Over the next few weeks I’ll be reskinning EVE Metrics, ISKsense, and various other things to have a much much nicer theme and one that is consistent across websites, giving each site their own visual take on the theme. Those sites will also be getting some much-needed optimisation, graphics, and new layouts.

Nexus is the other thing this brief post will touch on. Myself and flexd, the other developer working on the project and new member of VAF, have decided that open-sourcing the whole thing would be mad. It’s hideously complex to set up in places (though much easier than it used to be), and in any case a lot of the functionality Nexus provides is heavily aimed at alliances rather than corporations. We’ll still be offering Nexus to some alliances on an ask-and-we-might-let-you basis, but we will be forking Nexus, stripping it back to the killboard and fittings components, and releasing that as open source on Github.

That means if you’re an average corp you won’t get things like the tactical/intel overviews and IGB components, and all the alliance-level member managemet, capfleet management, and so on will be out. Because 99% of people don’t need it, to be honest. By keeping things more limited we’re keeping it much more hackable, more secure, easier to maintain and easier to extend, which means we’ll get it out of the door much quicker than we would have if we’d kept it all bundled together. So we’re looking at somewhere early-to-mid 2009 as our first release.

I think that just about covers it. Oh, other than to say happy holidays and a happy new year in advance, so I don’t forget as I obviously will do.

VAF Logo ftw!

I figured it was high time something was done about the lack of such a tool- a tool to generate the icons for corporations in EVE Online, which are constructed from three pictures with their related shaders, given the data from the API corporation sheet. So here it is. With many thanks to Entity for doing the hard work getting the image data out of EVE and working out the finer details of EVE’s image formatting.

Really can’t be bothered to host your own? Take a look at my freely available corporation logo generator server, which uses this library to provide corporation logos for those of a less technical nature!

This is a pure-Ruby library with a bundle of prerendered corporation image components, which are combined at runtime to display the image. It is recommended that you cache corporation logos generated with this plugin.

Transparent Logos are also supported

Browse source/Download (Github)

While it’s designed as a Rails plugin it should work equally well as a standalone pure-Ruby plugin. The only dependency is on RMagick, a Ruby interface to ImageMagick. The library is hosted on Github, so you’ll need git to grab it, or you can hit the download link on Github to grab a tarball or zip.

Usage is as simple as the following:

If you use this and want to say thanks, please do so with ISK- both to Entity and Ix Forres. As far as I know there should be no legal issues with this, other than to give CCP credit as with all ingame assets used out of game. And, of course, many thanks to CCP for adding the data needed into the API. If you really must, the Python version by Entity is over here.