Socket.Kill is a real-time cloud-based kill-mail aggregator with an attitude. Designed to look like something from the Alien franchise and featuring a library of my own screenshots from the game - Socket.Kill has become a constant tab I have open right next to zKill in my browser. The whole idea was to bring kills to life as fast as possible with as little latency as possible, and the site has certainly achieved that goal. As a companion to other kill-mail based systems, it has quickly found its niche in my own library. And I suspect many of yours as well.
Dexomus Viliana, or ScottishDex as you might know them, is the one behind-the-scenes and the creator of the site. I recently decided to find out more about Socket.Kill and the process behind its creation. Especially in light of his recent nomination for the Creators Awards (Congratulations!) at this year's Fanfest.
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Rixx: Tell me a little about yourself in Eve Online?
Dex: I haven't been playing a great deal recently as I just got married, so the organization and stress of that kinda left me with little concentration and interest in playing any sorts of games but its kind of settled down now. So I'm starting to spend a bit more time in game, but the character has a rich history. I have been a member of Wingspan taking part in the amusing role play of being a delivery agent, spent a bunch of time in the area of ganking, even did some carebear stuff in my earlier days. I have done some production ( I have a Zirnitra that I built myself ) although I am not sure of any scenario where I get to actually undock that, but it's nice to look at, I was part of a prominent corporation during the invasion of Goon space although I found that a double edged sword. You get in situations were you end up with pages and pages of kills which was excellent, but I found the tidi-fests draining to the soul and I have maybe a dozen keepstar kills on my board so that kinda brought me to the end game so to speak? What else is there to do?
Spent a bunch of time FC-ing for Bombers Bar, but kinda lost interest in that for various reasons. Did one or 2 things for Spectre which is a brilliant setup, but I just lost a bit of interest in the FCing area. I think it was due to the more recent development of ego’s in null which kinda put me off the whole area, not quite sure really, but ultimately I did my time as fleet commander, time for someone else to take over.
More recently I did a few introductory classes for the lovely Laura at Eve University which was fun, giving an outline to new people who are just starting out, mainly Abyssals diving as I spent a whole load of time streaming (and dying) in a lot of Abyssals on twitch. I have a reasonable knowledgebase on how it all functions and works, as it was implied that to newer players the idea of Abyssals is an intimidating prospect, so I figured I would provide a higher level outline as to what to expect then they are tooled up to approach it in the right way.
Going to be doing a bit more of that. I figured I am at the stage where perhaps I don't have a great deal else to contribute apart from experience, class room is a fun way to do that (Sounds like I am considering retirement right?)
Rixx: How did you get started playing the game?
Now your asking. I remember when I was super young I messed about with the game, the days when there was 2 hour long down time and tranquility was running on really old tech, then I fell away from the game due to illness and life, as we all tend to do. I re-engaged about 11 years ago and progressed throughout, initially started off as a carebear without any level of dedication, when I was younger I wasn't really known for being a patient guy and some of the activities had a tendancy to require the whole rinse and repeat mechanic, so time and patience was key. Then when I restarted the game properly I decided one day to go on a Bombers Bar fleet, and on that evening I saw more titans in one night than I had seen in a whole year of playing carebear.
Rixx: Where did the idea for Socket Kill come from?
It was a strange moment, during the Christmas period my workplace becomes very quiet, without going into too much detail we have a change freeze, which results in very little activity. As a side project I had been spending a bunch of time learning how to code properly, over the years I had done bits and pieces but my experiences is focused on infrastructure rather than coding so its not something I ever really got involved in. I thought I would invest more time, so I had been developing a function for a completely different corporation which meant I was discarding a whole load of killmails, and I thought to myself why not do something with that instead of sending it off to the abyss?
As we both know there has been a full range of ideas based on kill-mails that have came and gone over the years, as far as I can remember the Eve Uni Wiki has a page full of either abandoned or archived ideas over the near 20 years that Eve has been around.
I didn't want to get into the business of making a kill-board, because that's a space thats already covered with Eve Kill and zKillboard so would just be competing for attention rather than focusing on innovation. Squizz has over 10 years worth of integration and community involvement specifically related to the web site, so you would be stupid to even try and compete with that.
zKill is rich in stats, details, history and the cost these days to maintain a cloud based database would never be sustainable for a project that does not actively generate money, so I figured no one does the opposite, the scope simply to render the kill mails as fast as physics and the internet allow. So that was the initial objective, but as development carried on I realized it was kinda boring on its own. In terms of visuals a lot of projects are designed to maximize utility and usefulness in order to make it sustainable from a monetary perspective, but no one these days aims for pure atmosphere and aesthetics, That was my objective but ultimately I'm not very creative, so i thought why not include something I love, and I'm betting a lot of eve players do - and that was the Alien franchise. I did my best to fuse these 2 worlds together, initially when I put it together it was on a subdomain that I own simply as a testing environment, I got a bunch of positive feedback encouraging me to go further with it, so I turned it into an official domain and Socketkill.com arrived.
Rixx: Where do you see the site evolving down the road?
In terms of the site itself the visuals have achieved a nice balance. I have tested a variety of ideas, for example there was one I tested where the screen would flicker subtly to imply it was struggling for power, but I found that just gave me a headache. Another idea I had was to implement scan lines almost like a VHS, but I could never really figure out a good way to add that without it being annoying.
I have a few other ideas for implementation, perhaps make the site a bit more independent as the value of the losses I get directly from zKill. Additionally there are no visual details should you be interested in a specific kill mail, at the moment the link takes you directly to zKill, so that area is interesting to see whats achievable without a database. Cloud gives you a variety of options, so it's just about finding the right one without it impacting my bank account too much. I feel I have struck the right balance in terms of cost vs output benefit.
I do have a beta version of a heat-map which essentially generates a pretty picture of what's coming into the site itself, purely a visual thing of no real benefit to game play but it was fun to make.
Rixx: Any additional features we don't know about?
The site itself has some subtle features, for example anything over 20 billion lost you will see a gold Kill-mail alongside a sharp split second loss in power just to add to the atmosphere, also have a counter for global NPC losses, there is an element for link sharing so if you have something you have in development feel free to contact me in game or elsewhere and we can have you added.
The backgrounds were provided directly by yourself as you know, over 200 screenshots throughout the game, they have a grain like overlay to imply a faded and old worn out interface.
Also created an API to allow access to those alongside access to the web socket which is purely whitelist based (this is not trying to be counter productive, this is purely to protect bandwidth) so if you have anything in development that would benefit from that please let me know.
Rixx: Anything else you'd like people to know?
I discovered purely by accident that I have become a finalist in developer of the year at Fanfest, its nice to know that the 800 commits on a Github have been appreciated and got the recognition. To all of you that voted for me I am incredibly grateful for that, anyone else reading this if you enjoy the aesthetics it would be wonderful if you could vote for me in that category, no idea if there is a prize or anything to win but it would be pretty cool if I got that recognition.
Bottom right hand corner of the site there is an About Page which has an assortment of links wether it be Github, Twitter or even email, you are welcome to contact me should you have any questions or input on the platform, always happy to listen.
If you want to show some appreciation just go for the isk, might buy myself another Zirnitra to look at.
Cheers.
Here is a link to the About Page. Which contains additional links and information for getting in contact with Dex. Be sure to visit the site and support our creator community. I certainly wish Dex the best of luck in the Creator Awards and look forward to seeing what he has in store for us down the road.
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