from Hacker News

How to parse EVE Online chat logs (in Common Lisp)

by michaelmdresser on 11/28/21, 2:05 AM with 23 comments

  • by sen on 11/28/21, 8:21 AM

    I loved my time playing EVE, spent a fair few years running a major (couple hundred players) Corp in one of the big alliances back pre-pearlabyss. We had a whole suite of web apps that integrated with EVE auth and API, and managed various aspects of the game for us. Threat Intel by putting bots into enemy chats then scraping for keywords (mentions of certain system names), tools to monitor the markets for certain prices/shortages we cared about, custom maps that let players submit scan data, etc etc.

    I’ve never experienced any other game that gives you the rush of a major alliance battle in EVE.

    It’s an incredible game with a lot of insanely smart people playing and some great communities around it, but regretfully I had to “win” as life is life.

    o7

  • by ben0x539 on 11/28/21, 8:54 AM

    Oh, hey, I had one of these when I was afk-ratting in an Ishtar in Guristas space, those were the days: https://github.com/ben0x539/eve-log-alert

    I'd drop my Ishtar[s] in an anomaly[s], then tab out and probably read hacker news or something, and completely forget about it, usually leading to either dying as I didn't check intel channels or even look for hostiles in the local system, or wasting time as I didn't warp to the next anomaly after clearing the current one. With a simple ruby script, a janky sql query and a pile of ugly heuristics, most of that stopped being a problem, as a very loud noise would remind me to warp away! It hits a "sweet spot" of being totally non-reusable but doing exactly what I need it to while remaining just editable enough to hack in more special cases/heuristics...

    It wasn't a super time-efficient way to get space-rich, but at least somewhat effort-efficient, and it netted me enough that I could probably have bought a titan or three. Of course I eventually lost most of my net worth by having it invested in shitty minerals and being unsubscribed as the floor fell out under that market.

    Those were the days.

  • by amerine on 11/28/21, 4:29 AM

    I love love love posts talking about using our skills to make our entertainment ours. Kudos for sharing and much love for sharing how you are making EVE just a little more fun.

  • by grimgrin on 11/28/21, 4:36 AM

    I like to enhance games with log parsing too. Been playing muds again lately and writing logs with the mud/telnet client (tintin++) to be parsed/spat out in tmux splits, which works great

    (as an aside, I started looking and testing mushclient, which is adored by many. nick gammon has been upkeeping it for years and it offers a ton of features/settings)

  • by laserbeam on 11/28/21, 8:50 AM

    I used to have an eve chat log parsing tool for getting all the kills in a roam. I'd just ask everyone to x-up once, would then grab their names and timestamps from the chat logs, and then ask zkill what happened to those players during the fleet chat. This was perfect for the kind of chaotic, but small roams we did with Eve Uni, and for the fact that we used to write after action reports after most fleets.

    It would sort those kills, and add separators between fights based on time.

    It's one of the simplest things I've ever implemented, and I think Eve Uni still used it for years after I stopped playing. Eve chat logs are beautiful.

  • by zeristor on 11/28/21, 12:42 PM

    Before this used to be Play By Email games one from the 80s being Empire.

    Sean Eddy, he’s probably on HNews, wrote some software to process the emails to get a lead on other teams.

    As I remember the story this keen interest helped him hone the skills for genetics analysis, but he could just have been a natural.

    https://www.the-scientist.com/uncategorized/a-mind-apart-450...

    or:

    https://archive.md/3IbBK

    I’m reminded of Richard Feynman honing is mathematical skills at school competitions.

    Suffice to say these skills with the impetus behind them are hugely useful.

  • by azalemeth on 11/28/21, 3:48 PM

    I played EVE for about 4 years around the late 2000s and early 2010s. It's the only game I've ever played where (a) physical units were respected in calculations (e.g. tracking speeds in radians per second; distances in Pc -> Ly -> AU -> km -> m) and (b) other players contained a nonzero number of linux kernel developers...

  • by Yhippa on 11/28/21, 4:44 AM

    In general, what is a good language to parse game logs?