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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!)
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.
I'm the same. It's a fascinating game and I've given it a couple of tries but I get the feeling you really need friends or be outgoing enough to make friends in-game. It's not a game you can play by yourself in my experience.
EVE is a game that goes on 24 hours a day, right? Meaning I stand a chance at losing my ships when I'm sleeping or otherwise not available to play. I've already tried a few 24/7 games and I just can't.
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.
There are mechanics that protect assets in player-owned (and therefore destructible) structures, so long as the station is properly fueled and maintained in known space. Your stuff gets whisked away to a nearby NPC station, where several days later you can retrieve it for a certain percentage of its assessed value.
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.
Ships that are docked in stations are safe, and in space your ship will warp away and disappear when you log off. The only exception is if you're already in combat. Your ship will still attempt to warp away, but it will remain in space until a combat timer expires.
It is worth noting that player-disconnected ships in emergency warp can be probed down by experienced players with the right equipment.
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.
however, the safe logoff button avoids emergency warp. in exchange for sitting in space without maneuvering or activating modules for 30 seconds, you disappear immediately when the time runs out. at least this was the mechanic a couple of years ago.
Still is. When doing sneaky stuff in enemy territory and they have all exits blocked the usual procedure is to cloak up until the combat timer runs out, then (after checking for hostile combat probes) de-cloak and start safe logoff.
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.
I had a summer where, Matrix-esque, I stopped seeing the ASCII in DF and it became a marvelous experience. I lost that quickly, and even tile sets weren’t enough to hook me again.
There has been regular progress updates on their steam page's news section [0]. In February, they said their "earliest possible launch date would be in the fall" [1].
Also, budget. Factorio is a one-time spend. EVE is subscription based, and good luck getting to the point where you can pay for the subscription entirely from casual game play.
That's always was in the back of my head while playing EVE in various trials.
I’ll affirm that I had fun playing Eve, and I’d be willing to acknowledge a suggestion that this was thanks to playing with the right people. Perhaps participating in large-scale nullsec alliance warfare and industry could also be considered “the right way”.
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.
Carp being ridiculously strong for a long time, because they swim all day and that trains strength.
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.
Odd fact; Eve Online's servers were written in Stackless Python. The last reference I can find about that is from about 2015, perhaps they've since migrated. Although looking now I see Stackless still gets updates and credits CCP Games for financial support, so maybe they still use it.
I would assume that Eve Online has expanded and evolved so much since development started in the late 90s that migrating any significant part of the existing code base to a different language is risky. Not only would you lose the existing, battle-tested code, but also the experience and institutional knowledge around the existing development environment and language.
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".
Stackless Python has also been a problem for EVE. Due to the cooperative multitasking of stackless tasklets the main loop of EVE can't leverage SMP. They've coped with this mainly in three ways. One is offloading as much as possible (network communication, for example) onto other threads. Another is "time dilation" where each 'tick' of the main loop is given more real time to process. This means the game runs slower, sometimes to an absurd degree in large engagements. Finally, there are hard limits on the number of players that can be present in a "system." The limits vary depending on what hardware a given system runs. On occasion these limits are too low for the number of players that might otherwise participate, which makes it a tactical matter that players actively exploit.
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.
I suspect the Stackless choice made a lot more sense 20 years ago, before asyncore and when Twisted was brand new. And when CPUs had 2, maybe 4 cores and no one was running Python on more than one except for some very exotic stuff. Stackless seemed quite viable then.
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?
I used the word "unfortunate" because it wasn't necessarily wrong or foolish at the time. There were still significant clock rate increases expected in future devices. We used to think 10 GHz and more was right around the corner. Instead clock rate increases became incremental due to the inherent properties of complex digital semiconductors, which isn't something one should expect EVE designers to have predicted.
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...
If hacker news comment threads were python, then stackless would let you have unbounded nested comments, with all of the possibilities for new kinds of interaction that that would imply.
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.
It is amusing that Eve Online is often derided as being a "spreadsheet game" which is removed from immersive play. There are lots of columns of numbers, but no real way to interact directly with ships as pilots. Still interesting, but this seems to embrace calculation dominated simulation interaction.
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."
Individual accountants are not amoral. Accountancy, however 8)
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.
Now I come to think of it, accountancy could learn a bit from IT. OK IT is about 100 years old and accountancy has been running for millenia and double entry and the three ledgers are quite well understood. Avoiding tax seems to occupy the minds of far too many people. 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.
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.
Eh, cloud accounting started taking off back in 2013 or so. The accounting industry is making changing. In the UK, you have small changes like making tax digital with the HRMC. A lot of those CVEs appear to be intentional to incentivize certain behaviors or outcomes or to give your political friends more money. Tax professionals these days work with both domain knowledge and specialized software and don't need encyclopedic knowledge of the tax code anymore. So yes, when the tax law changes, the software gets patched as well.
Double entry accounting more or less started with Luca Pacioli in the 15th century. Our current CPA/CA/CMA environment started in the early 20th century. A lot of entry level work and rote data entry is being handled more programs these days, but a lot of the core work may remain out of reach of automation due to the edge cases or frequent changes. More firm consolidation is happening, and more non-accounting majors are being hired to work in accounting businesses.
> 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.
Just one, and it was elective. Few enough to realize this stuff is tricky and I should tread with care. Not enough to know all the loopholes of what you can get away with and still be ethical.
Also it becomes very useful piloting a ship with an oversized afterburner which makes it move very fast but penalizes the turn speed, thus breaking the logic of usual controls provided in game.
This would've been much more useful in the era of spreadsheets-online Eve (2003 - 2012) it's been so ridiculously dumbed down since then that I don't really see any added benefit to having Excel integration
As someone who briefly worked on a site that put a UI around searching the Eve Online API, this is great news! The more people can do things at their skill level directly in Excel, the more time will be for the 3rd-party sites innovate on more interesting things.
As someone who has played, given them money, been involved in the politics, played their FPS and been on its player council, and attended Fanfest in Iceland...
To he honest, reading the stories is far better than playing the game.
Playing the game was great fun when I was in high school, and university (and for a few unattached years afterwards).
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.
We all do because the time dilation* is so bad it takes 10 minutes to have a button click register (not joking).
*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.
If the ability to trade real-world money for ingame currency hadn't ruined the game for me I'd still be addicted to it. Still haven't decided if that's a good or bad thing.
Yeah but it still creates the constant temptation to just buy back your losses and it also lets you put a dollar value on everything you do. I quit after I realized I was grinding for $1.72 an hour.
Indeed. I tried to give it another shot a couple years ago but I could not find an alliance that would have me because all of them were enemies with various alliances I'd been literally over a decade ago.
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