Category Archives: Gaming

iPhone Eve Online fitting tool, part 2: Open Toolchain and Cygwin

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As my hackintosh laptop is still in Huddersfield, I have been looking into alternatives to  XCode on the Mac for iPhone development.

As a proud owner of a Jailbreak’ed iPhone 3gs, I have the ability to execute custom binaries compiled with the iPhone Open Toolchain. The Open Toolchain is basically a set of tools to build iPhone apps without using XCode. After a few hours of tinkering around, I have the Open Toolchain compiled and working in Cygwin on windows, with the ability to compile and deploy binaries to my iPhone across wifi. Yay!

Using the Open Toolchain I have been prototyping some UI ideas for the iPhone fitting tool. Next on the list of tasks is to parse the CCP Eve data exports into an SQLite database, for access on the iPhone, and to write some basic logic to get the ship categories and item types showing up in the app… then I can worry about writing the rest of the logic to power an actual ship fitter app.

iPhone Eve Online fitting tool

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There isn’t one and there should be. I have been looking into starting development once my real life work gets a bit less hectic.

Currently available fitting apps for the desktop Pc include EFT, closed source; Python Fitting Assistant, open source but written in Python; and a few others built into bigger apps like EveHQ.

Basically, I have option of programming a app from scratch (fun but long), or trying to port Pyfa.

Porting Pyfa may be possible, although Apple have an annoying policy discouraging the use of interpreters in the appstore… although this doesn’t stop me from using py2objc and targeting jailbreak devices through the cydia app store equivalent.

I think I will start to prototype an app store variant, written from the ground up in objc, should be a fun project, although it might be hard to find the spare time require ;-).

Because of Dramiel

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Logging on to EvE for a bit of down.time after work, I noticed an open fleet invitation in alliance chat for a gate camp in p3. i hopped in my Jaguar and started making my way through low sec to the gang.
When I arrived, we had a fair few people in a wide range of ships, roughly 40 pilots in everything from frigs to bs’s, wit a nice amount of dictors, but no logistics.

after camping the gate for a while, a group of neutral dramiels jumped in to us, about 20, supported by a covops loki with probes, 2 sabres and a few taranis’.

A rather annoying game of cat and mouse followed, as our tackle attempted to provide warp in points for us, the dramiels would burn away and attempt to pick off stragglers.  I landed a few scrams on some of the dramiels, but as I neglected to fit a web, I was unable to old them in place. after numerous warp outs, warp ins and bubbles dropped, the dramiels left, we popped a few of them, and lost a few of our pilots. unfortunately the killboards do not seem to be updating,  but I believe we were up on isk killed vs lost, even if we were down on numbers killed vs lost.

a fun night in the end, but it makes me think about the balance of the dramiel, when the enemy fields a fleet almost entirely comprised of them… oh well, now the question : should I buy one myself? my track record for fotm ships is pretty bad, web nerf hit just after I trained recon 5, nos and myrmidon nerf hit just after I bought 5 fully fitted nos myrms :p.

Hmm, decisions…

Edit:

Killmails -

Taranis

Taranis

Dramiel 

Eve online killboard metagaming, with libcurl and regex

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A few days ago in Eve Online, the alliance which I am a member of was declared war on (a pretty common occurence in the game). 
Taking a quick look at the killboard of this warring corp got me thinking about a project i previously added to the “program it later” pile (a pile that is growing at an alarming rate). Anyway, looking at the prevalence of eve dev killboards (open source php and mysql, I host one myself here http://owenworley.co.uk/eve/kb), my idea was to knock up a little app which grabs the killboard homepage of a specified corp, grabs all killmail links, grabs these pages and parses the name, corp, (alliance), location and ship of everyone involved in the kill.

The net result: a full list of members, what ships they like to fly, and where… very useful.

The technical side, if anyone is interested, would be using libcurl to pull the main page, and regular expressions (i am using boost::regex) ti detect appropriate names and links.

Work is progressing at speed, with the basic functionality implemented,all that is left now is to pretty print the results.

Also, as libcurl and regex are both available in php, an interesting side project would be to port it over, allowing it to be used from a website (as opposed to .exe download). php would also allow for easier formatting of the output data (portraits of characters and ships).

Stay tuned for the full app, which will be posted when it is complete :-).