On the development front – LMeve dev blog #1

Industry Tracker - Login Screen

When I first started this project, I knew it will take more than a day to complete. In fact, I have assumed it will take at least a month (1-2 hours a day) to finish basic features. I was wrong: it took one and a half month. The result however, is better and more functional than the original Specification required.

First I would like to say a big thank you to my corp mates, who are testing LMeve restlessly. Beta test has also raised some excellent improvements and ideas, some of which are implemented already, and some have been added to the drawingboard. Thank you guys!

Features developed since the last post

Tasks is a module, which allows planning and tracking industry jobs over the course of one month. Currently the only person with edit rights is the CEO, so he can plan manufacturing, invention and copying for each corp member. Members can view their own task list, which shows the completion state of their tasks.

LMeve task tracking page
LMeve task tracking page

It looks almost exactly like the Task page on Marcel’s aideronrobotics.com (this was one of the specified requirements). Crysis McNally, one of our members has proposed to add a tooltip over Progress and Success bars, which shows how many jobs have been already done. This way corpies know exactly how many more runs are needed to reach 100%. This is one of the features we’ve missed in the original aideronrobotics.com industry tool.

Database is a module mainly used for planning and reference (and since there is no “Kit Builder” yet, it also tells the amount of materials required for production). It’s also the first module to display price data from eve-central.com (data itself has been downloaded for more than a month). We plan to add a drop-down ME field, which will recalculate required materials, and a setting if we want to get (or stop getting) price data from eve-central.com.

Ah, the beauty of Excel in space ;-)
Ah, the beauty of Excel in space 😉

Wallet has been iterated upon, because previously it would display walletTransactions (market sales) and walletJournal (bounties, contracts, taxes, etc.) separately. Market and contracts are now merged, so we know the actual ISK flow (we are buying minerals from corp members using contracts, and the rest of materials from market).

Tips’n’Tricks for Static Data Dump and EVE API

I have already mentioned it in the first post about LMeve, that EVE API can be tricky at times. So does the Static Data Dump.

As it turns out, telling the correct amount of materials required to build an item is not an easy task, because the data is mixed together: skills and “extra materials” are in the ramtyperequirements table, so you have to tell them apart (hint: join invgroups and use categoryID = 16 to separate skills from materials).

Secondly, the invtypematerials table contains the materials you get when reprocessing the item. It should be the same amount as materials required to build an item, right? Well, it only holds true for Tech 1 items. For Tech II, you have to subtract Tech 1 base item materials from the Tech 2 materials (hint: use recycle column in ramtyperequirements table to find the base item). The weirdest thing however is, that for some items it will give the exact results (for example Improved Cloaking Device II), but for some (like Kronos) you will end up with negative values! Of course the only solution is to hide the negative values from output.

Last but not least, EVE API is having hiccups now and then, throwing 1001: cache is invalid error for wallet transactions, wallet journal and message feeds. The main functionality of LMeve does not depend on these feeds (apart from the Wallet module), but for some people, like Somerset Mahm (and his excellent Blink service) it can be quite a pain. Good luck fixing it @CCP!

Story continues

This is not a formal project, so keeping the scope from growing is not much of an issue (the only budget I have here is time), but there is still plenty of features waiting on the drawing board:

  • Industry Goals (similar to Tasks, but at the corp level). Ideally I would like to draw pretty production lines for Tech II and Capital items with all the intermediate products.
  • Inventory (Material Stocks, Buy Calculator for buying minerals from corp members)
  • Market (Monitoring buy/sell orders, Monitoring market prices for materials and products)
  • Settings (Some values are still not editable without phpMyAdmin right now)
  • EVE API monitoring (to gather API statistics and errors over time, currently I only keep the last value)
  • Linking characters to accounts using EVE API (currently admin has to link characters to account manually)

Want to help us test LMeve?

Would you like to join a friendly group of mature players and get paid for cycling corp manufacturing and invention tasks?

Well, now you have a chance! Apply to Aideron Technologies today! Simply contact our recruiter – Razeu – in game.

PS. Please specify AT in the application form, because we still share forum with Aideron Robotics.