Talk Unafraid

OK, it’s been over a month. I know, I’m terrible. It’s been a while.

I’ve been busy with reality, by and large. Lots of stuff has been happening in the real world, mostly relating to my current studies, which has removed my spare time and distracted me from things like blog posts. This is going to be a bit of a summary post before I go back to my usual programme of ranting, rambling, mad ideas and neat snippets of code.

Recently I’ve been going to some gigs; first off was Mitch Benn, who is fantastic live and whom I can strongly recommend you go and see if you like comedy, rock/metal and cleverness. And on the cleverness note, I also went to see Jonathan Coulton with Paul & Storm. You probably have heard JoCo’s work before- he wrote Still Alive (don’t watch if you haven’t played Portal yet!), the ending song of Portal. He writes other songs, too, about evil geniuses in love, office romances, geeks, programmers and giant squids. Oh, and robots. Don’t forget robots. The live gig was a great experience- here, have some pictures to go with that…

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OK, so that’s about all on the live gigs side of things. Back to EVE and code. I’ve rejoined my old corporation, Vanguard Frontiers, after a brief leave of absence to have a bit of a highsec break. Mostly doing trading in the interim, which has been useful for getting another perspective for EVE Metrics. And hey, neat segway there, yeah?

EVE Metrics has been going well; we’re still mostly rewriting things for performance at the moment. But we have been adding features and improving the site in other ways- we’ve improved the My Metrics functionality no end, and added wallet ledgers, both corporate and personal. We’ve got a lot planned for EVE Metrics but we really need your help to let us do what we want to do- we’re now asking for donations for our new server, and we’d also appreciate it if people used the GTC link on the bottom of all EVE Metrics pages if they need to buy GTCs; you’ll be supporting us with your purchase. Get your friends to help out too with donations and GTC purchases, and we’ll be closer to getting our own hardware sorted out. Myself and Makurid are basically a pair of very poor students, so we really can’t do this without your help. If you want to see EVE Metrics progress faster and perform better, this is the way to make that vision a reality.

Other than that, I’ve been quite slow on the code side of life- mostly, I’ve been fixing bugs, tweaking server software and working on maintainence scripts to keep everything running smoothly. Hopefully in the next few months we’ll have some new toys out for you to play with. Until then, keep giving us feedback on EM and we’ll keep fixing bugs and improving things- we’ve done a lot in the past few weeks, including new history dumps, data freshness display, realtime data feed, and more, including a whole host of performance improvements. Keep the comments coming!

Well, that fateful time of year comes along again- thousands of EVE Online players meet for fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland. And I can never make it. This year, my studies conspired against me; except they didn’t. While unknown until hours beforehand, I actually had no work and a lecture on basic packet switching keeping me in England. Doh.

Anyway. We got a lot of fluff, this year. Aside from further elaboration on stuff already announced, there were actually no major announcements made at fanfest. We did have some interesting info about New Eden, CCP’s EVE-Online-Online website. And there was some evidence (gasp!) that CCP were listening to third party developer suggestions at the API roundtable.

There was almost enough minor stuff announced to make it worthwhile. We did get a release date for Dominion – 1st December 2009. But no New Eden with the launch. And knowing CCP we’ll probably not get API changes till a bit after that. What’s really awesome though is that we will be getting new APIs. I’m just hoping they’re useful APIs…

Anyway, while I was sitting at home being mostly bored, I decided I’d had enough pressing F5 on the Twitter search page, and put together a website (ff.mmmetrics.co.uk – it’s down now) to grab EVE fanfest feeds from Twitter and Flickr. This became popular enough within a few hours that we had to rip it off the server and give it it’s own Amazon EC2 virtual server, as it was in danger of crashing ISKsense and EVE Metrics. Doh. A wild success, in any case, for a simple but handy website. What the website did make us realise is how little headroom we have on our current server. We kinda knew that already but it did make the point quite well.

EVE Metrics 2.1 has launched mostly well but we’re still having issues with the API processing code. Makurid has been working hard to pin down the cause of the problems and destroy it while I’ve been fixing up servers and moving sites around, and we’re getting a bit closer to having a complete fix. We’re not there yet, but we will be soon with any luck.

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

No.

What do I mean, ‘no’? What I mean is, I would actively dislike it if CCP decided their next project was iEVE. Why? Well, it’s quite simple, really. It’s immersion. It’s partly why CCP won’t let people write UI addons in the style of WoW. EVE is very distinctive, and extremely immersive. It’s part of why it’s such a brilliant game. You just simply can’t replicate that immersion on a mobile platform, no matter the technology involved. I guess what I’m saying is that EVE shouldn’t be played on a mobile device.

If we did get anything for mobile platforms, then obviously EVEmail and other information would be what you’d want. Some people would argue skill training should be accessible from outside the game. I’d have to disagree with that one, again on the grounds of immersion. You’re doing something very much tied to the game there, and it should remain in the game.

Of course, the optimal way to do all this is just to open up some APIs and let people get to work on it. Look at the current offering of mobile apps- there’s loads out there and some (Capsuleer) are of an exceptionally high standard. Why should CCP try and replicate all this effort in-house when they could just open the appropriate APIs to developers? If CCP wanted to really fuel development of certain tools, they could take on the popular third-party devs for given platforms as contractors and task them with developing the features full-time, thus leveraging existing apps and talent while getting exactly what they want. It’d be good for the 3rd-party developer ecosystem and better for CCP, who get what they want at vastly reduced effort, cost and so on.

Well, we’ve had to push back the launch of EM2.1 proper because of the API downtime CCP keeps announcing, and a few remaining issues with environmental switchovers for legacy apps on the same server. Anyway, here’s the juicy, tender patch notes for your enjoyment. Everything is subject to change and may not be 100% accurate, but we reckon this is more or less spot on.

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I just finished migrating ISKsense to PostgreSQL. This was more of a move for convenience’s sake, as MySQL on my server is basically deprecated because PostgreSQL rocks so hard. ISKsense is the last major app to move, and by far the trickiest. The move comes as I prepare to move the server to Ruby 1.9.1 from Ruby 1.8.7, a major change; I had the ISKsense source checked out on my staging server for 1.9.1 testing and decided to go ahead and move the db.

This is kinda a documentation post to describe the move and how you, too, can migrate your databases with a relative amount of sanity remaining intact, unlike me. read more…

CCP have really hit the nail on the head with the proposed nullsec changes. A few weeks ago I decided to leave my home in EVE, Vanguard Frontiers, of whom I had been a member for over 2 years. Lack of time was the main driver for this, but a contributing factor was the lack of dynamics in 0.0. I’m very into my fleet warfare. Typically not capital scale, but large fleets. I tend not to FC directly, just sit in command chat and keep things moving in the right direction, though I have been known to step up and lead when needed. And it’s gotten boring.

How do I mean boring? Surely, PvP with hundreds of ships can’t not be fun? Actually, it really does get quite boring. There’s the waiting to find some targets if it’s a roam, the waiting for targets to jump in if it’s a gatecamp, the hours of staging and waiting for allies if it’s a major op. And there’s the huge amount of restrictions in any nullsec alliance’s engagement policy- you don’t fight outside cynojammed systems with large fleets if you don’t have to, you never engage unless you’re sure to win, etc. It all leads to a very stale few hours of near-combat, and often opponents will dance around for hours without ever meeting, even between 2-3 systems. And don’t get me started on the politics.

What CCP are trying to do is increase the amount of emergence by increasing population density, decreasing the complexity of combat in 0.0 in terms of cyno jammers, and thus leading to better combat; breaking up the hours upon hours of near-combat (which can be very draining) typically endured by pilots in deep nullsec and encouraging smaller operational groups. This means smaller fleets and more of them, making combat in nullsec actually potentially interesting. And, certainly, more approachable by smaller alliances and larger corporations.

Hopefully this will make nullsec a little more dynamic and thus a little more fun to play. Only time will tell, of course. That and a lot of playtesting on sisi. Hop to it!

I’m afraid I must apologise- this is a rare unrelated-to-EVE blog post. But it does include shiny things with lights on them.

Many of you may know I spend my spare spare time mixing sound and dabbling with lighting and set design. Fewer still know I was down at PLASA (the Professional Lighting And Sound Association) 2009, the annual huge trade show in Earl’s Court, London. For the non-technically-minded readers, it’s basically where all the companies selling lighting, sound, pyro, effects, projection and staging gear go to showcase their products and network. It’s actually rather good fun (if a little harsh on your feet), and there’s lots to learn.

It’s getting scary how much IT factors into this kind of thing nowadays- spotted some HP Procurve switches in a rack at the GrandMA booth, and there’s more audio networks than you could possibly need out there now. Most of them are built on ethernet, which is just silly when you consider nanoseconds, not milliseconds, are considered acceptable latency on proper high-end consoles. Ethernet’s just too damn slow for live audio. Besides, these people are talking sharing networks with audio, lighting, video, and all the rest. Madness!

Anyway, enough with the words. Pictures after the break! read more…

OK, I’ve been talking a lot about rewarding people in EVE Metrics 2 for uploads. Specifically our new uploader credit system.

We’ve decided to remove all the EVE Metrics 1 statistics. Partly because there’s a fair bit of stale data in there, and we want to start afresh with our new crediting mechanism, which I will now describe in some detail.

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I can imagine the look of surprise on your face. A new article has crept into your RSS reader, or perhaps by chance you decided to revisit my site and noticed a new post! Astounding as it may be, I do hope to get back into a more regular posting schedule now. The past few weeks have been hectic to say the least.

On a personal note, I’m starting a course in Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London in a week’s time. As a result I’ve been running around sorting out accomodation and so on rather than writing blogs. I’ve been spending the rest of my time working (the sort that pays), and the tiny little nooks and crannies of spare time are crammed with work on EVE Metrics 2.

In the past week I also received some donated server hardware; this will be taking residence in my new home and hopefully in the future the cluster will be spending most of it’s CPU cycles doing reports and more complicated econometrics using the EVE Metrics dataset- stuff that takes way too long to do online, but is achievable offline.

Anyway, back to business. Read on for the lowdown on EM2.1, new features, new uploader info and more!

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As you might have heard, CCP announced Dust 514, their console MMORPG. And then announced it was to be integrated with EVE, especially with alliances and corporations. I just don’t see how it can work, honestly.

Half the point of EVE is the userbase is a very mature one and the sort of crowd who sit in their room playing with internet spaceships. Does EVE really want to get the Halo players of the world contributing to the game? I honestly don’t think so. It’s a very snobbish view, I know, but the average console gamer probably doesn’t want to spend their time liasing with alliances and planning the takeover of space from other alliances with internet spaceships they can’t see. What’s in it for the Dust 514 players, anyway? A mission system that could easily be done with some clever AI, from what I hear. I remain highly sceptical and look forward to seeing what CCP has planned in further detail- if they make it work it’ll be fantastic. But it’s a big if.

On a much lighter note, I’ve got some snippets from EM2’s new API integration. We’re being really thorough with this so far; we have seperate workers to download and process the API, meaning we can get around the API-being-slow bottleneck by having 3-5 workers just downloading and a few doing the processing (which is quick). What we also wanted to do was give you, the user, tons of control over what information we load into EVE Metrics. Read on for detailed information. read more…