Upcoming changes to the Image Export Collection
Greetings developers!
As was mentioned at EVESterdam 2019 at the start of the third party developers panel, we're looking into deprecating the IEC and upgrading the image server to better support cases that people were using the IEC for. This will remove the need for a lot of work to be done every release by team TriLambda, as the IEC generation pipeline is very old and radically different from EVE's modern graphics processes.
Along with moving images from the IEC to the image server, the image server itself will be getting a facelift. In short:
1. The new image server will be (but has not yet been) deployed to a new url (image->images), and support multitenancy though a query param (defaults to TQ), e.g.:
- https://image.eveonline.com -> https://images.eveonline.com/?tenant=tranquility
- https://image.testeveonline.com -> https://images.eveonline.com/?tenant=singularity
2. The Asset API for the image server will be formalized better, and will broadly take the form of
some types have special variations, e.g. blueprints have bp and bpc. A query to /{category}/{id}?tenant={tenant} will return a json document listing available variations.
3. Requests to the Asset API will be redirected to CDN's across the globe, providing much faster response times.
4. The first iteration of the new image server will not provide scaling and simply return the largest size available for developers to scale as they see fit, but we welcome feedback on this and if enough cases come up from the dev community we will seriously consider how to provide such functionalities
When it comes to the IEC, the variants path is the missing piece that was forcing a lot of developers to fall back to the IEC. Most types were already available, but the variants for things like blueprints and relics were not.
The future of the IEC is currently planned to follow this sequence:
- Deploy the new image server side-by-side with the old one.
- Stop updating the IEC
- Release a package of UI icons on the developer resources webpage
As you can see in step 3, we will be moving the UI icons into a separate zip. The UI icons are currently not addressed or ordered in any useful way, and a lot of work would need to be put in by the UI team to organize them into a long-term structure and update the client to use that new structure. Fortunately, the UI icons that are widely used by third party developers do not change much, and so this UI icons zip represents a medium-term solution to this problem. We will be generating this package once and it will then be the source of UI icons for third party developers until the refactoring of UI icons can happen.
If you are affected by these changes and would like to make specific requests or give us feedback, we would like to hear from you. We would also like to hear from third party developers who are heavy users of the IEC if they think there is a specific subset of the UI icons that would be disproportionately useful. Without making any promises, there has been some discussion of possibly putting a small subset of the UI icons on the image server, and we would like to know more about how people use the UI icons.