Back in 2014 Andrew Groen asked me to produce a map of New Eden that he could use as the basis for showing strategic movements in his upcoming book "Empires of Eve". The focus would be on Null Space and it would need to be a high enough resolution to allow for zooming in to specific areas to highlight movement. So of course I agreed and spent the next few months working on what would become the first (and only to my knowledge) vector based map of New Eden. I made the map publicly available back in 2017 and it has been downloaded over 35,000 times from my DropBox.
Fast forward to this year when famous explorer Katia Sae asked me if it would be ok to use it as the basis for a project he is working on. Little did I know at the time, that he would take my original map and make it even better. I thought it would be easier if I let Katia tell you about what he did in his own words:
So, my background is a wannabe artist that likes to dabble, but haven’t really done too much serious work. With that in mind, I’m currently working on a project that I’ll not share here, but will soon™. For that effort I was utilizing Rixx Javix’s New Eden Map. My skillset includes Adobe Photoshop which I’d say I’m fair at, but I have no experience with Adobe Illustrator which is what the Map was done in. I developed a proof of concept of what I had in mind which worked well enough, so I set about moving ahead with the project. Unfortunately, the area I was mostly working in was Empire space and no offense to Rixx at all, what he did was an amazing piece of work, but it was focused on Null Security. What I needed was accurate detail in Empire.
After wrestling with the Map for a few days, I stumbled upon the fact that scripting was a thing in Adobe Illustrator. Stop the presses!! I may dabble in art, but as a professional I’ve been an application developer for over 20 years. (Not so much these last few years, but that’s another story.) I’ve work from the big boy mainframe computers in COBOL down to the little guys, PC’s from Basic, Visual Rexx, to Visual Basic and probably a dozen other languages over the years. Well now, things that make you go, hmmm.
So, I downloaded the Eve Online databases, which are awesomely provided by FuzzySteve and you can find them here: https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/dump/ If you’re wanting them for yourself, look for the latest “sde-DATE-TRANQUILITY” folder. In there you will see two sets of compressed files. One set is geared for MySQL and you can identify them as “tablename.sql.bz2”. The other set is what I used since I only needed a few tables loaded into Excel and those are the comma separated files which you can identify them as “tablename.csv.bz2”. For my effort, I only needed four tables: mapRegions, mapConstellations, mapSolarSystems, mapSolarSystemJumps.
Once I had the tables loaded into Excel and cross referenced (vLookup anyone), I had the task of converting CCP’s scale to my scale and position for Illustrator. The beauty of using CCP’s data is they have the system locations, XYZ coordinates, and of course all the information concerning that system to go along with it. Now I’m a bit rusty with vbScript and math are hard, but after more time than I’m willing to admit, I finally figured out that if you’re wanting a top down view of New Eden, then the axis you’ll want to use are “X” and “Z”, NOT “Y”. It comes out a little ugly otherwise. The rest of my time was spent understanding and figuring out the calls to Illustrator. Here’s a link to some reference materials if you’re into that kind of thing. AppleScript and JavaScript can also be used if you’re more familiar with those languages. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/illustrator/scripting.html
So, what’s all that mean? Well basically it means I was able to automate someone else’s dream (design specs), which is what I do as a coder. In other words, I was able to read the data and draw in Illustrator accurately placed - all the systems, all the jumps, for all regions, backgrounds, etc, assigning all the objects with their respective names, and so on.
And the result is what you have before you now, UPDATE 2.0 (2020). Now I’m able to continue my project, which there’ll be more on that soon™ I do have to say, when I finished and compared the new map with the old, Rixx had done an amazingly accurate job that I have a much greater appreciation for the hard work that he put into it. Thanks Rixx, you rock! Awesome stuff as always and thanks for the design specs on for this new map.
Onwards and upwards! Or as I like to say, fly clever,
– Katia Sae
Thanks Katia and now we can share the results of our collaboration with everyone. So enjoy the new and improved (accurate) map of New Eden.