This is a primtive tool to aid my obsessive book-keeping during exploration
trips in EVE Online: A Bad Game. eve.xhtml and eve.cgi are intended to be
deployed on a webserver that will run eve.cgi as a ruby cgi script, and to
be accessed from the EVE Online ingame webbrowser. The cgi script requires a
writable file with the name eve-data in its working directory. Adding to the
log requires the password hardcoded into eve.cgi, the default value is
"secretpassword".
Exploration in EVE Online means using a Probe Launcher and several Scanner Probes to find locations in various EVE Online solar systems that cannot otherwise be navigated to. These sites usually provide PvE activities like hunting NPC pirates for bounties and loot or performing special profession-based tasks. Other sites are wormholes that lead to other systems in space.
During the scanning procedure, sites will be displayed under an ID consisting
of three letters and three digits, such as ABC-123, usually well before the
site is actually reachable or can even be classified. This ID will remain
constant for the duration of the site's existence (or until the next downtime,
whichever is sooner), so upon later searches in the same solar system, it may
be useful to compare the known IDs of known-useless sites against the ones
currently visible.
This tool will simply allow you to keep a log of identified sites and search
through the log by ID. The sole advantage over a text file or spreadsheet is
that the ingame browser will submit the solar system you are in with the
request to the cgi script, so that and the current time will be noted down
automatically.
Use the EVE Online ingame browser to navigate to eve.xhtml. While scanning,
copy and paste the entire scan results table into the form field and press
Submit whenever you see something new. Fill in the password, but leave the
solar system field empty for normal usage.
You will see a table with the information you entered up to now for this solar system, along with timestamps indicating when a signature was first recorded or last amended: When you paste a new scan results table, it will amend missing type and name columns in existing entries as well as append new entries.
Once you know the type (Unknown, Gravimetric, etc.) of a site, you might decide it is not worth investigating further. On subsequent visit to the same system, you will see the previously recorded information once you submit your first set of scan results, and hence can quickly determine whether new sites have spawned since your last visit.
The displayed entries are automatically filtered for the current solar system and timestamps no older than 72 hours. Note that signature IDs change with downtime, so entries more recent than the last downtime are highlighted.
- The password should really be read from a separate credentials file outside of the webserver's document root, I suppose.
- A standalone webserver might be useful so that the whole thing can be run locally, trading the convenience of a central log that can be used by multiple users scanning the same systems for ease of setup.
- The (clientside) JavaScript is fairly ugly since I was pretty much learning as I went along, so it is lacking in use of frameworks and organization.