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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

For those confused like myself, this is about Eve, an excel-like development environment from the person who brought you LightTable. This is not about Eve Online.

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> excel-like development environment

Not to be confused with the Space themed excel-simulator that is Eve Online.

Someone made a parody web game once that was basically a database view of user and game state. You could insert rows and get points and things, it was a hilarious jab at the whole class of games where the gameplay feels like you're just updating cells in a database. I searched for it but couldn't find it just now, anybody know what I mean?

You triggered my memory of playing this. I also attempted to search for it, but the name won't surface in my mind.

I suspect that I'll recall it at 2am tomorrow.

Thanks.

I detect confusion. It's Excel that excels at simulating Eve Online. It sounds like Eve would make an even better simulator of Eve Online than Excel, however.

Thanks. It didn't help that they were talking about moons and planets.

Yes I can see how the moons and planets could be confusing. They have a bigger range of examples now and also the ui has changed a lot As well

The more pressing question: Are there any systems with good agents that won't immediately be overrun by a large alliance?

Or from the person who got bored and abandoned LightTable as a mere proof of concept compared to the initial grand ambitions.

Yep, same here. An Eve Online developer's diary would've made for a very interesting read indeed.

But they do have those. https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/

Some are technical, some are not. But the ones around the time of major tech changes are the most interesting. For instance, when they implemented "time dilation" a few years back.

Time dilation is, and remains, the single most beautifully elegant piece of problem solving I think I've seen applied to spaghetti legacy codebase like Eve's, and saved the game from a slow descent into unplayability.

Not played for a year or two, but that's coming off the back of a 10 year eve-habit. It always makes me smile when I see it randomly mentioned on HN and suchlike.

PS. Free Larkonis Trassler.

What is also quite interesting about their platform is that they use Stackless Python for the game logic (https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-pyt...). Their whole architecture is quite amazing for how old their tech is and what they have managed to achieve.

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