Rifter Drifter

Updated with new Wine application installation procedures.

I can now install Eve too, more details in another post

Everyone in New Eden is currently getting excited about the upcoming Dominion patch. Pretty much every aspect of live in Eve is getting updated whether its 0.0 sovereignty, supercapital ships, faction and pirate ships, Minmatar battleships, assault frigate speeds, or even just living a quiet life in one of the NPC corporations. The most exciting thing about all this is that right now you can test it out on SiSi, the test server. Except if you use a Mac. The current SiSi build doesn’t yet have a Mac release.

But I want to play on SiSi and test out the new toys. After all, my Dramiel and Firetail just got very exciting not to mention my Jaguar and Wolf. I don’t like the proposed changes but more on that in another post. Anyway, in the thread linked above there is a comment that SiSi runs fine under Wine and that got me thinking…

I headed out and got my paws on the latest Wine build for OS X. Installation is really easy, just drag and drop the files into your Applications folder. Its that simple. Job done.

Now that Wine is installed the next step is to make sure that we have all the dependencies that we need to install Eve. Go to your Applications folder and open up the Wine folder. In here you will find an application called Wine Bottler. Run that.

In the “Wine Winetricks” window you can select dependencies to install. For now just select “corefonts”, “dotnet11″, “dotnet20″, and “tahoma”. This will install the standard Windows fonts and also the .NET runtimes needed by most modern Windows applications. Once these installations are complete we are ready to start installing software.

First of all I tried to install the Eve client. Unfortunately I got an error about a DLL library during the installation. Despite this error installation completed but I was unable to boot the game beyond the splash screen. I’m looking into how to get past this.

I was able to get EVEMon and EFT up and running, though. First of all download the applications:

• EVEMon: http://evemon.battleclinic.com/
• EFT: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=548883
• Eve Market Scanner: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=598006 (follow same installation procedure as EVEMon)

Once you have downloaded the installer files it is really simple to add them to Wine. Make sure that you have Wine up and running. Click on the menubar icon and select Wine Controlcenter. Select the “Custom” button on the Controlcenter toolbar and click “Select Installer”. Choose your EVEMon installer and click okay. Before continuing make sure that you have set the prefix template to “Wine Files” unless you want to mount a different prefix. Then just click “Create”. Wine will prompt you to create an OS X style application that you can use to launch EVEMon like a normal Macintosh application.

Eve Fitting Tool doesn’t require any installation. Just double click EFT.exe and it will fire up straight away. I recommend putting the EFT folder somewhere like your Applications folder.

If I find more useful applications that work with Wine I’ll update this post.

Oh, and if you know how to get Eve running under Wine please, please, please get in touch.

Ceres |ˈsi(ə)rēz| |ˈsɪriz| |ˈsɪəriːz|

1. Roman Mythology the goddess of grain and agriculture. Greek equivalent Demeter.
2. Astronomy the first asteroid to be discovered, found by G. Piazzi of Palermo in 1801. It is also the largest, with a diameter of 567 miles (913 km).

– The New Oxford American Dictionary

Ceres is an EVEMon clone for Mac OS X. At the moment it is very much still under development but it is already stable and very useable. I now use it all the time to monitor my accounts.

When you first Ceres you are presented with the Character Preferences window. From here you can add characters to monitor and change options such as how skills are displayed and whether or not to show Ceres information in the OS X menu bar.

Once you’ve added your characters they appear in the main Ceres window with summary information about the current skill that they are training and when it finishes. You can also see the Eve server status. The display is simple and elegant.

To keep an eye on when you next need to change skills, or whether you need to add something new to the in-game skill queue you can enable the menu bar display. This adds an item to OS X’s menu bar that tells you when the next skill finishes. Clicking on it displays a menu that also shows you when all the currently training skills finish.

The final feature that Ceres sports at the moment is a character information screen very much like the one that EVEMon gives you. You get all the basic information such as wallet contents, skill point totals, character attributes, and rate of training. As well as this you get the standard breakdown of skills and the level that they’ve been trained to.

At the moment there is no skill planning feature. I would assume that future versions will begin to see this functionality added. To me this isn’t a real problem, though. I know the skills that I want to train over the next few months so I can just schedule the next one as each current skill finishes. For longer skill plans and new players this is probably more of an issue. It also doesn’t allow for hypothetical skill plans when considering new ships.

Still, with EVEMon being Windows only this is definitely better than nothing. Its definitely worth keeping an eye on it to see where future versions take it.

Its been quite a long time since I did an Eve tools review and seeing as the last one went down so well I thought it might be time to do another.

EVE Metrics is a web site similar to the more popular Eve Central. What makes it different and, for me, better is that it has more advanced data analysis tools and the ability to create a market quickbar like you can in the game itself.

When you first land at the site you are given the simple option of searching the market for whatever you want. Helpfully the search box uses AJAX to help you find what it is that you’re looking for quickly and easily.

The item search results are particularly helpful. Rather than just providing a basic summary of the buy and sell orders from around the cluster EVE Metrics gives a nice, succinct, overview of the current market conditions. You get the best buy and sell orders available and the station that they are available in. As well as this there’s the global average buy and sell prices and the average buy and sell prices in Jita. Seeing as Jita is pretty much the centre of the trading universe this is very useful.

Beyond the buy and sell order information you also get average, maximum, and minimum prices based on Eve’s own data. Interestingly you also get the total movement over the last week. This data seems a bit sketchy at them moment so I think it might be fairly beta but the volume is definitely useful.

If you register with the site you can create a list of favourite items and also limit the search results to the region in which you live. For Verge Vendor this doesn’t seem to be very useful but that’s not surprising seeing as we don’t have much trade around here. If you trade out of Amarr, Rens, or another major hub this could prove to be very useful.

Overall I found the site really easy to use and really useful. It lets me keep an eye on the prices of my most used modules and, should I want to, limit it to my home region. Probably the main downside is that because its a new site it has fewer contributors than Eve Central. There’s also no upload tool for OS X so I can’t contribute my own market data.

I’ll definitely be using this rather than Eve Central in the future.

After the success of my review of Eve Mail its time for the next item in the series: Eve Asset Manager.

I’m sure that most residents of New Eden find themselves in the situation where they have ships and assets strewn across what seems like every region of the Eve cluster. Although you can search these things using the in game Asset Manager the options are fairly simple. One of the major complaints being that you can’t search fitted ships or cargo containers. The solution to this problem lies in the lovely Eve Asset Manager.

Not only does it let you search all of your character’s assets, you can also add alts and even other accounts. This means that I can check to see how many warp disruptors I have in stock between Wensley’s hangar and Allii’s various shopping outposts. This is obviously pretty damn useful for planning shopping runs or making sure that you’ve thought of everything before you undock from Jita IV-4 and head home. Assets can be filtered by a whole range of variables including (but not limited to) location, name, meta level, owner, and even base price. You can even save queries to keep track of your most frequently used asset types.

Two of my favourite features, though, are the ship loadout report generator and materials report generator. The ship loadout report does exactly what you’d expect. It generates a list of all your assembled ships, their owners, locations, and any fittings and cargo. Fantastic for trying to keep track of what you have in your various bases of operations. The materials report groups all of your minerals and salvage materials by station and queries Eve Central to work out their market value in The Forge. This is only really a feature I use when I need to liquidate some capital but I’m sure that for all the industrialists and miners out there this would be a very useful tool.

There are other features that I haven’t had to use yet like the POS fuel report generator but this is a great application and one that I used extensively while moving out of Stain and find myself using more and more for day to day queries now that I am an outlaw and can’t just pop into Rens to pick up that 125mm Gatling Autocannon II that I forgot to buy.

You will need to download the Trinity static data dump which is available at Eve Files. Put this file in your Eve Asset Manager folder.

OS X Installation

Although Eve Asset Manager is Windows software you can still install it on your Intel-based Macintosh. You will need Darwine and MacPorts.

Download Darwine and drag the Darwine and Trix files into your Applications folder.

Open up a terminal window and, assuming that you have installed MacPorts type: sudo port install cabextract

Once cabextract is installed leave the terminal window open and run Trix. On the third tab select the options labelled “native .NET 2.0″ and “Fix bad fonts that cause crashes in some apps”. Ignore the warning that you need a Windows license. Click install and wait while Trix installs the .NET binaries.

Double click Eve Asset Manager.

Thanks to torgat for providing me with these instructions.

Eve Mail is a great tool and one that I’ve started using more and more so I thought I’d write a little bit about it.

Like many pod pilots I like to keep my planet-side life separate from my time in a capsule. Eve-mail lets me do this by separating out space-faring communications out from the more mundane day to day business of life in New Eden or any other galaxy. For a completely negligible fee of 0.01 ISK Lake will set you up with a customised e-mail address using your CONCORD authorised handle, for example wensley@eve-mail.net. I now use mine for all business when I’m not in my pod. You can check this e-mail using almost any interface from web mail to POP and IMAP servers. Brilliant!

It gets better than this, though, because Eve Mail also provides access to a Jabber server so you can chat to other pod pilots even when you aren’t wired into your capsules. There’s even an automated postmaster that will answer queries such as checking your wallet’s balance and skill training progress updates. There are more advanced options for corporations that would allow you to send out-of-pod updates to pilots such as juicy targets or calls to arms for defence (or attack) operations.

So, even when I’m on shore leave I can still have my finger on the pulse and receive important (and trivial) updates about what’s going on up there in space.