As stated in my last post, making this tool was both easier and more difficult than I was expecting. I thought I’d explain that, and shed a little light on a couple of libraries that made this oh so much easier than originally expected.

The libraries in question are LibDogma and PHP-Dogma. These libraries meant that I didn’t have to think about what any modules did. I just tell them ‘This ship, these skills, these modules and rigs’ and I get back an answer saying ‘this hp, these resists’.

This is the core of any fitting tool, and what makes writing fitting tools so much, umm, fun. So many little caveats, the various stacking rules, and so on, and so on. Libdogma takes care of all of it. php-dogma lets me access libdogma from inside a php page.

With that out of the way, it was a straight run home, tying it into the code I’d already written for the evaluator to parse the input. And just a little for calculating and outputting the EHP. That’s the ‘Easier than expected’ bit.

The more difficult than expected comes from the expectations that I had, when I found libdogma. I’m using a Centos 6 server, which comes with gcc 3.4.4. That won’t compile libdogma. So I found an updated rpm and tried that. No dice.

Eventually I downloaded and compiled clang (the latest version) from source. That built libdogma fine, and it passed all the tests.

At which point php-dogma refused to compile. It appears to have been a problem with php 5.3.27, as after an upgrade to 5.4, it all worked fine. And the first time I tried, I’d forgotten to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH, so it didn’t find libdogma. Took me a little time to run that one to ground.

Short sentences, to cover quite a lot of time banging on things, and hoping they’d work.

Anyway, as php-dogma is agpl, I’ve released the code on github under the agpl as well. Short version, if you don’t know the license: Add it to what you want, but if you let people use it, then you have to let them have access to the source, including if it’s as a service. Obviously, IANAL, so you’ll want to look at the license in more detail, if you’re not happy releasing your code.

The idea for an update to my scan evaluator tool came up on twitter and it struck me as interesting. Turned out to be both more and less complicated than I thought it might be, but I’ll go into that in a different post, in case you’re interested in the techy details.

The non-techy details are pretty simple. Take a ship scan, paste it into the tool and bang, you get an estimation of how much EHP the ship has.

Now, because I don’t have a huge database of people’s stats (and if I did, I wouldn’t use it, as I wouldn’t have people’s permission for it. So they’d stop giving me the stats), it’s assuming that they have all relevant skills at 5. And the irrelevant ones, but those aren’t relevant. It’s also not giving them any fleet boosts. And there’s the possibility the ship scan missed a tank module, so you didn’t tell the tool about it.

Aside from those caveats, all the test ships I’ve thrown at this have come out with the figures (+/- 1 hp) that pyfa was telling me (aside from one bug that I’ve reported.)

Of course, No warranty is given for people using this for nefarious purposes such as scanning cargo ships and deciding how many ships to commit to attacking them.

Credit is due to Artefact2, without whom I couldn’t have done this (at least, not in the short period of time it took.)

I have some thoughts about functionality to add, such as alerts about open slots. But that’s a future update. This is the initial release.

No warranty is given for any purpose, If your computer explodes when using the tool, it’s all your fault, you should have been nicer to it.

This only applies for T2 things with the blueprint calculator.

You’ll find a new row in the Time Calculations box. This is called iskh 24H rounding

This is taking the time taken to manufacture all the runs for the invented blueprint, rounding it up to the next 24 hours (so a 3 hour run takes 24 hours, a 25 hour run takes 48 and so on) and then calculating the isk/hr as if that’s the time taken.

This is so you can have an idea of how much isk/hr you’re making, if you’re only putting jobs in once a day, at the same time. It’s not perfect, of course. If you have a window of several hours, then a 25 hour job probably won’t consume 48 hours of a slot.

But if you look at something like a Hobgoblin II then you can see how it affects your profitability if you’re doing a single run per day.

As it’s not relevant for non-limited runs, it’s not added for those.

Just a quick update on the blueprint calculator. (Well, It wasn’t that quick to do. But it should be very simple to understand.)

The blueprint list created by the form, https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprints/enterlist.php, will now show an ISK/hr, an ISK/HR for POS manufacturing (basic arrays only.) and isk/hr for POS, with the datacores cost removed, for -4ME -4 PE blueprints.

It’s not perfect; T2 Ships can’t be made in regular ship arrays. This doesn’t pay attention to that. And R.A.M’s are kinda ignored, due to the rounding to less than 1 unit. But it’s indicative enough, and simple to check up on. All skills are assumed to be 3, when determining the cost of the datacores.

Long term, I’m planning on having it being possible to override the skills, but that probably won’t happen till SSO is available, as I don’t want to go to the trouble of writing a full user management system when something should be coming out some time in the next 6 months or so.

The github is mostly up to date, but I need to add in the details for how to manage the infrastructure needed, like a copy of price data in the database, possibly with a data loader, to pull it from my archived copy.