EVE Online: Add-in for MS Excel
eveonline.com
eveonline.com
Prosperous Universe Honest Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODecu2voAh8
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100/Rule_the_Waves_3/
Forum: https://aurora2.pentarch.org/
Wiki: https://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php
Video (previous version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xhUGGEnJcU
I had some trouble getting the embedding to work quite right, but I might try an pick the project up again sometime.
I know I’ve seen other games use this UI style before, but I haven’t heard of the one you posted, and can’t recall whatever game is hidden in the back of my mind. Command: Modern Operations comes to mind, but is a bit fancier.
A major downside is that these spreadsheets end up taking forever to update. You change one thing and wait five minutes for it to finish updating cells.
But I thought I heard there's a wasm version out there, so aim for the fences.
Things take hours to do. Fly a ship from Deimos to the commodity exchange at Antares Station? That's going to take 7 hours (like 7 _real_ hours). A smelter facility will take 10 real hours to smelt a batch of aluminum. You want to be a real good planner. Unless you like having to wait another day because you miscalculated the amount of flux needed to run your smelters, causing your aluminum production to run idle for half a day.
Where do you sell your goods? Well there's six commodity exchanges spread across the galaxy which accept one of the four currencies used in the galaxy (and yes there's FX markets). The bid/ask for goods varies so you'll want to decide where it may be optimal to sell (fuel isn't free!). You don't have to ship it yourself though, you can post a contract at your planet for someone else to ship your goods and deliver them within X days for a price.
This game is crazy. I have somehow ended up in a position where I now pay money to pretend to be a supply chain analyst and write my own ERP software. These are the scripts I use to run my company:
`csv.py` - converts exchange and inventory data to csvs
`production_line.py` - performs analysis of current production lines as described in `data/production_lines.json`
`analysis_increment.py` - Based on current production lines, gives a list of next building/recipe to invest sorted by ROI days
`analysis_multi_step.py` - Starting from current production lines, plots out the next several buildings/recipes to invest in based on their ROI days
`analysis_supply.py` - Gives a per-planet supply breakdown including planned productionn lines if included
`analysis_vertical.py` - Given a material ticker, returns an analysis of production lines with varying degrees of vertical integration to produce the given material.
`analysis_arbitrage_trip.py` - Takes origin, destination, capital, profit threshold, mass, and volume. Will give a list of materials to buy at origin at ask prices which then must be sold ASAP at destination bid prices
Now you can program in your program while you're programing your program to simulate programming programs against other programmers!
- money supply (for each currency)
- production of fundamental ores, minerals, gases, liquids
- production of consumables (for your workforce)
- balances of the market makers (MM). For background, for a particular material/commodity, a commodity exchange may have a MM that is basically the buyer/seller of last resort, so the bid or ask offered by the MM will be relatively low (for bid) or relatively high (for ask). I don't know the details well, but I think the devs introduce a MM if there isn't a lot of organic demand/supply for something (more seasoned players probably know this better). Anyway, so if you sell to the MM, the MM balance goes up. If you buy from the MM, their balance goes down. So an increase of the MM balance for say the Antares Initiative (one of the factions which operates a commodity exchange) can be interpreted as a lot of people had to sell to the MM, thus not a lot of player demand for that commodity.
[0]: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/tag/economic-report
[1]: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/uploads/default/original/...
The word is tinged, and unfortunately so—but a functional economy that provides operators entertainment like this sounds like the start of a metaverse.
That's because no 2 ERP deployments are the same: you either have a rigid, fully bespoke system that's "easy" to develop, but can't be used anywhere else. OR you have a gigantic ERP system that has knobs up the wazoo for customizability, which supports an entire industry of consultants that do installation & configuration (like SAP)
Particularly the parts about arbitrage.
My favourites were Ogame [1] and Galaxywars [2] which were both unplayable after a few months because you were just raided every day without a chance to bounce back and balancing in general was horrible. Still good memories though because the game continued when you were not online. You sent an attack that took 8 hours on way so after 8 Hours you know if you succeeded and after 16 hours had your loot and ships back (or not)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGame [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxywars (german only sadly)
My heart still belongs to TDZK, this is what the combat looked like with coordinating in IRC before everybody had voice chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isg5PA79Gd0
You always had to calculate transit time and I got a little too good at feinting right and attacking left and I might have taken all of the fun out of it for the other people. They'd reinforce the wrong planet and I'd swarm another border while their ships were in transit.
They really are a sight to behold. Eventually they got simpler, then annual. They do them monthly now, but Guðmundsson isn't part of it and they are really nothing more than data dumps with some automated infographs.
I'll bet Martin Shkreli would dominate at that game. (Yes, that Shkreli: search him on YouTube and marvel at his excel skills.)
And yes, if you never seen Shkreli do exccel, youll be very impressed.
So if anyone has an example of some wizardry, please share!
It just is so remarkable to me that no other games dare to have the depth & accessibility that EVE does. No one else has anything remotely as open ended as EVE Online's existing APIs or data dumps. It's shocking to me that games remain so quaintly isolated in their own world, that they don't seek to open up to allow more.
Please note, Excel is not a requirement to play EVE Online, it is only useful to have an add-in for some roles.
Further, for most popular games, Excel doesn't even make sense. Parent's request for more games to be more accessible to external tools like Excel is not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense.
Hey one could imagine cool things to crunch that data lmao
The parent is excited because the game they like to play is so baroque and complicated, that full participation requires external data processing (yes I know you don't have to use Excel or anything else, but amongst the dozen or so regular EVE Online players I know, including one former EO QA tester, every single one uses Excel to some extent to track their game, so YMMV). The point is not every game needs visibility at the API level, so why should the game developers waste time providing it. My grandma's casino sim games don't need an API; wins and losses are tracked quite easily in the app. If you need an API and an external tool to play Farmville or some such, I think you're missing the point just a touch. Does my city building sim need an API? I guess I can think of a few things that an API could provide. Would I use it? Why, it's just a game.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the game you like needs an API, everything need an API. Same mentality.
Also, have to love that Microsoft is actually involved here. Makes me wish that Activision buy out goes through.
I'm not so much arguing with you as presenting how I remember it. We could both be right, or one or the other, it's not important... I'm just an old scordite miner getting ready to retire, so out of the generosity in my heart, anybody who sends me some ISK today, I'll go ahead and double it - no strings attached. It's time to get out of the game anyway.
I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples:
There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses. There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects. There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_.
The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.
but just like real life, the 1% own the majority of stuff and need to use spreadsheets or software to plan stuff out
Do you mean in Path of Exile or in games in general? Afaik most of the economy stuff in PoE is behind an API that's relatively open(you have to request access, but you pretty much always get it).
The complexity in Path of Exile is less in the economy and more in build creation though. With tools like Path of Building that you can spend almost as many hours in as you're playing the actual game(or you just copy what someone else did like most people).
I wanted to build a better catalog for their MTX (because their shop site is pretty terrible) and was explicitly denied API access even though they already have a public API for it that their site uses. Shrug.
Path of building is great, but AFAIK the formulas used for it are from observations and not an API.
As in they have a bunch of endpoints that are perfectly usable but they don't want you using it for some reason. It spawned a small ecosystem of third party docs and wrappers on poedb and github.
I can't tell if GGG just don't have the resources to support more APIs or if they are worried about increasing access for other business reasons, but they do threaten an account ban for unauthorized use of their public APIs. It's too bad, as someone who's both spent a lot of money with them and wanted to spend more but could never find the right items because their official shop is so bad. Oh well.
Sometimes I just want to have a good time trying out a new build, even if it never makes it past early mapping, but the game just makes that so punishingly difficult.
Having a build advisor (maybe even built into the game somehow?) would be awesome. But I think GGG purposefully tries to keep it obscure and complex, maybe to increase longevity? Heck, it worked for me... got bored of Diablo 4 after a week because it was so basic.
I think arma3 does (in terms of depth - very different games), it has a full programming language built into - people have done everything from Zombie Survival to Living on a tropical island to recreating the Vietnam war to completely replacing the stock AI with one that feels remarkably human[1].
It is a staggeringly complex system underneath.
WotC has a huge problem with this in Magic the Gathering for instance. They used to publish all the stats about what decks won the daily events on their online platforms but they had to stop because the data helped people micro-optimize the best deck way to quickly after a new set of cards came out.
The game was so much more than then, and had (has?) brilliant PvP.
It really was one of the games that did a great job of providing a real sandbox. Spreadsheets were just part of the equation for some playstyles.
(Reference for those who are unfamiliar: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/08/excel-esports-on-espn...)
They had the whole stations, bars, clubs, traders, asteroid exploration, assassination... etc. designs, but they couldn't figure out how to get it off the ground in a clean way.
EVE was always called a fancy Excel simulator.
One thing EVE taught me is that some games provide more enjoyment the more you put into it. For me, I had to play 'hardcore' in EVE to really start to have fun - casual just didn't work and was never enjoyable.
At this point in my life I just don't want to invest the time and energy to enjoy EVE. I like hopping into a game and having fun immediately, versus having to work to have fun.
In the end, I realized that my favorite part of EVE was just looking at the ships, but I can do that without playing.
Many video games are addicting(stardew valley), many games invoke nostalgia(Nintendo/Zelda), some are slot machines(Diablo 3 and Starcraft Coop), etc...
You wonder how many games are genuinely fun, and how many are marketed well and cause a network effect. Did people really like playing Madden 20xx and Call of Duty X? Or did 1 popular friend get their psychology exploited, and if you wanted to be cool, you'd buy the game to play with them.
Can't talk about those games but Fortnite is a fine example of insanely popular game yet it's actually really fun too. I was ignoring it for a long time and started playing when the Covid lockdowns started and I was surprised that it's actually a good TPS game + the constant updates what makes it really enjoyable. Live service games live and die by the updates and Epic does the gameplay updates really well: new or unvaulted weapons every 2-3 weeks, new map changes every 3 months etc. So it always feels fresh, just enough change that you don't get bored.
There is also the aspect of instant gratification which makes the genre appealing to a lot and easy to jump in. It doesn't take a lot to understand what's going on and if you fail you just start a new game, akin to rogue/lite/like genre which is coincidentally (or not) became popular since the 2010s too.
Zelda TotK seems to be pretty disappointing from what I read. After BOTW I finally gave up playing every Zelda game.
Nintendo is the best when it comes to video game marketing, they basically brainwashed us since we were toddlers and they have a tight grip over mainstream reviews.
I don't know if TotK is good, but we won't be getting too much honest feedback until the hype dies down. Remember when people said BOTW was the greatest game of all time? That aged poorly.
Anyway, I am quite skeptical of people who put modern Zelda in their 'great' games list. They havent been a powerhouse since N64.
Are you trying to approach entertainment as if there is some objective measure of "fun"?
And how is this issue specific to games? Aren't movies, TV and books all subject to your same concerns?
Yes
I've been playing videogames since the days of Pong. I've had a pong console, the ZX Spectrum, the Intel 286,386,486,etc, Xbox, PSP. Still have the Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, GameCube, Wii, Switch and nowadays i play most of my games on my "family gaming computer" which is a MSI Trident 3.
Of course life happened and i don't have much game time. And i got older of course. What i do like are the stories in the games. I like rpgs, but hate the fighting and grinding. I like fpses, but hate their mazes/puzzles (except for the Portal games).
The limited time has made me picky on what game i want to play, so there are very few games that i really complete. I want the most of my invested time. The last one i completed was Star Trek Resurgence. Nice story, nice graphics and the qte's made sure the game progresses without needing much time. It was lots of fun.
I'm still trying to complete Yakuza 5. The stories are nice, but it takes lot of grinding.
* I have less time or patience to invest in learning the intricacies of complex games that used to be so rewarding. I've been a big fan of Paradox games over the years, but man, the amount of time needed to really appreciate games like Hearts of Iron or Crusader Kings isn't worth it to me anymore.
* I feel less capable of "suspending reality" in RPGs. When I was a kid, I feel like I could get super immersed in things like the Elder Scrolls games—I probably have more hours in Oblivion than any other game to date. But I don't quite get that same feeling anymore. Adulthood, I guess?
Now, I almost exclusively play relaxing games that don't require too much mental overhead (like Diablo). I'll still pick up indie games that get a lot of traction (enjoyed Hades and Disco Elysium), but rarely touch AAA games.
Games ultimately fulfill a lot of different needs for people. Not every game needs to be the most engaging thing ever, in the same way that not every movie needs to be The Godfather. And I think it's important to recognize why people play games without being condescending about it.
This whole part could have been replaced by adding "it's just not fun _for me_", and without making it sound like you do think the game is objectively not fun but don't want to defend it.
In my opinion such qualifiers aren't necessary as there's an implicit understanding that others are sharing their opinions, and are generally explicit in the event that they're not.
My corp was awesome and after I stopped playing (at the start of World War Bee 2), I saw that some of my corpies stopped as well. I had just skilled my main character to fly a capital ship and I wanted to try ratting (sort-of idle PvE content) with it, but lots of things happened and I kinda didn't have time nor money to spend on the game. I only managed to pay for the subscription with ingame money once. I tried to get into industry as I found it interesting, and wanted to build some tools to help fellow industry mates at the alliance, but never got to build them.
Planetary interaction also looked nice, as you had to plan out a setup and you needed different planets to produce the components that would result in higher profits.
It was fun playing, but now I remember one of the reasons I lost interest in it was that it got bought by Pearl Abyss and suddenly a few months later they announced lootboxes inside the game and kinda made it more P2W than what it already was.
To this day I don't know if CCP killing my enjoyment of the game was a good or bad thing.
This 14-year-old video sums it up: https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=66
But for each moment like that there were countless hours where we were just sitting around being bored doing nothing. Or mindlessly grinding. It was fun because it was subversive and one of the few places where you could actually be aggressive in a way that had consequences. And trust me, I lost a lot too. It felt super bad. But that was what made it fun!
I’ve got a family now and no way I can play EVE anymore. But I’ll remember the crazytown I played in.
There is nothing in it that is stopping anybody from choosing the worst and most boring activities, unfortunately.
Personally I only found EVE Online fun when I was making it not fun for other people. Like the time I made friends with some guys, spent a few months playing with them, then robbed them blind and blew up all their spaceships for the insurance fraud while they were sleeping because I got bored. I got so much hate mail it was glorious.
Then I lost all my ill gotten gains playing space poker. But man it was exhilarating. Just like a true space cowboy. The highs and the lows.
A few months later I tried to make more money using my very expensive carrier ship that was worth a few hundred in real life money, and then that got blown up by some other space pirates. Thus completing the circle of rage. I haven’t played much since.
There’s a joke in the game, you’ll say “whatever happened to Frank?” “Oh, he’s winning at EVE”, meaning he quit. The only way to really win is to not play.
If funcom realised the value auno.org was adding to anarchy online they could have pioneered this too just like f2p and advertising.