NavBot goes Open Source!

At last! The moment you've been waiting for - NavBot is now available as Open Source! If you're interested in helping out, or really want to see your favourite new feature in NavBot, head on over to the project site and look around, then post a bit about your programming background as a comment to this post - simple as that :-) You'll need a GMail address - I can send invites if necessary.

Happy programming!
:-D

NavBot Quick-Start Guide

Thank-you for your purchase of the NavBot-class trade assistant. This short guide will help you install the unit and connect it with your Pod's systems.

Installing NavBot
Download and extract the setup files, the run setup.exe. NavBot should automatically detect the EVE directories that link you to your Pod and will run in the system tray (bottom-right).

Your First Time with NavBot
Once NavBot is running in the taskbar, go into EVE and open the in-game browser. Either press Ctrl-V or type "http://localhost:9999" into the address bar, and press enter. This will connect you to NavBot.

To get the most out of NavBot, you need to make it a "trusted site". NavBot itself gives you links to do this, but sometimes the EVE browser seems to forget. You might have to open the list of trusted sites manually from the menu bar and check that http://localhost:9999 is listed as trusted.

Since this is your first time, let's take it slow. Ask NavBot to show you a list of market reports you already have (3rd option). If you have any reports, tell NavBot to remove them all - this places them in an Archive folder in case you want them again in the future.

Now, open the market in EVE and find "Reports" in the list of trade items. Select it, then click on the "Export Data" button.

Now go back to NavBot and ask to see how you can make money / start trading (1st option).
NavBot will ask you how much ISK you have available and how much cargo space you have available. Fill in these values and press "Enter".

Now for the best bit - the top trade routes! NavBot finds three kinds of routes:

1. The best (most profit per warp) single trade trip you can make, starting from your current system. This is what you'll usually use; it tells you how to maximise the amount of isk you're earning per hour.
   
2. The best (most profit per warp) single trade trip between any two systems that NavBot can find. This gives you an idea of how much profit is available in the regions you've exported, and can help you decide whether to stay where you are or go to a different system to start trading there.
   
3. The largest profit in total to be found between any two systems. This is perfect if you just want to stick the autopilot on, sit back and relax.

For each type of route, NavBot shows two routes - one with systems that start and end in secure space (>0.5) and one with systems that may start or end in insecure space (<0.5).

Picking a route is easy - you can right-click on any of the links and choose to autopilot to them or even dock directly at the correct station, all from NavBot's report screen. The type and number of items to buy are shown too!

Finally, after each trip remember to re-export the market data for any item you've just sold, and to update your ISK in NavBot - the routes you get are only as fresh as the data you give it!

I hope this helps - please drop any feedback or questions as comments and I'll update this main post. Above all, happy trading!

Release: NavBot rev. F

Here it is - NavBot revision F, fully-compatible with the 2.2 EVE patch. You can download it here!

Changes include:

• Fixed disappearing market logs problem after the 2.2 patch
• New "Change export directory" option in tray-icon context menu
• No longer crashes if your current system can't be found in the map database (CCP haven't released 2.2 database dump yet)

As always, post a comment if you have any problems. I wanted to get this one out as quickly as possible, so some of the features I've been promising you all will just have to wait for a future release.

Until then - happy trading!

Latest EVE Patch

A quick heads-up - the latest EVE patch has broken NavBot support. They've changed the format of the log file filenames. You can expect NavBot revision F with a fix for this later this evening or tomorrow!

Release: NavBot rev. E

At last, the highly-anticipated, oft-requested revision E is here, bringing full support for the revelations II patch - download now!

Changes include:

• Revelations II suport
• Even easier setup and install - simply click and run!
• Quantity of items to buy displayed (at last, no more using the calculator)
• Fixed crash when using items with several "-" in the name
• No longer crashes if the clipboard is unavailable

Sorry it took so long, I hope you like it! I've a couple of things left on the feature list for revision F, but if you'd like to add to them, get in touch!

Happy trading!

P.S. NavBot may require "Run as Administrator" to work under Windows Vista.

Coming soon... revision E

Sorry for the lack of updates recently - the graphics card in my laptop blew up and I'm reluctant to put out any new releases without being able to test them in EVE myself. HP wanted 10+ working days, so I'm expecting the laptop back in the next week or two.

There's not a lot wrong with revision D, but revision E is already looking quite a lot better. A rather nasty bug that causes errors when you try to search for items with lots of -s in the name (such as most implants) has been fixed, and a few helpful tweaks have already been added, such as showing the quantity of items you need to buy.

Until then... happy trading!

Release: NavBot rev. D

It's beautiful, it's simple, and now it's even faster than before! NavBot revision D is here. Here's 5 great things about revision D:

1. It's like, 5 times faster.
2. Your available isk and cargo are now saved, which means you don't have to keep checking what the cargo size of your Mk 4 Iteron is.
3. Items with a "-" in the name now work. Long live implant trading!!
4. The list of trade reports now caculates the age of each report correctly, instead of adding the time difference between you and GMT.
5. You can click on a button to change the isk/cargo instead of pressing "Enter" and hoping.

I love it, and I hope you will too. NavBot is right here, waiting for you...

Release: NavBot rev. C

With the help of countless pilots from the community and some outstanding individual contributions (you know who you are), I proudly present: NavBot rev. C!

New in this revision:

1. Useful error messages instead of crashes!
2. Better support for non-EN localization. Did NavBot give you drunken, meaningless results? It shouldn't now!
3. The letter 'C'!!!!!!!11122

As always, please post your problem reports and error messages as comments to this post!

Happy trading :-)

NavBot requires XP SP2

Thanks to everyone who's written in with their error reports; we've discovered that one of the web server classes NavBot uses is only supported on Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and, presumably, Vista. Sorry about that, everyone! If you can, then upgrade to SP2. If not, then I'll take a look and see if I can replace the class, but I'd rather not write my own web server from scratch ;-)

There are a couple of other error reports coming in, of wildly innacurate profit predictions (including cases where no profit should be possible) and of crashes when trying to view market reports or search for trade routes. I suspect the former *may* be related to localisation; I'm working on a German-localized laptop (ja, ich wohne hier in Deutschland) with the English-language EVE download and an English-language Visual Studio (ja, so gut ist mein Deutch noch nicht!).

I can easily imagine some combinations might be getting their "," and "." confused. I'll try to reproduce this tonight, and hopefully send out a revision C with fixes for this tomorrow or the day after.

Have a nice day,
OpenCloud

Release: NavBot rev. B

Firstly, thanks to everyone who's posted or written to me to tell me you like NavBot! It makes me happy :-)

Ahem. Secondly: Sorry to everyone who's had problems with revision A. Just for you, I've put together a quick revision B with the same features but extra error reporting. I've opened up the public comments on this page, so please post your error logs here and I'll try to work out what's going on!

Release: NavBot rev. A

After many occasionally late evenings, here is NavBot rev. A, ready for your pleasure.

Assuming, that is, that you already have the .NET 2.0 runtime from Microsoft (you might, you might not).

In testing, NavBot often found trips worth 20-40% of Tejar's total cash within a single system. That's right, 0-jump profit is everywhere.

Enjoy!

Project #1: Eve-Online Trading Tool

Eve-Online is an online game set in space. If that doesn't sound like your thing, don't worry, Project #2 is going to be a beautifully-simple tool for software developers. Maybe #3 will be a novel, or a rose garden. Who knows?

Edit: One year on, here's the latest revision of NavBot! If you'd like to read about why I wrote it, please carry on...

There are several trading tools for Eve, and none of them are particularly good. Here's why:

1. They can't export the market data for fifty different items for me while I get a cup of tea.
2. Some of them require me to share my market reports with the rest of the internet, which means any profitable routes attract immediate attention from other traders.
3. They don't find the best routes - specifically they don't seem to aggregate items of the same type but varying prices, which gives them an artificially-low volume and means the most profitable routes can stay at the bottom of the list split into half a dozen different trades.
4. They ask the wrong questions and give too many answers. There are two important questions that any budding trader might have, and neither needs me to browse through combo boxes or interact with HTML lists. I'll come back to the questions later.
5. They're not individual enough. The most profitable route for me depends on the amount of cargo space my ship has and how much money I have to spend. It also depends where I am. A good trade finder needs to take all of this into account.

What does it do?
There are two kinds of trading in Eve. You can either speculate on the market by placing lots of buy and sell orders - buying when something is cheap and selling when it is expensive - or you can cart things from A to B - buying where something is cheap and selling where it is expensive.

This tool tells you which items you can take from A to B to make profit as quickly as possible.

More specifically, it answers the two most common questions I ever have as a trader:

1. Which are the most profitable trade routes for me right now?
2. I'm at A and am going to B; can I make a profit on the way?

The form of the answers is not necessarily trivial, nor can it always be a simple ranked list. For example, when I ask to see the most profitable trade routes then I also want to know how far they are away from where I am now, and whether they are in high-security or low-security space. I need to see both, because perhaps this time I'll decide it's worth the risk to make 400% profit. Maybe I'm keen to travel half-way across the galaxy to get to a really profitable area or maybe I'm happy here because my corp headquarters is nearby. These are interesting, even fun choices to make. This is called the game. The algorithm can play at Excel, but I want to be the one playing spaceship captain!

Instead of putting up more details now, I'll put up the first release and you can see what I mean for yourself.

Website-in-a-Blog

This site is, probably, The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. I'm not interested in finding out about renting web space, or choosing between a Windows or Linux server, or a fully-hosted system, or whether to use php or asp or write it all in Rails.

I want to craft software. Beautifully!

So, this blog is also the website. New releases will be tagged as releases, I'll figure out a nice way to give download links when I have to. Feedback will be in comments. Job done! It's like, three clicks to set one of these things up. Or ten. I wasn't counting.

So, don't go looking for an official website; this is it!