POCOs and Wars coming to an API near you! | EVE Online

POCOs and Wars coming to an API near you!

2014-06-05 - By CCP FoxFour

Well crud,

It's been some time since there was a dev blog on API related stuff. This will be a pretty brief dev blog but should contain a few interesting things.

This dev blog is aimed at Third Party Developers for EVE and contains technical details for new API endpoints. Without further ado let’s get this show on the road.

POCOs in the EVE API

You can currently get a list of all your corporations Player-Owned Customs Offices (POCOs) by looking at your corporations asset list through the EVE API. That’s however very limiting in that it only tells you that you have some POCOs, not how they are configured. We have added corp/CustomsOffices to the EVE API which will require a CEO or director level corporation API key with the asset list access mask. Provide that and you will get a list of all your corporations POCOs and their configured settings.

Due to limitations with the EVE API and how the data is stored for POCOs in the database, we unfortunately are not returning information on what planet the POCOs are orbiting. We are however returning the POCOs item ID which, just like you can now from the asset list endpoint, take that item ID and send it to the corp/Locations endpoint. From that you will get an X, Y, Z returned. Use that information with information from the EVE SDE and you can look up what planet a POCO orbits.

If you are really lazy, and trust Steve Ronuken, you can use his API to look this up: //www.fuzzwork.co.uk/tools/api-map-data/

Player Wars in Public CREST

Wars are a fun thing and we like to show a corporations war history in the client. That is all fine and dandy. However we think you pilots can do some cool stuff with war information, especially some cool over time charts. With this in mind and the fact that wars are public information in the EVE client, we have added a new endpoint to public CREST. The endpoint will be /wars/ and will list all wars in the history of EVE Online, right back to warID 1. You can then go /wars// and get detailed information on the specific war. Please keep in mind some information, such as ISK and ships killed, only started getting tracked with the wars revamp. The final resource you can expect is /wars//killmails/all/ which will list all killmails associated with the specified war. Again, this is all information available in the EVE client and we are just making it available via public CREST.

Test Server

We have recently opened up the ability to generate API keys for the Sisi API which means you can actually test these and future updates: //community.testeveonline.com/support/api-key

POCOs: //api.testeveonline.com/corp/CustomsOffices.xml.aspx?keyID=XXXX&vCode=XXXX

Wars: //public-crest-sisi.testeveonline.com/wars/

Documentation

After wanting to put new documentation on the EVElopedia site relating to third party developers it became clear that the third party developers section of EVElopedia was not in good shape. Due to this we decided to make some changes. We began with deleting all information on the wiki we could find relating to third party developers. Not only was the wiki missing information lots of it was wrong, which is worse. After deleting it all we started putting new documentation up which you can find here: //wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Third_Party_Developers

It is a wiki so if you feel like contributing please feel free to do so. There is a forum thread here to discuss things relating to this endevour: //forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=346902&find=unread

Finding out about these updates

Recently we have been making changes to the EVE API and public CREST at a fairly fast pace and in some cases in pretty minor changes. That combined with the fact that most of these releases don't happen at the same time as an EVE release means that there is often not a dev blog about this stuff. So where then does this stuff get announced and where can you go to find out information on changes?

The simplest place to find out about updates to TQ is check this post here: //forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4384137#post4384137

If you want to know about changes ahead of time, discuss them, know when they are on the test server, and that kind of thing, you should follow this thread: //forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=332097&find=unread

More generally you should check out the Technology Lab forum. We are trying very hard to make sure the things we do are posted and discussed there: //forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=263

When are these updates being released

This stuff is all live on Tranquilty (TQ) right now.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading guys, hope you come join the discussion in the tech lag forums, and finally: BLARG!

CCP FoxFour

@regnerba