How hard is it to program a carrier ratting bot?

[Innominate]

@Innominate

I have looked into this, extensively. No publicly available bot can use fighters with the speed and accuracy needed to keep from losing almost all fighters in the biggest anomalies. So many fighters would be lost, to the point of the subcap bots being better than carriers. Input speed is a double edged sword because Eve has input thresholds. Too slow and fighters die. Too fast and keys stay down or up, causing much bigger problems. Doing all that is needed to not lose fighters, AND keeping the damn thing from losing alignment, makes things even more complex. (A ship worth 2b+ that takes 20+ seconds to align, makes the precision needed extremely high, further increasing complexity.)

I know the complexity needed because I decided to prototype it. That has taken me months, with 500 to a thousand hours of development. It almost works, but still loses some fighters and alignment a few times per site. That is just the combat logic. It can’t reload or do other necessary things.

It has to be multi-threaded so that one thread gets the memory snapshot while the other does the mouse work, otherwise fighters die while waiting for the snapshot process to complete. I still lose 1 fighter per hour.

I am a programmer and I have to tell you that the logic is super complex, and took several iterations and once starting from scratch (after the post above). The combat logic to manage fighters and targets like a person does is 2k LOC (which doesn’t touch the Eve GUI), and all of that code is lean code broken out into functions so there’s no duplicate code in different functions. The rest is probably 5k-7k LOC (lean).

Does it work now, yes.
Was the time worth it? NO… (But it does make 2-3 times more than a subcap bot. Once every few days Sanderling can’t find a memory element and my bot might die.) My time could have been better spent on making a subcap bot farm.

That being said, if anyone has also gotten a carrier bot working and making at least 100m/hr… Message me and we can swap notes or something.