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
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