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Eve Online is getting Microsoft Excel support
- ivanmontillam 5y agoCan't wait for them to open an OData feed, so I can plug in my Power BI Desktop and do some serious calculations. Though the Excel is also awesome, I can do Python number crunching over it.
- randomcarbloke 4y agoThis 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
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- m0llusk 5y agoIt 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.
- singron 5y agoIt's not a cockpit simulator or anything, but there is a small part of the game some people play where you actually pilot ships.
- crest 5y agoIt immerses you into the world of amoral high level accountants of large cooperations.
- formerkrogemp 5y ago> It immerses you into the world of amoral high level accountants of large cooperations. Hey, we accountants aren't amoral! How many ethics classes are programming folks required to take?
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoNot a single one in most cases. Which explains tech companies these days.
- pessimizer 5y agoOne.
- tomrod 5y agoA koan. 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." The man left, enlightened.
- Tao332 5y agoRinzai struck them both with his fly whisk.
- jayd16 5y agoIt didn't really imply that all accountants are amoral. In fact, specifying implied the opposite... Although methinks you doth protest too much. /s
- User23 5y agoThree immediately come to mind: foreign corrupt practices, user data privacy, and sexual harassment.
- gerdesj 5y ago
- causality0 5y agono real way to interact directly with ships as pilots. This is not true. EVE has had manual ship control using the arrow keys for over a decade. It happens to be totally useless but it is there.
- seangrogg 5y agoIt's not totally useless when you find yourself needing to navigate around a gate covered in bubbles in a game of cloaked cat and mouse.
- chupasaurus 5y agoAlso 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.
- klysm 5y agoI learned a lot about how markets work playing EVE as a kid. The complexity of the game is pretty beautiful.
- chupasaurus 5y agoThere are quite a few PhDs in Economics who got it researching EVE markets.
- dang 5y agoRecent and related: Eve Online x Microsoft Excel announced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284972 - May 2022 (4 comments)
- rektide 5y agoWorth 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. [1] https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Swagger_Interface https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_Swagger_Interface [2] https://github.com/gtaylor/EVE-Market-Data-Relay https://github.com/gtaylor/EVE-Market-Data-Relay [3] https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/API_access_to_market_data https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/API_access_to_market_data
- SonnyTark 5y agoNever 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.
- cridenour 5y agoSimilarly, 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.
- cpach 5y agoSo this game has been going for nearly twenty years? Pretty awesome.
- xeromal 5y agoEve is one of those guys I like to read about, but never have played. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B-R5RB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B-R5RB This is one of my favorite stories. Hope this interests you.
- cpach 5y agoA virtual battle that has its own Wikipedia article. Quite impressive :)
- xeromal 5y agoAnd cost over $300,000 USD in damaged ships.
- monkeybutton 5y agoSo do the game developers hang out, watch and pop some champaign when an event like that goes down?
- Xeronate 5y agoWe 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.
- fnordpiglet 5y agoJust make sure your pee bottle is empty
- justusthane 5y agoEve is a game that I love to read about, but have never played and probably never will. Same with DF.
- godman_8 5y agoDF?
- MaxGabriel 5y agoDwarf Fortress
- elihu 5y agoI haven't gotten into Dwarf Fortress either, but I do enjoy the Dwarf Fortress bugs twitter from time to time: https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs
- kadoban 5y agoThe Boatmurdered epic is also great fun, for those that find DF interesting but don't necessarily want to actually play. https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introduction/ https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introducti... looks right from the first page. It's _very_ funny in parts, and gives a great sense of the insanity that game can contain.
- RhodesianHunter 5y agoSame. The whole saga of cats getting sick from licking their feet which have alcohol from the tavern floors thing is wild.
- Scarblac 5y agoCarp 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.
- causality0 5y agoIf 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.
- User23 5y agoThe Plex system is still pretty clever though. It doesn’t create new ISK so it’s not inflationary.
- causality0 5y agoYeah 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.
- Aeolun 5y agoYeah, this is true. It also devalues the money I earned earlier. If I log in now I can buy the entire fortune I made years ago with 2’ish PLEX.
- causality0 5y agoIndeed. 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NelsonMinar 5y agoOdd 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.
- gmueckl 5y agoI 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.
- pmoriarty 5y agoWhat's the advantage of Stackless Python over ordinary Python?
- cwillu 5y agoIf 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.
- dasz 5y agohttps://wiki.python.org/moin/StacklessPython https://wiki.python.org/moin/StacklessPython 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".
- topspin 5y agoStackless 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.
- coderintherye 5y agoAs 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.
- jandrese 5y agoDid anybody else have to double check this wasn't an Onion article? Eve is already a game that is sometimes derided as "flying a spreadsheet".
- chupasaurus 5y agoThis was announced during the keynote by devs on EVE Fanfest.
- topspin 5y agoYes. "Excel In Space." An old EVE joke. The irony...
- Havoc 5y agoMultiplayer excel!
- nigwil_ 4y agoExcel Versus Excel! EVE...
- ineedasername 5y agoEve Online is beginning to sound more & more like a normal 9-5 office job, just with a scifi space opera wrapper around it.
- topspin 5y agoYeah, complete with PHBs and everything. I'm dead serious.