere that's destructible I'm fairly certain you could lose that ship if the facility itself is blown up. But in that case you're likely part of an alliance that will bankroll you a new ship from their industrial war engine.
Of course, should the station owners fail to maintain said station (you'll get a notification if the structure goes low-power), or you're bold enough to park assets outside of known space (wormholes, Pochven, etc)...upon destruction about 50% (random chance, the Loot Fairy is quite capricious) of your stuff can wind up in a big debris cloud affectionately known as a "loot piñata".
Destroying an abandoned station is quite easy, the real problem is snapping up the haul before rival raiders swoop in for a fight.
That was a decade ago, however. When I peek in on the goings-on today, it looks like the game is on life support.
For me it was w-space (wormhole systems with no gates to their systems, you have to constantly scan for connections an map them - there are tools… - and no list who is in the same system as you) with a small tight knight group. We ran PI (some sort of industry) and Escalations (PvE in a group with defined roles) for income and hunted other players (doing the same) for fun. I would even go so far, that the exploration, mapping, hunting & killing lifestyle of wormholes is how EVE really is supposed to be played. But I can see that if that was the only way to play EVE only a few hundred would play it at all.
Stackless Python allows you to run hundreds of thousands of tiny tasks, called "tasklets", in a single main thread. These tasklets can run completely decoupled, or they can communicate via "channels".
Seems like an unfortunate choice in a world where compute cores proliferate but clock rates increase only incrementally.
The original designers made this choice because they believed it reduced developer burden; they could deliver the game faster because the programming model is simplified.
I have been haunted by dreams of implementing a game engine to 'solve' EVE for about 15 years now. One imagines perhaps golang and it's goroutines efficiently distributing tens of thousands of players and other entities across a 64 core CPU... Or perhaps something akin to io_uring written in asynchronous Rust. I can't count the number of times I've diagrammed the memory structures and algorithms.
Amdahl's law is the ceiling of what is possible, but just approaching it would deliver staggering possibilities.
What's surprising is they've never made a plan to migrate off. I'd like to think 95% of the code is platform agnostic and could run on any Python, but maybe it's not that simple and anyway that last 5% is awfully scary. Also perhaps Stackless works just fine for them, particularly since they've invested in maintaining it. The single core thing is definitely a problem but there's no magic bullet to parallelize code like that in any Python variant.
I wonder if they ever considered Erlang instead of Python?
The game is old and the game model is well understood. It would take some hard thinking but I suspect it would be possible to rework the core game loop with a reasonable amount of effort. However, I don't think the motivation exists now; the game was sold by the original developers (CCP) and the new owners appear happy with the steady revenue of EVE's modest but loyal paying accounts. The developer would have to imagine that enabling the game to handle one to two orders of magnitude more players in a battle would translate into a substantially larger player base.
Having studied the problem for a long time I believe the next bottleneck, after the processing of game entities is fully parallelized, would be communication. Keeping all the clients aligned with the current state of, say, 100,000+ entities would be challenging. It would require a sophisticated pipeline and perhaps something akin to streaming, ah la H.264. In any case the communication solution would require a corresponding orders of magnitude decrease in the rate of data sent to clients. Then there is the database which, last I heard, is Microsoft SQL Server...
It's a fascinating problem.
They have been working on an initiative called Quasar to offload the services that do not need to run at simulation speed. Market. Players skills management. Map. Etc
If you see "The Monolith" in these, it is the Stackless Python codebase. Stuck on Python2 too.
Hey, we accountants aren't amoral! How many ethics classes are programming folks required to take?
A man observed a single small demon in a city. "Surely this is the most righteous of cities, for only a single demon is found among them!"
He later saw four monstrous demons beleaguering an old man. "This must be the most wicked sort, for four demons haunt upon him!"
Describing his experience to the local priestess, he was corrected. "The city is so wicked that it only takes a pitifully small one to rule them. The old man is a paragon, for even four of the strongest demons could not fell him."
The man left, enlightened.
Although methinks you doth protest too much. /s
No, this is the old saw about "money is the root of all evil" which is bollocks - it's "The love of money is the root of all evil" which is still bollocks but at least likely. So that's the motivation for the usual crap trolled out at accountants.
It is ironic (hypocritical?) that us lot on HN are familiar with the difference between a hacker and a cracker in IT terms and yet deign to decry accountancy.
The tools of your trade in accountancy can be used for both getting your books in order and with some additional thought and effort: fraud. The real world parallels are so obvious and if you happen to read Terry Pratchett, you will encounter the "Dark Accountants".
Accountants and lawyers are often seen as an expensive enemy/cost centre. The funny thing is that IT is often seen in the same way by everyone else, including accountants and lawyers!
So, kids: you might be able to fiddle up a cluster of webby funkiness. If you can't work out how to turn a profit from your coolness, you might need an accountant to do all the boring stuff like making money work properly.
I think accountancy needs something like the CVE system too. So when a new tax avoidance measure is discovered - CVE number deployed, description, patches by vendor/govt. etc etc. In the UK, when you do your Self Assessment tax thing, you could simply declare which CVEs you accidentally used for a 50% discount this year but full payment next year and those not declared run 200% if found out.
> Instead of fixating on a 20% "loss" to tax, why not try to increase production/sales by say 30%. Cost your time on each endeavour and see which makes the best return. A lot of the mindset is minimizing one of the biggest expenses, taxes, in order to maximize leftover money. Not every industry can scale up quite so easily as software :). So, if sales can be increased substantially, minimizing costs, or taxes, would be one of the natural areas of focus. Americans, including me, are often quite jealous of the ease of tax filing in other countries. Anyways, cheers.
This is not true. EVE has had manual ship control using the arrow keys for over a decade. It happens to be totally useless but it is there.
The irony...
Eve Online x Microsoft Excel announced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284972 - May 2022 (4 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B-R5RB
This is one of my favorite stories. Hope this interests you.
*time dilation is a hack the devs added to make it so their servers don't crash when many people are in the same space. It essentially slows the game down relative to the number of people in a solar system.
To he honest, reading the stories is far better than playing the game.
So why is the game not worth the effort?
As a game and meta-game it’s layers are deep and enticing, but it can be all consuming of your life if you aren’t careful.
Many of the ways to play involve putting the game ahead of real life obligations.
All my current RL obligations would make playing pretty much impossible. There’s also a lot of things I like doing most in-game that I’d be better off doing in RL.
Though the Excel is also awesome, I can do Python number crunching over it.