Science & Industry

EveManufactureTool (EMT) is an industry tool developed primarily for the T2 manufacturing market but also usable by those building T1 items. In development for over 18 months, it is now time for a public release. Development in ongoing, with a great deal of features and usability options planned for eventual release.

You can see what the program looks like by going to the website at http://www.evemanufacturetool.com where you will also find the registration and download page.

Ingame help can be found in the channel "evemanufacturetool". I encourage you to join it where you can have a hand in the design of upcoming features as well as voicing your thoughts on existing design.

Now with a tutorial!


Planned feature list

• comparison between two regions/systems for prices (buy only?)
• add option for the skill that was PE (3% time per level)
• allow install line for invention jobs?
• add volumes for things!
• API stuff!
• async property updates and refresh as data comes in
• add the ability to select whether to buy something off the market or build it for a component
• alert if closing and haven't saved
• enhance team auction display to include bidding info
• if user doesn't select or marks some items in selection pane as complete, when margin updates on lock, numbers can look weird
• perhaps a condensed view of manufacture, with selectable data/columns
• perhaps set default ME/PE for empty blueprint in options? (e.g. can default to 10/10)
• ability to exclude t2/meta/faction items when adding a manufacture group
• add global skill levels for manufacturing time reduction
• phoebe skills for time modifying
• change build time profit ratio to mean something more useful, perhaps combine with buy/make component change
• user designated groups?
• copy/paste BPOs from ingame for ME/TE values
• add windows style question mark to bring up a help window on how to use a dialog

Feature release version
6.12

• add some config options for colours and thresholds
• ingame browser page for buying quanties (browser page would update EMT!)

6.11

• allow for moving/merging items/batches

Fun stuff. Observations:

Too many clicks. Popping up saved! is a wasted click.
The dropdowns are clunky.
The pricing scan is finding lower priced items at non-hub stations which is inappropriate. A sell system dropdown would solve this.
Pricing and installation cost is damn good.
The client-server decision is spot-on.
You'll definitely want to move this to a click-once application. I can help with that.
.NET 4.0? The only reason for that is to support Win XP. That'll severely limit you as you try to move forward.
If you're interested, I have an EVE API project which solves all of the API and Crest download problems and which would be trivial to consume.
Out of curiosity, what's your hosting stack?

As it is this tool is easily the best one available for market research.

1. Yes, prices are from eve-central. Part of a planned feature that should be done within a month will allow for greater control over what pricing to use by allowing you to manually override the price for anything that is part of a batch.

2. I'm aware of this and it's been something that I've wanted to change/fix/adjust since the first version. The way I do it at the moment is just to add all of a given item with all decryptors and then press manufacture and manually find the best decryptor to use. I'll put this on my to do list as something to change.

3. Invention currently assumes a 4/4/4 skill set but you can change this on a per batch basis (set skills button) or an individual invention line (skills field).

4. Vaguely, yes. If you click the dropdown button next to a manufacture job, it'll show you the components required for that thing. If manufacture cost < buy cost, it's cheaper to build (almost always is). This is something I'm looking in to changing with colour to make it more obvious as well as a tickbox to indicate whether you're buying this or building it.


Yay, feedback!
Yes, the "Saved!" dialog is a bit wasted. I can probably just throw that in the status bar now. Beyond that, what else do you think there is too many clicks for and do you have any suggestions of what to change?

I like my dropdowns :( If not comboboxes, how better to present the information? You can "search" the dropdowns just by typing and it'll start trying to take you to something that matches. E.g. typing hou would take you to a hound.

Yes, pricing is something that is getting a review and change right after I finish teams. It's currently based on a sell region which I have always used the forge for. Generally Jita prices are the best in that region so it's not been something I've noticed but if you're selling in Amarr/Dodixie/Rens/Hek, I can see it being an issue. The good news is that the program already has the back end support for single system pricing.

Wasn't expecting to hear someone praise the client-server decision. It was initially an all-enclosed client but there are so many benefits to keeping the server online all the time, especially when it comes to price caching, CREST calls and SDE caching.

It's .NET 4.0 because that's the highest version that VS2010 will support. I haven't found anything holding me back with it yet but if you know of some jesus feature that would be of great help, I'd love to know.

I'll take a look at your eve API project. I do plan to include API things eventually but that's such a monumental task, I wanted to get the rest of it working first. The hosting stack (if i understand what you're asking) is just a WCF server that I wrote with a bunch of services available; the market one is actually open and doesn't require any validation. The website is just ASP.NET on IIS.

Ahh I understand. I'll look at changing the comboboxes to that, it should be simple. Thanks!

Teams feature has been released.

Only an active team can be applied to a batch, not one that's in auction.
Teams are applied to a group of things, such as assault frigates, cruisers (T1 hulls), heavy assault cruisers, medium class (all cruisers and battlecruisers).
Estimates are given about how much of a difference a team will make. Using this, you can work out roughly how much is your maximum bid for a team for a given production batch.

If you have problems with it or it doesn't work how you expect, do let me know so I can investigate and fix.

Number of updates since my last post here. http://www.evemanufacturetool.com/Change_log.aspx has all the details.

Next major feature release will be for pricing choices starting with selecting region/system pricing for the final products of a manufacture batch.

If you're running off a BPO, you should use the blueprints tab and set the defaults. Any jobs entered will use that first and you can change it to something else if you desire. You're not supposed to be updating each run individually. That said, there's also no reason why updating the ME should be slow at all. All the data it needs to recalculate everything has already been requested and stored locally. I'll have a look to see if there are any remote calls that I've missed when changing the ME.

Changing build system should be nearly instant. The only data that has to request is the manufacturing index. Changing pricing region, depending on where you pick, will be slow(er) because unless someone else happens to have loaded those prices in that region within 12 hours, it has to run off to eve-central to get an updated set of data. It's on the to-do list as something to fix/change.

Can you reproduce a blueprint being listed twice and unable to enter ME on it or any after? What about attempting to delete a blueprint from the list? I've never encountered either of these things but it could be because you're doing it in a way I haven't thought of.

Scrolling and expanding the window size certainly shouldn't be slow; that's something I discovered very early on and spent a long time fixing. Again, can you give steps to reproduce it so I can find out why? Assuming this in on the manufacture tab. I've noticed some possible performance fixes on the invention side of things but they shouldn't be causing comments like that.

On your last point, set the default ME/TE for the blueprints you care about from the blueprints tab and then you'll find the add group works just as you expect, with the values you want it to contain. What does .NET 4.5 do with async that's still doable the hard way in 4.0? Are you referring to await/async?

Everything gets cached locally after a first request including pricing. It doesn't hit local storage so a restart will lose the data but it does get stored in memory. Sorting columns should never cause an additional server requests. Where is it that you're seeing the slow sort?

There are plans in place to do client side persistent caching of data that doesn't change. Perhaps I'll start on those sooner than later!

As I said, the client already has caching. I'll take a look at sorting/scrolling on those fields. There's no reason it should be generating any extra traffic once the data is loaded. All the data to calculate everything should already be in memory.

What do you have listed in your manufacture tab? Everything?

If I scroll up and down really fast, the scroll bar does lag behind where my mouse is but there are no additional server calls happening. What you may have been seeing is one of the cache calls being made in a very poor way (it's on the list to make better).

Beyond that, sorting is instant for me. no matter which column I click on. I'll fire up an XP VM and see how it handles on that, it could be related.