Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that EVE already has a fairly competent API[1]!

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 EVE API got me into programming, real life investing and trading (through a "could I apply this in real life?" light bulb moment), and unleashed my interest for mathematics.

The game itself also made me into somewhat of a cynical and incredulous person - I'm undecided whether or not that's something negative :)

Traders have to be cynical.

So, were you able to apply the same methodology effectively in real life?

Yes absolutely. Mostly consisted of data aggregation, monitoring/reporting, risk/position calculations which eventually led to automated trading (still working full-time*2, so no golden goose).

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.

Can you please speak to some examples of these in game strategies that are illegal in real life when it comes to trading?

Infiltration, espionage, sabotage, and manipulation of rivals, partners, and other key influential entities. If that fails or seems ineffective threaten/harass/assault (it helped that there was always a fleet of nerds with digital spaceships to call upon heh).

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.

Not the parent, but I did this out a silly game called MapleStory.

Never played EVE, but in X2 The Threat, the internal scripting system was exposed to the player in the game ui to allow scripting anything in the game you want. I ended up writing elaborate trading and defense procedures to manage my 100+ fleet of traders, factories, sector patrols and escort ships. Fun times.

Similarly, when I found out about custom scripts in X3, the game got a whole lot more interesting - I created a carrier who searched the universe for abandoned ships, claimed them, repaired them and sold them.

A shame X4 moved to a terrible XML based scripting language. Still can do all those things, but a lot less approachable.

EVE Online and Destiny/2 have amazing APIs.

I will never play EVE again - not my thing - but I'm frequently tempted to write _something_ that uses the Destiny 2 APIs.

I remember the Destiny app allowed you to send items from your local inventory to your vault, which was nice, but I always wondered why didn't they just add that functionality to the game itself. An artificial way to increase usage of their app?

No, since nearly everyone uses 3rd-party apps to do that. Destiny Item Manager or Ishtar Commander.

I use the official app to get my bounties, that's it.

One of Destiny's big UI constraints is consoles. Lots of the more ambitious apps only work well because you're on the computer.

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!)

This is what Serenity server is for

The client itself no longer exposes the python interpretter, got locked down time & time again. It's be so neat to have the opposite: as flexible & accessoble a client as possible, one where scripting is super accessible to all.

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