CCPs most recent addition to their arsenal of addons – The Empyrean Age – allows players to engage in combat with the enemies of their chosen Empire, by joining with the Militia. This opens up a whole new can of worms with regards to PVP, not only in Low Sec, but also – as enemies of the Empire count as War Targets – in High Sec.

The graph this post is linked to shows the impact The Empyrean Age has had on the number of Pod Pilots killed in Low and High Sec space before, and directly after the introduction of these new features.

Link: Graph showing pod pilot kills

Shortly after tightening the straps on old-faithful, I came up with a method that would generate perimeters around a set of 2D nodes. Basically, I would take the center point of a ‘region’, or set of 2D nodes, first of all by normalizing the min/max (in practice min=0, max=max-min), and place a line of detection stretching out 50% of the region width. This I would then shrink down unit by unit until a solar system was found within the specified sphere of detection (approximately 4×4 units on an image scale of 200×200), and then draw a line from the previous point, to this new point. This process would be repeated around a 360 rotation, creating a full outline of the target region.

I’m sure there is a better method than the one I have touched on, and used here, but for the time being this seems to work; and I only need to generate the coordinates for the regions polygon once, after which they can be scaled and reused as needed.

While this method works (as you can see from the attached gallery), it has not really aided in the ability for users to see jump data. Many regions overlap, and as such the map generally becomes a mish-mash of regions, jostling for space. The next step I would like to take before continuing with developing the statistics app (for jump / kill statistics, in an animated map over custom time scales / regions) is to generate each region separately, which in fact I can already do; the difference in my new target is that I would like each region to ‘displace’ its neighbours, so no two region overlaps, giving a nice margin around each region. Now, I’ve got a hunch of how to go about this, but nothing solid right now, so back on goes the thinking cap!

In the mean while, feel free to check out these generated images. The first image is of the entire EVE Online universe, and the others are of individual regions. They have all been created completely automatically using one PHP script, and one large chunk of data.

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This is an on-going project, and I will be feeding in further information to refine the display, such as kill data, security status, region etc, to make the map more informative, and easier to read at a glance. My hope is that these maps will be of use to Alliances for keeping watch on possible troop movements / combat operations in and around their space.

Other future improvements will be the automatic generation of animated maps spanning custom time-scales, region / constellation specific maps, as well as alerts (if this little experiment moves that far forward).

The current method used to judge the appropriate size / color of the ellipses is pretty basic..take the highest jump count in the ‘verse, and use the jump amount of the target system against it as a ratio, providing a sliding scale for color and size. As mentioned, I would like to plug in kill data into this some how, as well as perhaps taking some influence from mean jump amounts for color / size determination, to make the display a little smoother, while retaining the ease of viewing.

This may well not go anywhere, but I would really like to beef up the generator to display region / constellation boundaries, as well as Sovereignty and the total number of players online.

Anyway, if you’re interested you can take a peek at the initial dump (the weekend of 19th April) at http://www.othala.co.uk/eve_jumps/19_04_48hr/. Any suggestions, requests, feel free to send them to me ingame (my character name is Seidr), or through my website.

Example output – download

The deeper down the sometimes dauntingly long ladders of logic programmers decent while coding during this trance-like state makes me wonder in what way are these artificial constructs held together, without fragmenting and dissipating into the usual background-noise of the ever-busy cortex. What causes these constructs to fade, just as fast as they had been conceived in a sudden flash-fire of obliteration that leaves us grasping for dear life to the ideas, the concepts that we have seen appear before us. Which areas of coding cause different ‘tick-over’ speeds in the brain? These are questions I would love to ask, but dread to try and answer.

Seeking information on the run-time of the brain is no simple task, especially for a lay-man without his own EEG unit. Thanks to the guys over at OpenEEG, anyone with the time, skills and a relatively small amount of cash (~£100) can build and operate their own EEG unit, allowing the user to delve into the different states-of-mind, reflected in the patterns of brain-activity gleened via EEG. Building an EEG unit is therefor, my first goal.

What to do once I’ve got an EEG? Seeing as my goal is the study of brain-activity during what I’m calling, ‘The Coders Trance’, one route to go down would be to record one such session in its entirety, allowing myself to drift in to this Trance, while recording not only the EEG session, but also the Key Strokes in real-time of the coding session, allowing me to effectively play back both sessions in tandem, viewing the brains reaction to different problems as I skip between goals and targets within the projected Source Code.

What do I hope to learn? Now, that is a tricky question. As you may have seen in the Programming section of Othala.co.uk, I’ve got an interest in Bin-aural Beats, which was sparked when I got into the programming of my own portable alternative to the Brain Wave Generator. This PME (Portable Meditation Engine) was to be for Sony’s portable console, the PSP. Bin-aural Beats are able to induce certain states of mind and aid in meditation, concentration, sleep etc. What I would hope to learn from performing an experience as outline above, is what state of mind, at what speed the brain ‘ticks over’ when a programmer is in this trance-like state, and if the sensation can be reproduced using a Bin-aural Beat, designed to induce the same brain-state, using wave-patterns gathered and observed from the EEG.

Who knows if anything will come of this, but I thought the musings were worthy of a Blog post..my very first proper Blog post as a matter-of-fact!

Reference Links

OpenEEG

Derek Sivers – Programming is like Songwriting

Paul Graham – Hackers and Painters

Mike Cherim – The Coder

Denis Wier – A Suggested Model for Trance

Othala.co.uk is a repository for the creations, deliberations and thoughts of Psilocybeing on subjects ranging from Digital and Photographic Art, to articles and creations in the field of Programming.

You will also find here a Blog, which Psilocybeing will update from time-to-time with thoughts, speculations and more often than not, completely unadulterated ramblings.