Chaos Theory

Eve is all about actions and consequences. The beauty of Eve is that the consequences are highly unpredictable, especially in wormhole space... well, at least on the long run.

Let me tell you a story about a chain of events which started with a random pilot firing a few shots at a random POCO in a forgotten wormhole system and ended with the destruction of a Rattlesnake a few days later in a seemingly unrelated C3 system.

People sometimes like to "gift" us POCOs in wormholes and shoot at them to generate notifications which, they assume, annoy us. I never really understood the behavior, but we woke up one day with this message:

We made some jokes about it in corp chat and then continued minding our own business, but curiosity got the better of me so I looked at the killboard of that system. Indeed, some of us have been in there a while back and probably annoyed the residents a bit. Thinking there was a small chance that this was indeed a real POCO bash and not some random aggression, I started running some locators:

Wasn't really expecting to get a hit - this meant he just fired a few shots at the POCO and then docked inside a station to await downtime. Chances were that Itamo system was the entrance to J124327.

And indeed it was.

The wormhole was empty, no forcefields, only dead sticks. Some POCOs were missing and one of the few left belonged to us, so I decided to sell the wormhole :)

C3 wormholes with high-sec statics are pretty wanted, even if they don't have good P.I. I got an offer in less than a day and sold it for 500 mil ISK. We transferred the POCO, too. Thank you, Ioku Adarger, whoever you are.

Two jumps down the chain I found another empty C3 wormhole with a high-sec static. Talk about luck. I received an offer the next day and ended up selling it for 425 mil ISK after guiding the customer inside. We used a broker, which means he didn't trust me very much, but he came directly in a DST instead of a scout, which was pretty hilarious. Of course we don't shoot our customers during a wormhole transaction, but I advised him to be careful and keep an eye on Dscan.

I left that system and logged out. A few hours later, after I was clearing up some bookmarks, I spotted this on Zkill:

My customer has been killed by none other than Zosius, the "Cloaky Bastard"! He runs a really nice blog which I happen to frequent pretty often: http://cloakybastard.blogspot.com/

Talk about coincidence.

In a way I feel sorry about my customer, even though I did my duty and advised him to be careful. On the other hand I brought more people into the realm of Bob and gave Zosius some practice for his new fleet doctrine. I'm sure he'll write an article about this soon ;)

Coder at heart

It's been a while since my last article. Apologies to my scarce group of readers. A few work and medical related issues (all good now) prevented me from being very active lately, but I wasn't completely disconnected from Eve.

While on medical leave I had the time (and boredom) to finally implement an idea I had for quite some time now. I named this idea "Pathfinder": a tool which is able to find the shortest path between solar systems (including wormholes). How does this work? It uses Tripwire (a popular wormhole mapper) and the Eve SDE (Static Data Export) database to construct its own version of the solar system with gates and wormhole connections. Here is how it turned out:

Why is this useful for me? It really helps me when I have to travel fast, for example when answering a batphone. On a good day, my alliance is able to generate more than 300 wormhole connections, including k-space to k-space connections and other useful shortcuts. Having a tool which is aware of all of these potential shortcuts may shorten the travel path, even if only by a few jumps, it can make a difference.

The application is open source and available to everyone who is interested: https://github.com/farshield/pathfinder. Here is a short demo on how this works:

The Tripwire developer, Daimien, will probably add this feature in a future release, but until then, Pathfinder is a workaround. I'm aware now that a tool named Pathfinder already exists, but I didn't know that at the time. If this tool will grow into something more than a proof of concept, I'll consider changing the name. This tool is still young and has some little bugs, especially regarding the user interface, so bear with me :)

Developing this application re-sparked an interest in graph theory, so I tried generating a wormhole map using Gephi and Pathfinder. The results were beautiful:

I got some good feedback from my corp mates and from the people on Reddit, most notably:

Now there's a comment worth hanging on my walls. This inspired me to submit the tool to a developer's contest organized by CCP, which, luckily, I learned about before the submission ended. I don't have high hopes, mainly because I think others were more dedicated, but also because my app doesn't focus too much on CREST, except for the part where you can authenticate with it and retrieve and set the in-game player location (which was, btw, pretty hard to implement).

Almost done, but, hey, no article on my blog should end without a kill. While shooting the above videos I noticed the residents of the wormhole, which I was using at that time for tests, started to log in. Killboards say they like to hunt explorers and ratters in their home system. Bait op it is!

Sadly, we lost our baiting ship, but killing almost 2b worth of stuff with decent loot is a good trade-off in my book. Wee Lad, if you are reading this, your sacrifice won't be forgotten :)

Fly dangerous o7