Thread: Developers Blog

Without going into too much detail about how much fun we had doing the Sansha Reborn live events last year or how pleased we are with the overwhelmingly positive reaction to them (you can watch/listen to CCP Dropbear and me whining about all that here, here, here, here, here, here and here), we'd just like to say thank you to the EVE Online community for once again amazing us with your input and helping us define one of the game's most iconic expansions. Seriously, without the dynamic storyline that evolved largely due to player activity, live events and Incursion wouldn't have been nearly as exciting. Nobody wants to sit around chatting about the good old days for hours on end, though, so on with the new stuff!
As some of you have already noticed, Sansha is back (uhm… again) with a vengeance (uhm… another vengeance), having switched his focus from abducting civilians off of planets to hunting down the people who worked to thwart that operation: capsuleers. He's upgraded his armada to include the types of ships found in incursions and he's no longer going to just sit around and wait for capsuleers to interfere with his plans, so he's never been more dangerous than he is now. If you're heading into incursion systems thinking you know what to expect, think again.
Beyond that, there are entirely new live event plot lines in the works, with at least one of them already in its initial stages of deployment. As both CCP Dropbear and I have advanced onset ADD, permanent insomnia, chronic workaholism, we're going to roll them all out simultaneously. There are going to be several stories unfolding, hopefully enough to appeal to a wide array of play styles. We’re aiming to please you lore hounds with some in-depth historical revelations, but everything we learned from the Sansha events let us know that players love to fight as well, so be ready for more of that, too.
The most important thing we learned, though, is that we're only half of the live event team; without a heavy involvement by the players, it's just static content, and that’s not what we want out of this. If you really want to get involved in the story of EVE Online, there’s never been a better opportunity!
It’s going to be one hell of a summer.






More...

The CSM 6 and CCP had their first summit from Wednesday, May 18 to Friday, May 20, 2011. During this summit they discussed Flying in Space with Team BFF, the future of EVE with CCP t0rfifrans and CCP Zulu, the EVE-Dust 514 link with CCP TomB and much more. Full meeting minutes are available at this link. A table of contents are as follows:

CSM Intro
Team BFF and the ‘Little Things'
EVE: Flying in Space
EVE Future
The EVE-Dust link
EVE Marketing
Quality Assurance
Game Masters - Policies, Petitions and Large Fleet Lag
EVE Security Task Force
Team Gridlock - The War on Lag
ISD and Community Matters
EVE User Interface Issues
Starbase Issues
Feature Abandonment
Nullsec Industrialization
Incarna and the NPE
EVE Art
Meeting with Hilmar
EVE Economics
Ship Balancing

We understand that there is a lot of information in one document and there are sure to be a lot of comments from players on many of the issues. We would ask that you place your comments in this thread as it will be actively monitored by the CSM and CCP.


More...

Knowledge is power, and we want to give EVE Online pod pilots more power (as if they did not have enough already! ;-) ). Ever since my first Fanfest, back in 2007, I have discussed with pod pilots the possibility of giving better access to the vast data that is available from EVE Online. The main obstacle so far has been making the data available on a consistent basis in a format that fits EVE players. I am pleased to inform you that we have made headway towards having a system in place that would allow us to give EVE players access to historical time series on items sold in the main EVE market hubs.
Exciting news indeed, and we can't wait to see what the human supercomputer that the EVE playerbase is will do with this data. However, before Team Sleeper Cell and the Research and Statistics unit can finalize this project we need your assistance to better understand which data format is best for the community. To do that, we will provide access to EVE market data from 2010 through May 2011. The data will show the average price for more than 6,000 items on the EVE market in the top five trade regions in EVE, along with other basic parameters, as can be seen in the table below. This data can differ from the in-game price history graph, since those graphs use either median price or average price, depending on the number of transactions available. In this case, we opted for calculating both the median and the average price for all items, so both time series are in the dataset. This is a one-time datadump for now, but in the future, the data would be provided on a regular basis. However, the catch is that the data will always be delayed; by how much will be determined at later stages in the development process, but until then, it would be great to hear from you guys what you think would be a reasonable delay: one month, two weeks, several days?
We're providing access to the market data in two different ways during our initial test run. Our intent is to only release it in one format in the future. As we want to know what is the most convenient for everyone to use, we're providing the data in both .csv and a MSSQL backup format. We will be using your feedback and statistics of which is most used to decide on how we will be going forward with delivering this data for you in the future. Please let us know your preferences for format in the comments thread of this blog.
The data is provided in the following format:

typeID	regionID	dateday	transactionCount	totalQuantity	totalValue	avgPrice	maxPrice	minPrice	medianPrice
27904	10000032	2011-04-25 00:00:00	1	1	123649.95	123649.95	123649.95	123649.95	123649.95

CSV: http://content.eveonline.com/data/ma...etData.csv.zip
SQL: http://content.eveonline.com/data/ma...etData.bak.zip
This is just a test run so that Team Sleeper Cell can continue their work on getting you this data on a consistent basis in convenient format. But we would also like to hear your comments on the usability of this data; give us examples on how you would use it. If this turns out to be popular, it is my opinion that the more we can directly give to you, the better.
More data, more knowledge, more power to the pod pilots of New Eden.
Many thanks go to team Sleeper Cell and Research and Statistics. Giving players some interesting data to work with is truly a team effort. You will see several of us participating in the discussion on this topic, including CCP Stillman, CCP Elerhino, CCP Recurve, and yours truly.
Fly safe but remember to destroy stuff - it is good for the EVE economy!

Best
Dr.EyjoG




More...

What is EVE Online? Bums, Education drop outs, Marketing, Scholars have argued this question for many years and come up with such answers as: “EVE is an MMORPG” (you can just taste the scholarship at work there) or “EVE is REAL” or “EVE is ruining my god damn life and my girlfriend is about to leave me but I got a sweet kill last night in my HAC."
In any case, EVE is this huge, hard-to-define entity that is pretty bloody cool, “somewhat” complex and so deep you can easily lose yourself within it. Players like to write about EVE, whether it be a guide to the latest really complex lovingly crafted system, whose face their alliance just grinded into the dirt, or a guide to that mission or complex they just completed.
So some bright spark at CCP decided that it would be cool to have a central repository where people could put all of this stuff and others could easily locate it. Someone said wiki’s were cool, so the EVElopedia was conceived and brought to life. It had a bit of an unsteady birth; issues with moderation and various other things initially hampered its growth, but it has since steadily grown in popularity and use.
What is the wiki

So the EVElopedia is a wiki. Put simply: it allows users to create simple Web pages on whatever they like and other users to search and locate that information. For the EVElopedia, this means any and all information related to EVE. For example:

• How does Tech 2 production work?
• The timeline of the EVE Universe?
• What’s a good way to fit and fly an Incursus?
• What were the major battles alliances fought in 2009?
• Who are the CSM and what do they do?

But is says beta?

It’s a bit ugly though. It’s also still in beta. It also has some lingering annoyances. So we decided it was high time we kicked it up the arse so we have the release version coming out very soon™. Unfortunately for me and wanting to show off in this blog, we mainly fixed a ton of boring behind-the-scenes work that was getting in the way of us progressing the EVElopedia along with the players like we wanted to. But here’s what we did change that you will notice:
We fixed ugly...


Into new sexy...

We removed the moderation queue

We had a system where you would edit a page and then it would go into an internal queue where our volunteers would check the edits and then approve the changes made to a page. While our vols did a great job, it really wasn’t the best idea. So we tried a few things and decided to go with the best suggestion: remove it. So we removed it.
We still have a very few pages that we will simply just lock. 99.9% of the pages on the EVElopedia you can edit at will. I know what some of you are thinking! Don’t do it, we will ban you. We will still be looking over all the submissions and anything that breaches the rules will get you spanked and possibly banned depending on how naughty you were. The rules aren’t that complex, but basically boil down to “don’t be a wanker.”
We fixed our backend

So many potential bad jokes. Anyway, this took ages and is boring, but during the initial development cycle and birth of the EVElopedia we did some things right and some things not-so-right. So we took a long look at it, chucked out a lot of stuff that was getting in the way of enabling players to contribute, and added a lot more support that allows us to easily add player requests, for example new extensions. We put in support for localization (not everyone likes English, you know) and laid the groundwork for better links from in-game to EVElopedia. EVElopedia is now much more closely aligned with its mediawiki core, which basically means we can move faster and operate better, allowing us to bring player requests and suggestions onboard to expand and improve EVElopedia.
Implemented a content portal system

We are implementing a portal system to make it easier to navigate around various subjects, something we were really lacking before. Hunting for something specific is fine, but trying to find all the help you can on mining or PvP can be laborious. We’ve started the portal system in this release and hopefully the some of you will come on board and help us expand it post release.
More Content!

There are a lot of good EVE Online wikis already out there. We want to work with these to both projects advantage. To that end we are working in partnership with EVE University and EVE History wikis to port over some of their best articles onto the EVElopedia, which we will then link directly back to the original. Also once we have implemented the in-game help links, your site's guide might be linked directly from the in-game window related to it. Which is pretty cool, IMO.
EVElopedia and you!

I’m thinking most of you will just want somewhere you can go search for a guide on advanced mining techniques, how to be a space ninja, or who are the Goonswarm – I like you people. A lot of you however will want to make new articles or update old ones – I hold you people close to my heart. Some stalwart souls will even want to really get involved and help us develop and progress the EVElopedia – you are my special people.
If you want to help further, how do you do it? We have a volunteer team (named YARR, much to their modest delight) who help us develop, support and moderate the EVElopedia. These guys liaise with you and then talk to us about what you need and require and then we get that implemented (new extension, hate the font size, etc). They happen to be recruiting!
If that’s not your cup of tea and you just want to see what people need help with or contribute to on-going projects then the Community Portal is the first stop shop as well as a hub for the community on the wiki. We currently share a forum which our volunteer EVElopedia admins and CCP watch, and you can email YARR at evelopedia@isd.eve-online.com.
Or you can simply create a new article on your favorite subject. However, please be sure that you search for the topic first, as chances are someone else has already made something and you can go and improve that instead.
The future

So that’s whats going to happen; this is what we want to happen in the not so distant future...
Decent editor

The current, basic wiki editor is rather awful, and we’d like to get something WYSIWYG-like in place to allow more people to easily create and update articles. This is sensible, we are sensible.
In-game help

This was actually going to make it in for the summer, but my heart was broken and it got delayed. Basically, we want to turn the help button you have on windows to directly go to an appropriate EVElopedia help article. This seems sensible; our current help doesn’t.
Localization

We might already have this in place by release. But we like more languages. More languages are sensible.
--
So what does all this resolve into. A leaner, easier to use, more pretty EVElopedia. Its my fervent hope that the community will get even more involved with the EVElopedia and we will see all manner of beautiful and crazy articles appear.
Thanks,
Ginger.


More...

What is EVE Online? Bums, Education drop outs, Marketing, Scholars have argued this question for many years and come up with such answers as: “EVE is an MMORPG” (you can just taste the scholarship at work there) or “EVE is REAL” or “EVE is ruining my god damn life and my girlfriend is about to leave me but I got a sweet kill last night in my HAC."
In any case, EVE is this huge, hard-to-define entity that is pretty bloody cool, “somewhat” complex and so deep you can easily lose yourself within it. Players like to write about EVE, whether it be a guide to the latest really complex lovingly crafted system, whose face their alliance just grinded into the dirt, or a guide to that mission or complex they just completed.
So some bright spark at CCP decided that it would be cool to have a central repository where people could put all of this stuff and others could easily locate it. Someone said wiki’s were cool, so the EVElopedia was conceived and brought to life. It had a bit of an unsteady birth; issues with moderation and various other things initially hampered its growth, but it has since steadily grown in popularity and use.
What is the wiki

So the EVElopedia is a wiki. Put simply: it allows users to create simple Web pages on whatever they like and other users to search and locate that information. For the EVElopedia, this means any and all information related to EVE. For example:

• How does Tech 2 production work?
• The timeline of the EVE Universe?
• What’s a good way to fit and fly an Incursus?
• What were the major battles alliances fought in 2009?
• Who are the CSM and what do they do?

But it says beta?

It’s a bit ugly though. It’s also still in beta. It also has some lingering annoyances. So we decided it was high time we kicked it up the arse so we have the release version coming out very soon™. Unfortunately for me and wanting to show off in this blog, we mainly fixed a ton of boring behind-the-scenes work that was getting in the way of us progressing the EVElopedia along with the players like we wanted to. But here’s what we did change that you will notice:
We fixed ugly...


Into new sexy...

We removed the moderation queue

We had a system where you would edit a page and then it would go into an internal queue where our volunteers would check the edits and then approve the changes made to a page. While our vols did a great job, it really wasn’t the best idea. So we tried a few things and decided to go with the best suggestion: remove it. So we removed it.
We still have a very few pages that we will simply just lock. 99.9% of the pages on the EVElopedia you can edit at will. I know what some of you are thinking! Don’t do it, we will ban you. We will still be looking over all the submissions and anything that breaches the rules will get you spanked and possibly banned depending on how naughty you were. The rules aren’t that complex, but basically boil down to “don’t be a wanker.”
We fixed our backend

So many potential bad jokes. Anyway, this took ages and is boring, but during the initial development cycle and birth of the EVElopedia we did some things right and some things not-so-right. So we took a long look at it, chucked out a lot of stuff that was getting in the way of enabling players to contribute, and added a lot more support that allows us to easily add player requests, for example new extensions. We put in support for localization (not everyone likes English, you know) and laid the groundwork for better links from in-game to EVElopedia. EVElopedia is now much more closely aligned with its mediawiki core, which basically means we can move faster and operate better, allowing us to bring player requests and suggestions onboard to expand and improve EVElopedia.
Implemented a content portal system

We are implementing a portal system to make it easier to navigate around various subjects, something we were really lacking before. Hunting for something specific is fine, but trying to find all the help you can on mining or PvP can be laborious. We’ve started the portal system in this release and hopefully the some of you will come on board and help us expand it post release.
More Content!

There are a lot of good EVE Online wikis already out there. We want to work with these to both projects advantage. To that end we are working in partnership with EVE University and EVE History wikis to port over some of their best articles onto the EVElopedia, which we will then link directly back to the original. Also once we have implemented the in-game help links, your site's guide might be linked directly from the in-game window related to it. Which is pretty cool, IMO.
EVElopedia and you!

I’m thinking most of you will just want somewhere you can go search for a guide on advanced mining techniques, how to be a space ninja, or who are the Goonswarm – I like you people. A lot of you however will want to make new articles or update old ones – I hold you people close to my heart. Some stalwart souls will even want to really get involved and help us develop and progress the EVElopedia – you are my special people.
If you want to help further, how do you do it? We have a volunteer team (named YARR, much to their modest delight) who help us develop, support and moderate the EVElopedia. These guys liaise with you and then talk to us about what you need and require and then we get that implemented (new extension, hate the font size, etc). They happen to be recruiting!
If that’s not your cup of tea and you just want to see what people need help with or contribute to on-going projects then the Community Portal is the first stop shop as well as a hub for the community on the wiki. We currently share a forum which our volunteer EVElopedia admins and CCP watch, and you can email YARR at evelopedia@isd.eve-online.com.
Or you can simply create a new article on your favorite subject. However, please be sure that you search for the topic first, as chances are someone else has already made something and you can go and improve that instead.
The future

So that’s whats going to happen; this is what we want to happen in the not so distant future...
Decent editor

The current, basic wiki editor is rather awful, and we’d like to get something WYSIWYG-like in place to allow more people to easily create and update articles. This is sensible, we are sensible.
In-game help

This was actually going to make it in for the summer, but my heart was broken and it got delayed. Basically, we want to turn the help button you have on windows to directly go to an appropriate EVElopedia help article. This seems sensible; our current help doesn’t.
Localization

We might already have this in place by release. But we like more languages. More languages are sensible.
IMMERSION PROJECT

We're hard at work on the first part of the Immersion Project, a central storehouse of all our lore so far. It's up to nearly a thousand articles, and it won't be long before we can let you guys get your first look at it.
--
So what does all this resolve into. A leaner, easier to use, more pretty EVElopedia. Its my fervent hope that the community will get even more involved with the EVElopedia and we will see all manner of beautiful and crazy articles appear.
Thanks,
Ginger.


More...

The four price indices of New Eden have been calculated for July 2011. For more detail on the indices, please refer to the price level chapter of the QEN.
The Mineral Price Index seem to be stabilizing after a sharp fall in the last two months, but individual minerals are still fluctuating a bit.
The 2.4% fall in the Primary Producer Price Index is mainly driven by a 13% fall in the price of Technetium. Technetium prices had been rising steadily since Tech II blueprint requirements were changed in the Dominion expansion. In June, this trend started to reverse, with Technetium prices falling by 4.5%, and in July, the price dropped by 13%. This comes at a time when the Northern Coalition, known as a major producer of Technetium, lost a lot of ground. Technetium moons changing hands may hamper moon mining operations for a short while, which would reduce supply. This should raise the price instead of reducing it. However, supply of Technetium does not seem to have been affected noticeably. Trade volume of Technetium was at normal levels in June and July, rising a bit from May. Produced mass of Tech II ships also remained fairly stable.
The price of PLEX falls by 5% from June to July. The average price in July is on par with that of April. Speculative trading in PLEX, following a dev blog on virtual goods, seems to have created a modest spike in prices in May and June, which has now settled back at pre-blog levels.
The values for July are:

	July 2011	1 Month Change	12 Month Change
Mineral Price Index	72.0	-0.2%	16.0%
Primary Producer Price Index	76.5	-2.4%	29.4%
Secondary Producer Price Index	110.8	1.8%	11.7%
Consumer Price Index	64.2	-2.9%	7.7%

The graph shows the development of the indices since October 2003.

Full series of the four main price indices in Excel format
Full series of the four main price indices in CSV format
The August indices are expected to be published around the middle of September.


More...

The four price indices of New Eden have been calculated for July 2011. For more detail on the indices, please refer to the price level chapter of the QEN.
The Mineral Price Index seem to be stabilizing after a sharp fall in the last two months, but individual minerals are still fluctuating a bit.
The 2.4% fall in the Primary Producer Price Index is mainly driven by a 13% fall in the price of Technetium. Technetium prices had been rising steadily since Tech II blueprint requirements were changed in the Dominion expansion. In June, this trend started to reverse, with Technetium prices falling by 4.5%, and in July, the price dropped by 13%. This comes at a time when the Northern Coalition, known as a major producer of Technetium, lost a lot of ground. Technetium moons changing hands may hamper moon mining operations for a short while, which would reduce supply. This should raise the price instead of reducing it. However, supply of Technetium does not seem to have been affected noticeably. Trade volume of Technetium was at normal levels in June and July, rising a bit from May. Produced mass of Tech II ships also remained fairly stable.
The price of PLEX falls by 5% from June to July. The average price in July is on par with that of April. Speculative trading in PLEX, following a dev blog on virtual goods, seems to have created a modest spike in prices in May and June, which has now settled back at pre-blog levels.
The values for July are:

	July 2011	1 Month Change	12 Month Change
Mineral Price Index	72.0	-0.2%	16.0%
Primary Producer Price Index	76.5	-2.4%	29.4%
Secondary Producer Price Index	110.8	1.8%	11.7%
Consumer Price Index	64.2	-2.9%	7.7%

The graph shows the development of the indices since October 2003.

Full series of the four main price indices in Excel format
Full series of the four main price indices in CSV format
The August indices are expected to be published around the middle of September.


More...

What is EVE Online? Bums, Education drop outs, Marketing, Scholars have argued this question for many years and come up with such answers as: “EVE is an MMORPG” (you can just taste the scholarship at work there) or “EVE is REAL” or “EVE is ruining my god damn life and my girlfriend is about to leave me but I got a sweet kill last night in my HAC."
In any case, EVE is this huge, hard-to-define entity that is pretty bloody cool, “somewhat” complex and so deep you can easily lose yourself within it. Players like to write about EVE, whether it be a guide to the latest really complex lovingly crafted system, whose face their alliance just grinded into the dirt, or a guide to that mission or complex they just completed.
So some bright spark at CCP decided that it would be cool to have a central repository where people could put all of this stuff and others could easily locate it. Someone said wiki’s were cool, so the EVElopedia was conceived and brought to life. It had a bit of an unsteady birth; issues with moderation and various other things initially hampered its growth, but it has since steadily grown in popularity and use.
What is the wiki

So the EVElopedia is a wiki. Put simply: it allows users to create simple Web pages on whatever they like and other users to search and locate that information. For the EVElopedia, this means any and all information related to EVE. For example:

• How does Tech 2 production work?
• The timeline of the EVE Universe?
• What’s a good way to fit and fly an Incursus?
• What were the major battles alliances fought in 2009?
• Who are the CSM and what do they do?

But it says beta?

It’s a bit ugly though. It’s also still in beta. It also has some lingering annoyances. So we decided it was high time we kicked it up the arse so we have the release version coming out very soon™. Unfortunately for me and wanting to show off in this blog, we mainly fixed a ton of boring behind-the-scenes work that was getting in the way of us progressing the EVElopedia along with the players like we wanted to. But here’s what we did change that you will notice:
We fixed ugly...


Into new sexy...

We removed the moderation queue

We had a system where you would edit a page and then it would go into an internal queue where our volunteers would check the edits and then approve the changes made to a page. While our vols did a great job, it really wasn’t the best idea. So we tried a few things and decided to go with the best suggestion: remove it. So we removed it.
We still have a very few pages that we will simply just lock. 99.9% of the pages on the EVElopedia you can edit at will. I know what some of you are thinking! Don’t do it, we will ban you. We will still be looking over all the submissions and anything that breaches the rules will get you spanked and possibly banned depending on how naughty you were. The rules aren’t that complex, but basically boil down to “don’t be a wanker.”
We fixed our backend

So many potential bad jokes. Anyway, this took ages and is boring, but during the initial development cycle and birth of the EVElopedia we did some things right and some things not-so-right. So we took a long look at it, chucked out a lot of stuff that was getting in the way of enabling players to contribute, and added a lot more support that allows us to easily add player requests, for example new extensions. We put in support for localization (not everyone likes English, you know) and laid the groundwork for better links from in-game to EVElopedia. EVElopedia is now much more closely aligned with its mediawiki core, which basically means we can move faster and operate better, allowing us to bring player requests and suggestions onboard to expand and improve EVElopedia.
Implemented a content portal system

We are implementing a portal system to make it easier to navigate around various subjects, something we were really lacking before. Hunting for something specific is fine, but trying to find all the help you can on mining or PvP can be laborious. We’ve started the portal system in this release and hopefully the some of you will come on board and help us expand it post release.
More Content!

There are a lot of good EVE Online wikis already out there. We want to work with these to both projects advantage. To that end we are working in partnership with EVE University and EVE History wikis to port over some of their best articles onto the EVElopedia, which we will then link directly back to the original. Also once we have implemented the in-game help links, your site's guide might be linked directly from the in-game window related to it. Which is pretty cool, IMO.
EVElopedia and you!

I’m thinking most of you will just want somewhere you can go search for a guide on advanced mining techniques, how to be a space ninja, or who are the Goonswarm – I like you people. A lot of you however will want to make new articles or update old ones – I hold you people close to my heart. Some stalwart souls will even want to really get involved and help us develop and progress the EVElopedia – you are my special people.
If you want to help further, how do you do it? We have a volunteer team (named YARR, much to their modest delight) who help us develop, support and moderate the EVElopedia. These guys liaise with you and then talk to us about what you need and require and then we get that implemented (new extension, hate the font size, etc). They happen to be recruiting!
If that’s not your cup of tea and you just want to see what people need help with or contribute to on-going projects then the Community Portal is the first stop shop as well as a hub for the community on the wiki. We currently share a forum which our volunteer EVElopedia admins and CCP watch, and you can email YARR at evelopedia@isd.eve-online.com.
Or you can simply create a new article on your favorite subject. However, please be sure that you search for the topic first, as chances are someone else has already made something and you can go and improve that instead.
The future

So that’s whats going to happen; this is what we want to happen in the not so distant future...
Decent editor

The current, basic wiki editor is rather awful, and we’d like to get something WYSIWYG-like in place to allow more people to easily create and update articles. This is sensible, we are sensible.
In-game help

This was actually going to make it in for the summer, but my heart was broken and it got delayed. Basically, we want to turn the help button you have on windows to directly go to an appropriate EVElopedia help article. This seems sensible; our current help doesn’t.
Localization

We might already have this in place by release. But we like more languages. More languages are sensible.
IMMERSION PROJECT

We're hard at work on the first part of the Immersion Project, a central storehouse of all our lore so far. It's up to nearly a thousand articles, and it won't be long before we can let you guys get your first look at it.
--
So what does all this resolve into. A leaner, easier to use, more pretty EVElopedia. Its my fervent hope that the community will get even more involved with the EVElopedia and we will see all manner of beautiful and crazy articles appear.
Thanks,
Ginger.


More...

For a while now we've had the latest API updates running on a SISI setup on apitest.eveonline.com as well as the new key management web on supporttest.eveonline.com. Most of you API-savvy programmers probably know how the new toys work to every last detail, but I'm still going to spell them out just to make sure everything is clear.

Customizable API Keys
You've been asking for this one for a while now and here it is. The new API key system offers a variety of new features that we hope will fill both third-party developers' and third-party application users' hearts with light, joy and furry little animals.

• Up to 10 API keys per account
• Customizable access to the API + Templates
• Optional expiry date
• Access to character- and corporation information separated
• Single-character or account-wide keys

The concept of customizing your API keys is all about being able to control what information can be accessed in the API with a particular API key, and for how long. Say you want to give the director of your corporation access to your wallet info but only for today, you can create a key that only unlocks that information and expires tomorrow. When you quit your corporation you can cut off any access to your API information your former boss may have had without having to create a new key for your third-party apps.
You can also customize the key's access to API information based on characters. If you select one of your characters then the key will only apply to the selected one, if you don't the key will provide access to all your characters' info. If you have a character that's a CEO or a corporate director then you can create a corporation key which unlocks the character's corporation information.
By templates, we mean that third-party developers can provide users with links to the API key creation form with a pre-defined access mask which describes what is needed for their application to work properly and the required API pages will be selected automatically on the form.
The management web for API keys has been moved to the EVE Support website. The old one will, however, remain open and you can still create and use the old keys in the API for a while. We don't have an exact date for cutting them off; we want to give developers plenty of time to make the switch and make users aware of the changes, but we are measuring this in weeks and considering something in the order of 4-8 weeks. We'll keep an eye on the key usage though and let you know well before we flip the switch.
To use the new keys in the API you can throw out the old userID and apiKey URL parameters and use keyID and vCode instead. You can find the keyID in the first column (called ID) on the API key management website, vCode stands for Verification Code and is displayed in the same table for each key.
Technical information in CCP Stillman's dev blog from the testing period of the new keys still stands. You can find some examples of how to use the keys in the API and how to create the template/predefined links there.

Contracts
Here's another popular request from the API community. I posted a dev blog a while ago which explains the strategy we were going with at the time. To make a long story short, we decided to stick with that strategy.
We created three new pages to display contract information. Well, three pairs of pages since you can fetch character and corporation contracts.
/char/Contracts.xml.aspx: Lists contracts issued within the last month as well as all contracts marked as outstanding or in-progress. A single contract can be retreived using the contractID parameter. Each item in the list has the following attributes:

• contractID
• issuerID: The character who issued the contract.
• issuerCorpID: The corporation of which the issuer was a member of when the contract was issued.
• assigneeID: The character or corporation who was assigned to the contract, 0 if none.
• acceptorID: The character who has accepted the contract, 0 if none.
• startStationID
• endStationID
• type: Can be "ItemExchange", "Auction", "Loan" or "Courier".
• status: Can be "Outstanding", "InProgress", "CompletedByIssuer", "CompletedByContractor", "Completed", "Cancelled", "Rejected", "Failed", "Deleted" or "Reversed".
• title: The player-made description. Odd naming, we know.
• forCorp: 1 if the contract was issued on behalf of the issuer's corporation, 0 otherwise.
• availability: Can be "Public" or "Private". The availability can also be set to "My Corporation", in that case the availability here is "Private" and the assigneeID is the corporation of which the issuer was a member of when the contract was issued.
• dateIssued
• dateExpired
• dateAccepted: Empty if the contract hasn't been accepted.
• numDays: Days to complete the contract.
• dateCompleted: Empty if the contract hasn't been completed.
• price
• reward
• collateral
• buyout
• volume

/char/ContractItems.xml.aspx: Lists items that a specified contract contains, use the contractID parameter to specify the contract. Note that items for courier contracts are not displayed. Each item in the list has the following attributes:

• recordID: A unique key.
• typeID: The type of the item.
• quantity: The actual quantity.
• rawQuantity: This attribute will only show up if the quantity is a negative number in the DB. Negative quantities are in fact codes, -1 is a singleton item and -2 is a blueprint copy.
• singleton: 1 if this is a singleton item, 0 if not.
• included: 1 if the contract issuer has submitted this item with the contract, 0 if the isser is asking for this item in the contract.

/char/ContractBids.xml.aspx: Lists the latest bids that have been made to any recent auctions. The first request lists all bids made to last months auctions but subsequent requests will only display bids that have been made since that last request. The item attributes are pretty straight forward:

• bidID: A unique key.
• contractID
• bidderID
• dateBid
• amount

These pages are accessible with character keys. The /corp folder has identical pages accessible with corporation keys. The data retrieval differs slightly but the datasets returned by the API are same as in the /char folder.

Random stuff

• Items in the AssetList (and ContractItems) now include a rawQuantity attribute if the quantity in the DB is negative. Negative quantities are in fact codes, -1 is a singleton item and -2 is a blueprint copy.
• MarketOrders.xml.aspx will now return all active orders plus all orders issued in the last 7 days. An optional "orderID" parameter can be provided to fetch any order belonging to your character/corporation.
• CharacterInfo.xml.aspx now includes employment history.
• WalletJournal.xml.aspx should no longer cause a Scotty when rowCount is high.

Credits
I think it's only fair to mention that CCP Prism X and CCP Stillman did the bulk of the work on the customizable API keys. All I did was marvel at this godly construct and build a couple of minor additions to it.
So. Thanks for reading, I know it was boring and dry as usual and for that I'm not sorry. I'll see you guys on the forums.
CCP Elerhino




More...

For a while now we've had the latest API updates running on a SISI setup on apitest.eveonline.com as well as the new key management web on supporttest.eveonline.com. Most of you API-savvy programmers probably know how the new toys work to every last detail, but I'm still going to spell them out just to make sure everything is clear.

Customizable API Keys
You've been asking for this one for a while now and here it is. The new API key system offers a variety of new features that we hope will fill both third-party developers' and third-party application users' hearts with light, joy and furry little animals.

• Up to 10 API keys per account
• Customizable access to the API + Templates
• Optional expiry date
• Access to character- and corporation information separated
• Single-character or account-wide keys

The concept of customizing your API keys is all about being able to control what information can be accessed in the API with a particular API key, and for how long. Say you want to give the director of your corporation access to your wallet info but only for today, you can create a key that only unlocks that information and expires tomorrow. When you quit your corporation you can cut off any access to your API information your former boss may have had without having to create a new key for your third-party apps.
You can also customize the key's access to API information based on characters. If you select one of your characters then the key will only apply to the selected one, if you don't the key will provide access to all your characters' info. If you have a character that's a CEO or a corporate director then you can create a corporation key which unlocks the character's corporation information.
By templates, we mean that third-party developers can provide users with links to the API key creation form with a pre-defined access mask which describes what is needed for their application to work properly and the required API pages will be selected automatically on the form.
The management web for API keys has been moved to the EVE Support website. The old one will, however, remain open and you can still create and use the old keys in the API for a while. We don't have an exact date for cutting them off; we want to give developers plenty of time to make the switch and make users aware of the changes, but we are measuring this in weeks and considering something in the order of 4-8 weeks. We'll keep an eye on the key usage though and let you know well before we flip the switch.
To use the new keys in the API you can throw out the old userID and apiKey URL parameters and use keyID and vCode instead. You can find the keyID in the first column (called ID) on the API key management website, vCode stands for Verification Code and is displayed in the same table for each key.
Technical information in CCP Stillman's dev blog from the testing period of the new keys still stands. You can find some examples of how to use the keys in the API and how to create the template/predefined links there.

Contracts
Here's another popular request from the API community. I posted a dev blog a while ago which explains the strategy we were going with at the time. To make a long story short, we decided to stick with that strategy.
We created three new pages to display contract information. Well, three pairs of pages since you can fetch character and corporation contracts.
/char/Contracts.xml.aspx: Lists contracts issued within the last month as well as all contracts marked as outstanding or in-progress. A single contract can be retreived using the contractID parameter. Each item in the list has the following attributes:

• contractID
• issuerID: The character who issued the contract.
• issuerCorpID: The corporation of which the issuer was a member of when the contract was issued.
• assigneeID: The character or corporation who was assigned to the contract, 0 if none.
• acceptorID: The character who has accepted the contract, 0 if none.
• startStationID
• endStationID
• type: Can be "ItemExchange", "Auction", "Loan" or "Courier".
• status: Can be "Outstanding", "InProgress", "CompletedByIssuer", "CompletedByContractor", "Completed", "Cancelled", "Rejected", "Failed", "Deleted" or "Reversed".
• title: The player-made description. Odd naming, we know.
• forCorp: 1 if the contract was issued on behalf of the issuer's corporation, 0 otherwise.
• availability: Can be "Public" or "Private". The availability can also be set to "My Corporation", in that case the availability here is "Private" and the assigneeID is the corporation of which the issuer was a member of when the contract was issued.
• dateIssued
• dateExpired
• dateAccepted: Empty if the contract hasn't been accepted.
• numDays: Days to complete the contract.
• dateCompleted: Empty if the contract hasn't been completed.
• price
• reward
• collateral
• buyout
• volume

/char/ContractItems.xml.aspx: Lists items that a specified contract contains, use the contractID parameter to specify the contract. Note that items for courier contracts are not displayed. Each item in the list has the following attributes:

• recordID: A unique key.
• typeID: The type of the item.
• quantity: The actual quantity.
• rawQuantity: This attribute will only show up if the quantity is a negative number in the DB. Negative quantities are in fact codes, -1 indicates that the item is a singleton (non-stackable). If the item happens to be a Blueprint, -1 is an Original and -2 is a Blueprint Copy.
• singleton: 1 if this is a singleton item, 0 if not.
• included: 1 if the contract issuer has submitted this item with the contract, 0 if the isser is asking for this item in the contract.

/char/ContractBids.xml.aspx: Lists the latest bids that have been made to any recent auctions. The first request lists all bids made to last months auctions but subsequent requests will only display bids that have been made since that last request. The item attributes are pretty straight forward:

• bidID: A unique key.
• contractID
• bidderID
• dateBid
• amount

These pages are accessible with character keys. The /corp folder has identical pages accessible with corporation keys. The data retrieval differs slightly but the datasets returned by the API are same as in the /char folder.

Random stuff

• Items in the AssetList (and ContractItems) now include a rawQuantity attribute if the quantity in the DB is negative. Negative quantities are in fact codes, -1 indicates that the item is a singleton (non-stackable). If the item happens to be a Blueprint, -1 is an Original and -2 is a Blueprint Copy. For further information about negative quantities see this devblog.
• MarketOrders.xml.aspx will now return all active orders plus all orders issued in the last 7 days. An optional "orderID" parameter can be provided to fetch any order belonging to your character/corporation.
• CharacterInfo.xml.aspx now includes employment history.
• WalletJournal.xml.aspx should no longer cause a Scotty when rowCount is high.

Credits
I think it's only fair to mention that CCP Prism X and CCP Stillman did the bulk of the work on the customizable API keys. All I did was marvel at this godly construct and build a couple of minor additions to it.
So. Thanks for reading, I know it was boring and dry as usual and for that I'm not sorry. I'll see you guys on the forums.
CCP Elerhino




More...