If you want to know what happens when Lockefox (@HLIBIndustry) and I team up, see these two links:
What’s that?
This is animated kill stats for 2013. Each blink is a ship of given type (or group) being destroyed!
You probably wonder if you can watch the battle of Asakai here? Well, not really. Let’s say 1,167,452 capsules got killed in 2013. That means, on average, every 27 seconds one was popped. The Capsule image on the webpage will therefore blink every 27 seconds (since I speed up time by 20x, it will blink every 1,5 seconds instead). In short, it’s showing the average frequency, not the actual kills. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to playback live data on this “ship grid” – it’s only matter of getting hold of the actual kill data as it happened. It should be even easier for a single battle – B-R – I’m looking at you!
How did we do this?
Lockefox had a database with kill data for the whole 2013 (downloaded from zKillboard.com), but we didn’t have an idea how to show it. Our inspiration came from XKCD Frequency – an animated gif, which shows how often some things happen in real world. Making it an animated gif however would be rather time consuming, so instead I’ve chosen javascript. First, javascript does a lot of things automatically. If I want to change something, for example update the data or make a 2014 version, I only have to update the CSV data with kill information. Scripts will do the rest. Later in the development I realized that for ship types I can actually use their icons instead of text, which should look better. So I came up with an idea of ship type grid, with icons blinking every time something is destroyed.
I have some more ideas how to present this information, so stay tuned. More pretty graphs and visualisations is coming soon!
Update
After we’ve published the 2013 kill stats yesterday, people kept asking if it was real time data. But it wasn’t.
So today I got the B-R5RB killmail database from Lockefox and used the ship grid from yesterday to make… an actual EVE Online Battle Player!
Since the event was played at 10% TiDi, if you set the time compression to 10x (yes, I’ve added a slider for that!), you will get real time as it would have happened without TiDi. Of course the entire battle took over 24 hours, so it’s best viewed at 100x 😉 Enjoy!