PMFs: data, charts, and the coming galactic player wars...

Mangal Oemie

Mangal Oemie
Hi BGS'ers and ED CMDRs in general...

I am happy to announce the soft-launch of the AEDC Cartography Department Twitter bot. If you like the monthly "state of the human populated bubble" updates, you're probably going to like this. Through this bot, you can get most of these charts on-demand, whenever you want, up to date with the latest eddb/api data dump (within a few hours)


It is working, though I will be tinkering with it a bit more today (put the script properly in the background, add a few finishing touches, log properly etc.), so there may be a few late replies in the next couple of hours, but it is otherwise fully functional. The bot will reply and in general it's working.

Note: give it a little time to reply - the process is actually remarkably involved - if the bot is unable to produce the chart, it will let you know.

Here's how it works: tweet at the bot with a request. There is a format (see below), but it is basically based on a CMD SUBCMD structure. Doesn't matter where in the tweet, and you can add words to make it more personal ;) just make sure the two key words are space separated. So something like "hey @AedcCartography please map Alliance for me". Upper or lowercase also doesn't matter.

The bot replies with a basic usage example, but the following list will help get it right first time.

Supported commands/charts/maps:

bubble pmf

chart govtypes
chart govtypes-allegiance
chart govtypes-allegiance-systems
chart states
chart stats-totals
chart stats-normalized

histo pmf
histo pmfallegiance
histo all3plus

map bubble
map alliance
map empire
map federation
map superpowers (NEW!)
map alliance-assets
map empire-assets
map federation-assets
map independent-assets
map pmfhomes
map largefactions
map mediumfactions

The charts may not look quite as good as the monthly datasheets, where screencaptures are made directly from the SVG. This has some automated conversion behind it, and the results are not always quite the same - the histograms, for instance, have wonky text labels. They also don't contain any embedded images within the SVG as <image> tags error out. Otherwise, the charts and graphs should look quite familiar.

Enjoy!
 
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Mangal Oemie

Mangal Oemie
A few technical details :) Not least because of D. Braben's connection to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This altogether uses 7 RasPis, mostly 3B+ and 2 RasPi 4.

https://imgur.com/a/SkARdXq
Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/SkARdXq


The core work is done by this cluster: the one furthest left runs Postgresql with the database file running on an external SSD drive. This collects and stores data from eddb.io/api after downloading the daily dumps. The remaining 5 are a k3s cluster, a light-weight Kubernetes distribution, and serves the HTML, and gets the data from the database in order to produce the SVG charts and maps. One of the k3s worker nodes is a RasPi 4 after an original 3B+ somehow failed to boot, despite a new memory card. The cluster actually likes the extra power

A second RasPi 4 runs the twitter bot, which itself has to go through multiple stages:
  • interpret the command what chart/map to create
  • create a headless browser to request the map, and render the SVG
  • extract the SVG from the response and save to disk
  • convert to PNG
  • attach to tweet
Scripts are a combination of SQL, bash, Python, and the SVG maps with a lot of JavaScript

Could this have been done simpler, and not requiring quite as much infrastructure? Sure! :) But what would have been the fun in that ...
 

Marcus Machiavelli

Marcus Machiavelli
Mangal Oemie said:
A few technical details :) Not least because of D. Braben's connection to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Click to expand...

WOW! Mangal that is SO COOL!
Please for us oldies call it Orac?
Orac_episode.jpg
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Mangal Oemie said:
A few technical details :) Not least because of D. Braben's connection to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This altogether uses 7 RasPis, mostly 3B+ and 2 RasPi 4.

https://imgur.com/a/SkARdXq
Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/SkARdXq


The core work is done by this cluster: the one furthest left runs Postgresql with the database file running on an external SSD drive. This collects and stores data from eddb.io/api after downloading the daily dumps. The remaining 5 are a k3s cluster, a light-weight Kubernetes distribution, and serves the HTML, and gets the data from the database in order to produce the SVG charts and maps. One of the k3s worker nodes is a RasPi 4 after an original 3B+ somehow failed to boot, despite a new memory card. The cluster actually likes the extra power

A second RasPi 4 runs the twitter bot, which itself has to go through multiple stages:
  • interpret the command what chart/map to create
  • create a headless browser to request the map, and render the SVG
  • extract the SVG from the response and save to disk
  • convert to PNG
  • attach to tweet
Scripts are a combination of SQL, bash, Python, and the SVG maps with a lot of JavaScript

Could this have been done simpler, and not requiring quite as much infrastructure? Sure! :) But what would have been the fun in that ...
Click to expand...
Can't say much more than...
1606728631955.png
 

DragoCubX

DragoCubX
Flying Scorpion said:
Maybe Fdev should delete player made factions that are only in 1 system and have been sitting at <2.5% influence for a long period of time.
Click to expand...
The problem is that in the same vein someone could advocate for NPC factions "disbanding" after lurking at super-low percentages for a long time. This would probably kill a lot of NPC pirate factions though, and likely reduce faction variety over time. At least that's how I see it.

Alpenmilch said:
Mangal, anything OK?

We miss your News, but we hope even more, there is no trouble holding you back.

Best whishes
Click to expand...
If you go on his imgur profile he has actually created the charts for March, but for some reason not made a post about it here.
 

Flying Scorpion

Flying Scorpion
DragoCubX said:
The problem is that in the same vein someone could advocate for NPC factions "disbanding" after lurking at super-low percentages for a long time.
Click to expand...
I can understand someone making that argument for the sake of a roleplaying perspective but I think for the most part, people would be understanding of fdev removing inactive player factions. You can only fit so many of them in the bubble. Similar issues arise when it comes to fleet carriers and ppl being able to grind out 5 billion credits in literally one day. Parking is becoming increasingly more difficult to find near high traffic systems.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Flying Scorpion said:
people would be understanding of fdev removing inactive player factions.
Click to expand...
Even if they could find a definition of "inactive" that didn't let a powerful force destroy its neighbours if they turned their back for a couple of weeks, it'd barely help to free up space for new factions.

At the moment according to EDDB data, PMFs control ~10,750 systems and are present in ~15,000 ... but, only ~1,000 PMFs are only present in a single system without controlling that system ... and in ~400 of those systems, at least one other PMF is present anyway to block new additions. Even if Frontier were to be ridiculously harsh and say that a PMF failing to control any system on the appointed day would be deleted regardless of how many systems it was present in, how recently it had lost control, how desperately its supporters had tried to avoid losing control, etc. etc. ... it would only free up 800 extra systems for PMF addition: huge amounts of controversy and ill-feeling from those who lost their factions as a result, to buy maybe three or four extra months of the current PMF addition rules working. More reasonable definitions of "inactivity" would probably be lucky to clear 100 systems for new additions.

I don't know what they are going to do in ~2 years when the space runs out, of course. Quite possibly neither do they yet.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Flying Scorpion said:
Maybe they can expand the bubble?
Click to expand...
They certainly could add more systems - a few hundred a month should be sufficient, and it'd be years before it made the bubble visibly larger by radius - the problem would be that the bubble is already too large for the number of active players, so they'd literally only exist so that PMFs could expand into them and have some nice mostly-uncontested territory. Still might be the least bad option, of course.

Allowing PMFs to be added to systems with a non-native PMF which wasn't the controlling faction would "free up" about 4000 more systems ... probably enough for another 2-3 years ... though the new PMFs could then be risking a big fight for their home, if they didn't choose carefully, because systems a 30-system group had just expanded into would then be eligible but really bad ideas. Still, it would be a temporary fix.

Making influence per-asset rather than per-system would create huge amounts more space for BGS without making the bubble bigger for non-BGS uses ... and make it much easier to add more later: new PMFs could even get a new installation or small surface base added for them ... but would be incredibly disruptive (beyond just "BGS as political competition"), mainly benefit the existing established factions on day 1, and probably take several months of instability before things settled down.

Turning up BGS instability massively to make retreats much easier, expansions much harder, and so on might collapse some of the mega-factions down and make it harder for them to arise in future. Or it might leave the mega-factions mostly unharmed and just make it really tough for new groups to get started. Very difficult to predict the results of something like that, and it'd involve a lot of complaining about the change regardless.

And of course, there's always "due to the lack of space, PMF creation is suspended while we consider the issue further" ... and it never returns.

Flying Scorpion said:
Ah does coming up with ideas help at all?
Click to expand...
It's always worth a try, I think!
 

DragoCubX

DragoCubX
Ian Doncaster said:
And of course, there's always "due to the lack of space, PMF creation is suspended while we consider the issue further" ... and it never returns.
Click to expand...
Now that you spelled it out I am incredibly fearful that that's exactly what FDev might do. Let's just hope none of them ever read this...

What I would like as a solution is a colonisation mechanic:
Existing factions should be given the ability to colonise uninhabited systems, maybe with requiring massively more work than regular expansions. The BGS state seems to fundamentally already exist and just hasn't been implemented yet.

And then new groups could use that exact mechanic as their founding: To allow them to start off all on their own in a fresh, previously uninhabited system that they can form into their home. Choice would obviously have to be restricted, e.g. the selected system must be within X Ly of another inhabited system or such. But it would allow for nigh-infinite new faction additions without screwing anyone over.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
DragoCubX said:
Now that you spelled it out I am incredibly fearful that that's exactly what FDev might do. Let's just hope none of them ever read this...
Click to expand...
Thing is, from the first day FD said PMFs were going to be "a thing", my reaction was "well that's got the potential to go weird fast..."

I think FD genuinely thought they were just offering up the opportunity to put some player-flair in the universe, not facilitate player- representation in the game for competitive purposes.

That much is obvious... since the initial pass of "give us a name and system, and we'll put it in", we've seen a gradual tightening of rules and requirements come in to play. But the galaxy becoming "full" was always going to happen.

Realistically, FD just shouldn't have added PMFs in the first place.
 
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