EVE Technology Lab

When querying your corps Asset list, it would be nice when the API returns the location of the POS, it returns what real location the towers and its structures sits at, instead of what system the POS is located at.

When writing an asset tracker, I just had a thought about what happens if a corp happens to have more than one POS in the system? All labs, towers, and everything else ends up showing on the asset list as in the system, which makes it more difficult to ascertain what belongs to what. :(

One could reference /corp/StarBaseList.xml.aspx to get the location of the tower, but this won't help with what is at the POS, such as structures or containers hanging around.

Forget about that.... What if you were to give us the XYZ coordinates of any item in space, leave the locationID as is pointing to the solar system, then leave it on the code monkeys to do the math on our end to figure out where the closest item in space is against mapDenormalize.

This should be really easy since
A> You're already accessing the list of items owned
B> Some sort of database already knows the XYZ coordinates of any player owned object in space since we can query for their existence AND objects always appear in the exact same spot when we warp away and warp back to location
C> It shouldn't break anyone elses code since you're just adding to the API row.
C.1> If you fear that it will, adding an additional parameter to the URL would allow for XYZ to be added. Something like checking for &XYZ in the URL would add the fields as needed for items located in space.

The XYZ coordinate could be added to each row in the format of XYZ="1.34,3.56,4.71" or whatever.

As you know, the starbase list has moonid for each tower, after that you are on your own.

There isn't realy a simply solution to it, and you would have to make your own data tables to make sense of it, where you have to map each pos-mod to a tower manually (yes it sucks)
The best way I have found doing this is finding the itemid for an item in a given hangar and use that to then retrieve an arrays itemid. And map that in its own table with type of hangar (lab,component factory etc etc) to which pos it's anchored at.

The least annoying way I have come up with is using the show info link URL you get from dragging an item into an in game chat channel hit enter, then copy paste the sent link into a normal text field (notepad,html form etc etc) this will give you a string like



To make more practical use of this I have a small web form where I select tower,type the name of the array and copy paste an url like above (linked from the hangar itself)

If the itemid is in the database asset table then I use it to find witch containing itemid it is (the array itself) and store that in a table mapping it to it's tower.

I have so far used this mainly to map our long term fuel storage and with the right sql I use this mapping method to calculate not only how long the towers themselves are running but also how long we can keep them running from storage.
(all API updated and calculated on a web-page)

Now I dont see a magic tool to do this, this should probably be something a corp\alliance should figure out on their own. (yes, once you get large enough you need your own corporate tools dev...)



Addendum: I can actualy use this show info 'trick' to view items in a container from corp hangar, or what fittings a ship in an SMA has on it (including cargo)

System location.
Clarifcation:
Since the assets api list only returns location ID, not the X,Y,Z coordinates.

The locationID is either systemID, or a stationID if memory serves.

Second addendum:
I would love a third starbase API where we could actualy get a list of the mods anchored near a given tower with the x,y,z coordinates.
I think that would work a lot better than having x.y,z in the assets list since this would only be applicable to stuff anchored out in space.

Granted we got a lot of stuff in space, but we have far more inside the stuff we have in space :P

I was only refering to that the show info URL method is the only way outside of api that I know of you can retrieve ItemId's.


This should be one of the bonuses of the 64bit item id's, they are no longer being reused, they might get destroyed, but they should be unique as long as the item remains unstack able.

In my guess it's simply a problem with ccp not giving us the x,y,z coordinates so we are forced to make do with what we can..

At first I tried something similar as Two-Step's method only I made the mistake of using strippers and my members couldnt stop messing with them...

I was just thinking.... If CCP were to NOT change the locationID given in the API, but instead ADD to the particular row the XYZ coordinate, WE can do the figuring on where the position of each item in space is on our own. All CCP has to do is give us the numbers. No additional calculating API side, just querying an extra single or three fields.

*goes and changes his OP*

I would love having x y z coordinates, although I dont want to see them in the assets api, since almost 90% of the items in it doesn't need them.

What I would love (as I mentioned) is a brand new api call which only lists the items we anchor in space something like ItemId,Custom_name,x,y,z (I dont need typeid, we have that in the assets dump, but It probably couldnt hurt), The custom name field might also be a pipe dream but it would realy help us out, althoug if you grid map your pos you should be able to pin-point by the x y z alone.

We can then use that data alone to map out our towers modules etc without having to fill alot of fluff into the assets api call wich already gets quite large enough as it is, and we dont realy want x y z fields for all the items in the hangars\arrays (especially since we cant restack on pos's (I mean repackage)) as it is we just want to know where the hangar\factory is.

Just for a little history on this I thought I'd point out the Q&A part of the API over on Eve-id since no one else had.

http://wiki.eve-id.net/APIv2_Corp_StarbaseDetail_XML

As far as I know they haven't changed the server structure in a way that would change the original reason why it couldn't be done. Those of you looking to get XYZ of stuff I think are truly out of luck but it would be nice if they could at least give us the moonID instead of the solarsystemID and IMHO could lead to less work for them at startup and when doing some of the backend processing of a POS but they may see it differently.

I understand WHs add another complexity to working with POSes. Correct me if I'm wrong since I haven't done anything with WHs but my understand is there is only one per system at a time. If that's true if all of the other POSes in a system used moonID then the only POS stuff that would be left with solarsystemID would be the ones in the WH right? so it might still solve the problem just having the moonID on the ones where it's known. Just a thought anyway if my understanding is correct.

One per moon, actually. (I know my home system has quite a few towers.)