Hello Capsuleers,
TL;DR: Atlas, a collaborative wormhole mapper on lgi.tools, is in early beta. Not ready to replace a real mapper. Looking for people to try the basic flow: paste scans, ID sigs, jump holes, general basic mapping. Report bugs via the feedback button or post here, and just generally help me see if the live backend scales. Scopes are broad because the whole multi-tool shares one login.
Try it here: lgi.tools/atlas
I’ve been working on a multi-tool web app for EVE. My current focus is a collaborative mapper called Atlas. I’ve got it to a very basic but usable early-beta state.
I want to be clear up front this is not ready for anyone living in wormhole space as their full time mapper. This is really a request for feedback and general thoughts on whether people like the direction. I’m trying to nail the basic user flow before I pile on features. If you do some day tripping and ninja huffing it may function well enough for that, just not anyone living full time in j-space.
If you try it, you can post here or use the feedback button on the app to let me know what you think. Especially any bugs or things of that nature.
The app is hosted, so I’m paying to run it. The other tools (industry planner, skill queues, and so on) don’t cost much. The mapper is different. I built it on convex.dev specifically to get a more real-time collaborative experience than other mappers. Everyone on the same map is effectively on a live stream of that map. If one person updates something, everyone else looking at it sees the change at the same time.
I have ideas for features that lean on that, but right now it’s just a basic mapper. Because of how it works, it can get expensive, so I also need to see how the design scales. People simply messing around on it would tell me if there are any glaring issues that would make hosting it a problem.
A few things that work today:
- Paste signatures.
- Once a signature is identified, harvestable sites (gas or ore) pull live values from Jita.
- Combat sites work the same way.
- Click a gas site or combat site on the map and you get the sleeper breakdown without leaving the map: waves, DPS, harvestable quantities and volumes, and isk values.
Isk values are currently pegged to Jita 4-4 sell orders and I’m doing my best to filter junk orders. At some point I have plans on expanding the pricing features. On the bright side the prices are very fresh. I use a shared caching layer across the entire app for pricing data. In short, prices are fetched from the ESI on view, that data is then stored in my DB as a cache, anyone else on the app viewing the same item/values gets to see that stored value or if it’s too old triggers a refresh. Same idea for combat sites. The goal is to keep the numbers as fresh as I can.
Wormhole identification is process of elimination. I keep track of the known wormhole signatures in a system and cross-reference them against the statics. As you identify them, the remainders get identified automatically.
The same thing happens when you jump. For example If a system has two wormholes that are two statics, say a C1 and C3 static and you jump one of them, I can compare the system you landed in to the known connections to determine which hole you jumped (hopefully). When the app decides it knows the rest of the holes, you get a little popup. I don’t think I’ve nailed the visual side of that yet. The popup isn’t that clear. Feedback on how to make it more obvious is welcome. If it already feels fine, that’s useful too.
Node positions are another piece. The layout algorithm runs locally in the browser. It is not synced the same way the other map data is. The goal is that everyone looking at a map sees the same visual layout by using a deterministic algorithm without having to track x, y coordinates. This is efficient and effective but has a few issues. When nodes spawn or despawn, the whole map shuffles. It does that for everyone, so you’re still looking at the same picture, but I don’t like having to relearn the orientation every time something changes. I’m working on locking nodes in place.
I’m also going to add more basic, useful information on the map. Distances to hubs once you hit K-space, for example. Also, currently if you click a system you only get signature and anomaly counts. I want to flesh that out. On any given node, if one system has 5 gas sites and another has 20 combat anomalies, I want to see at a glance the total ISK value of the system and how that breaks down across gas, combat, and so on.
Hopefully I can ship those two updates in two to three weeks.
A note on scopes
I’ve been building this mostly for myself and my friends, so I’ve jumped around between features. As a result many things are sort of unfinished and the scope request is fairly broad. Every feature on the site shares the same login. It’s a multi-tool. Even if you only log in to map, the industry planner is fully functional for you as well.
There are some skill-queue pages and other pages I had grand ideas for and never found time to develop. What I actually use for my gameplay is the industry planner for T3 production, and the atlas for wormhole sites / huffing, and mapping.
If you’re wondering why a mapper asks for things like assets: the industry planner lets you load a blueprint, pick the character you’re going to build with, and set the structures. From that it calculates margins, more or less. I wouldn’t call it 100% perfect. I stopped focusing on that side of the app. It’s a decent indicator of what can be profitable, but what I was really using it for is keeping track of production assets.
Example: you want to build a Loki. Plug it in and you see each tier of items that need to be produced, consolidated. Nested trees in this game are hard to read when you’re getting into manufacturing. I group everything by tier. Tier 1 is closest to final assembly, Tier 2 is everything that has to be built to feed tier 1 and so on. For me this gives clear view of the whole product.
Acquisition is tracked with a green progress ring around the quantities you need. You see the item, what it is, how it’s categorized, how many you need, and the ring fills in as you acquire them. Once you have enough, it checks off. Click the progress bar and you get a better breakdown of what you need, what you have, and where the stuff you have is located.
Same for blueprints. Owned blueprints and reaction formulas get pulled into the material math. You can override what’s being used to see how a different ME would change materials and margin.
That’s a tangent from the mapper. I only wanted to explain why the scopes are so large. I’d be a little sketched out logging into a mapping tool and seeing all of that requested.
Similar to how wormhole sites already pull into Atlas, I do want to bundle more of the main site into the map so it feels like one experience. Jobs running in a system showing on the map, routing to them, and a few other ideas. We’ll see how far I get with that.
Let me know what you think. o7
-Stormin
