Dec 9 2011

Printable NPC Damage Types Cheat Sheet v1.2

Yes, it’s the infamous NPC damage types list that about 80% of all EVE pilots have in place of their biographies. This time in a pretty & practical printable format:

What it shows:
- NPC Damage Types
- Weaknesses
- Drones to use (light/medium/heavy/sentry)
- Countermeasures for dampening & disruption

To download it: Right-click > Save as. Enjoy!

Changelog:
v1.0: Initial revision
v1.1: Added countermeasures
v1.2: Corrected wording of ECM


Apr 20 2010

The Ships of EVE

Federation Navy CometWhen I had the idea to integrate a preview of EVE ships in my blog gimmick ShipsQuickinfo, I had a look at what is out there, and very quickly realized that would not cut it. So I did what I always do, which is to overdo it outrageously. A single view of a ship is not enough in my eyes: to get a good idea of the ship you are looking at in a static image, you need more than one angle. I decided I would need three views: front, side and rear.

What ensued was a screenshotting session that lasted about a month on and off. Using the ingame preview window, I made three separate screenshots for every ship in the game – excluding the ones I did not have access to, namely the tournament prize ships and private/test CCP ships. Needless to say, post-processing was the biggest part. I had to rename all the screenshots, then manually edit each one to remove the labels the game adds. After that I was able to automate the rest with Photoshop batch processing.

Now that I am done there are 245 ships total, so 735 individual screenshots for the three views per ship. I am really happy with the result, as the blog gimmick is a lot more useful with the screenshots. Plus, they are unique – and that’s what I was aiming for. But the screenshots bundle offers a lot more possibilities, and I am eager to try out a few ideas.

To see how I use the screenshots in my blog, click on any of the following ship names:

Daredevil
Cruor
Paladin
Dramiel
Federation Navy Comet
Brutix
Crow
Gold Magnate
Keres

This gimmick is free to use for your site, the libraries are open source. You can download it from the ShipsQuickinfo project page.

And finally, the eye candy :) These are the 245 ships:

UPDATE: I have uploaded a much larger version on my DeviantART page.

The Ships of EVE

Note that the complete screenshots package is for sale for ingame currency. The format is a DVD with all 6 GB of post-processed screenshots as layered PSD files in 1632 x 1020 resolution. Contact me ingame or via email for details and pricing.


Apr 15 2010

ShipsQuickinfo v1.5 with Ship Screenshots

Reintroducing the website and blog gimmick Aeon’s ShipsQuickinfo: display detailed information about EVE Online ships directly inline without redirecting your users off-site. Now with custom ship screenshots with three views for each ship: front, side and rear. The script is made of a PHP backend and javascript clientside support.

Here’s what it looks like:

Abaddon
Widow
Tengu
Hulk

Features for v1.5

- New compact tabbed interface
- Custom ship screenshots bundle (separate download)
- The popups are now draggable to arrange them if you have several open
- Live set of examples to get you started
- NEW! Generate the required HTML <head> tags for your site (demo)
- Bundled ship data files, no database required
- Possibility to configure the script to use a live MySQL database
- Several issues fixed, see the changelog

Ship screenshots

The screenshots bundle available as a separate download is custom: I took the screenshots myself using the ingame preview feature. A few ships are still missing, included for now are the T1, T2 and T3 ships. I am still working on the faction ships, those will be added later.

I spent a lot of time on the screenshots, so the bundle you can download for free has a small watermark. If you want to have a watermark-free bundle, you can buy it for 15 million ISK ingame currency. The bundle of original screenshots is also for sale.

Download

You can download the script from the project page:

http://aeonoftime.com/EVE_Online_Tools/Ships_QuickInfo

There is also a live demo that you can play around with:

http://aeonoftime.com/EVE_Online_Tools/Ships_QuickInfo/demo

Upgrade notes:

For v1.4 users: just replace all files. No changes in the configuration file.
For v1.3 users: replace all files, create a new configuration file with the provided template.
For v1.2 and prior: the best is to install it from scratch.


Oct 23 2009

Howto: Mine efficiently

Personally I don’t care much about mining micromanagement. Even if an asteroid only has 700 units left, I just let my mining turrets complete their cycle. My Hulk does not even have a survey scanner on it. Blasphemy, right? Well I do know better, even if I do not do it that way. If you want to micromanage your mining operation, you need a survey scanner so you can see how much ore is left in the asteroids around you. If necessary, that allows you to adjust the cycles of your mining turrets to avoid losing precious cycle times on those that only have a few units left.

To be able to do that precisely, you have to know how much a single cycle will yield of the ore you are mining. Let’s say you are mining Veldspar: with my current setup, I get about 17.000 units per cycle. So if you divide the dial of your mining laser into sections, you can determine how much that turret has mined so far. That way you will know when to manually stop the turret so it only mines the 7500 units that asteroid has left in it. Of course that’s the hardcore micromanagement for those who want to pick a belt completely clean. The lazy micromanagers (not sure that makes sense) use the survey scanner to pick the big asteroids and move on to the next when they do not have a full cycle of ore left.

We are the hardcore micromanagers though! However, because calculating on the fly gets tedious real quick and as paper is not an option (think green :) ), here is a little tool I built that will do it for you.

Just enter the total yield per cycle of your turret in the field under the dials and it will display the according values. You can also change the name of the ore in the dials, I included some of the most common ones.

Here is a direct link to the flash file, that way you can use it fullsize. Here in the blog I had to downsize it a little. Suggestions and requests welcome!

P.S. Yes, that is a logistics ship tailing the Hulk in the screenshot. Better safe than sorry in some parts of the EVE universe…