Skill Discussions

It's a known (and annoying) bug. #1 in my personal list of things I'd like to get fixed.

https://github.com/evemondevteam/evemon/issues/12




Really pleased that you've picked this up, by the way.

Sounds tiny...

Support for citadels is, in a word, missing in EVEmon. It's going to take some time to resolve, because there are a number of steps involved in making the change. In addition, plans are underfoot to terminate suppoort for the XML API over the next 8 months and so I need to be sure that whatever is developed is future proofed.

The current plan is to update the data files for EVEMon and merge a few proposed fixes into the code and release. It serves two purposes: firstly, I get to know the code a bit better by going through the release process, and secondly everyone gets up-to-date data. The next release will probably focus on support for citadels, which will hopefully fix some of the more prominent issues quite naturally.

More soon...

Ash

I understand this, genuinely I do... The thing is that I can release what I plan to release probably this week. To prevent crashes where citadels are concerned could take a few days, maybe longer. To add proper support for citadels might take weeks, I'm not sure yet.

Bullet point one from "how you can help me" in my original post - patience...

I'm super-happy to see renewed enthusiasm for evemon. I've been chatting with Ashilta a bit, sounds like he's got his work cut out for him bringing this one up to scratch, so throw in if you can people!

Hey all,

A quick update from me... Well I say quick...

For obvious reasons, EVEMon is a little bit behind the curve. Consider that the last release of the application was 6 months ago, and just how much has changed in that time - Citadels are a thing now, we've seen new ships and items introduced and a lot of things have been overhauled. There have been some smaller changes too - where ship traits used to exist in the description window, there's now a whole new tab, the system around certifications has changed and we've a whole new API to explore. To facilitate all of this, CCP made some changes to their data structure, and this is reflected in the Static Data Export which EVEMon uses to function.

Long story short, whilst I had hoped to release a new version of EVEMon today, it's simply not going to happen. The list of things that needs to happen in order to facilitate a release is growin as I find more and more bits that I don't know about. To some degree, that's bad news as it obviously means that a release is getting further and further away. But there's some light at the end of the tunnel - with the situation the way it is, I have an opportunity to refactor some of the code and get things moving in the right direction. Hopefully, done right, I can take the opportunity to set some things up for the future to make sure that with or without me, EVEMon is never in this state again.

What's the plan moving forward?
My goal, still, is to get a release of EVEMon together that contains all of the updated static data for EVE, as quickly as possible and provide it to you guys (and me - I want it too!). To achieve that, I'm planning the following:

• Any functionality relating to certifications/masteries will be temporarily disabled.
• The tool that produces the data files which EVEMon relies on will be refactored to rectify the missing traits data in what's produced
• The tool that produces the installation package for EVEMon is currently dysfunctional and requires fixing

Completing these three items should get me in a state where I can provide a new version of EVEMon. As for how long this will take, I really don't know at the moment. I'm still dealing with a few unknowns - I've never used this tool for creating installation packages before, for example - but I'm planning to explore those quickly. Think Christmas...

Is there a longer term roadmap?
Good news - yes there is! Having promised you all that I plan to release every other month at a minimum, here's what I'm planning for the next four releases:

• Release 1: Fix the static data import and the associated production of data files for EVEMon. Temporarily disable the functionality for certifications and masteries. Fix the installer builder.
• Release 2: Refactor the data file creation tool to cater for the revised format of certifications and masteries. Re-enable the disabled functionality. Provide EVEMon with some basic awareness of Citadels.
• Release 3: Refactor the code that deals with API calls to CCP-Land. This will be a largely technical release with not much functionality added to the application, but it will make life easier for anyone contributing to find and implement the right logic to make API calls. This will deliver a much greater awareness of Citadels (I think!)
• Release 4: Add and change some things in and around the character sheet, namely around Alpha and Omega clone states and some kind of depiction as to the limitations of Alpha accounts.

Four releases at a release every other month minimum means that this is a fair amount of work already planned out. Remember that I'm coming at this from the back foot - we've missed six months of development and I'm unfamiliar with the code base - this is going to take time and I need to prepare people for that.

How you can help me
I would very, very much like people to get involved in the project - you've seen the amount of work that I have planned, and that's just thebeginning, before I even consider a feature request list from the community. The components of the four releases I've listed are quite obvious, but that's just scratching the surface! There's so much more that EVEMon can deliver and I'm confident that you guys can help out with that. I would, however, ask that if you want to get involved, you drop me a line first and we work on things in a carefully structured order - open source projects are fine if you're making many, small changes, but these are fairly big chunks of work that need doing.

Take a look at the project on Github. Raise issues, fork the code and get in touch if you can think of. Whilst all of that's going on:

• Keep using EVEMon. I don't want people to think that hope is lost - it's not. We're in a difficult place, but we'll get out of it, together - that's what the EVE community does best, it just keeps going.
• Encourage me to keep having fun. It's easy to look at problems like this and get disheartened. I'll happily run around and blap things in NPC null with people, chill out on Slack (join Tweetfleet!) or kick back on Teamspeak. I'm also upping my Reddit game, because /r/Eve is a fun place to be.
• Show your appreciation. The support in the thread is great, some of the other developers in the community have been helping me get my head around the differences between the SDE now and the SDE six months ago and it's fantastic to know that people care about the product.
• Keep the donations coming! Some of you have very kindly donated some ISK so that I can spend more time writing code and less time running incursions, and it's gratefully appreciated.

Anyway, enough from me. I'll let you digest this wall of text, but if you have questions, please ask.

Speak soon,
Ash

I looked into this before deciding not to contribute to EVEMon for the time being (I am on a Mac).

Whilst it is theoretically possible to run .NET applications on Mac or Linux (you can use Mono, for instance), it's not very performant.

Microsoft have developed a platform called .NET core which does run on both Mac and Linux fairly well, however it would require a complete rewrite of the GUI of EVEMon into something more cross-platform friendly like GTK and you'd also have to make sure that none of the dependencies you're using also depend on .NET platform libraries too.

TLDR maybe but probably not feasible

Hey guys,

You'll have to forgive me for saying so, but adding support for various different OS when the windows client is in the state it's in is so far down my list of priorities I can't even imagine when I might get it done.

One day, but not soon...

Huh, that actually worked. I had tried it before and it kept choking on installing .NET 4.6.1. Maybe I just had to set my Wine to Win7...

In any case, thanks for the reminder, it seems to be alright now.

Dear all,

Contrary to my own expectations, I am very pleased to announce the release of EVEMon v3.0.3 to the community! A change log of the release can be found on our Github page, and you should be prompted to auto-update in the fullness of time. Any issues should be reported via our issues page and we can all look forward to the next release!

This has been a mammoth effort - to pick up a new project, find a starting place, understand it and move on hasn't been easy, but Desmont has been a great help over the last week to get things up and running. I've truly thrown myself at this and am trilled to be taking EVEMon forwards, so please don't expect that this is it for another six months!

You can still help!
EVEMon is an open source project for a reason. If you want to get involved contributing to the development of EVEMon then please, feel free to do so. If you're not a developer but still want to help out, consider submitting issues or feature requests, or just ply the development team with gifts/donations to keep us sweet!

See you soon,
Ash

Very nice, thanks for your hard work.