I'm not really a coder, I'm just a quirky MMO player...

I ran into several technical difficulties last night while I was debugging my Hauler Agent. I know that most people think that EVE’s an easy game to write programs for, but it really isn’t. There’s a million different ways the developers twist up the user interface to prevent it from looking the same way over and over again. You don’t notice it as a player, but when you start NEEDING the interface to be consistent it becomes an issue. For instance, it took me three different if/then statements just to determine if I had just been offered a courier mission. And then, for some odd reason, sometimes an agent will leave up the missions window and you can just read it without having to reopen it. Then, other times, they close the window and you have to click “View Mission” every time you dock. Why? Probably just to give me a headache.

So these difficulties have slowed down my development. I can complete a courier mission, start to finish, right now if all the stars align (puns make me smile) but that’s pretty rare. The agent usually breaks about halfway through, either deleting a bookmark (instead of warping) or failing to warp to the correct location.

But it’s not a total loss so far. This was the first time I’ve written a new agent from scratch and I was able to make huge structural improvements to the program. Instead of having all the code in one long function, I created several small functions. This made it a lot cleaner and easier to write, and has lead me to think that I should create a sort of “master” class. But that’s an issue for another day.

A new agents was born...

A little while back, I defined what some of my short, medium, and long term goals were. Well, with well over 500 million ISK, I think it’s time to start planning on completing those medium term goals.

Sadly, in order to do so I must raise my empire faction to, at least, 5.0. And, being the lazy fuck that I am, there’s NO WAY I’m going to do that by hand…so it sounds like it’s time for a new agent! Hmm…I wonder what I’m going to call it…

Tonight I’ll be running a few missions by hand in order to work out a process for this new agent. I’m fairly confident that I can code this solution in about a week, but I’m a little lost on what kinds of missions I should code for. I know that I want to use an agent who only has 2 types of missions because that will reduce the variability (decreasing the amount of code I have to write) so Astrosurveying, Mining (I know, ironic, right?!) and security are off the table immediately.

That leaves only Kill and Courier mission types and I don’t know which I would prefer to do. Courier missions are very straight forward so I think I’ll lean towards them for now and see how it goes. It kind of sucks that I can’t JUST do courier missions, because that would make life a lot easier.

Hmm…I COULD code it to just keep denying missions that are not couriers. With an agent type that gives me a 95% chance to get courier it’s going to be highly unlikely that I’ll have to decline many missions. But, I don’t like the thought of declining missions just on principal, ya know?

Welcome to the joys of coding AFK Agents – lots more questions and doubts than answers at the beginning.