Too bad I can give you only 1 like, that link is saving me so much time and effort figuring stuff out in my never ending spreadsheet

:highfives:

Dedaf, I tried your tool before but it really doesn't like OpenOffice and I really don't like Microsoft Office :)

In any case a complete tool for compression is prolly the only one really missing in the universe of the community tools, where your ss, fuzzwork and IPH are no doubt the most impressive and complete ones.

From what I've been trying to do with my poor capabilities on googledoc, such a tool should be able to check:
- volume of the minerals required to build a certain item
- amount and percentage of the mineral of interest towards the total volume
- cost to produce the item (not buy/sell orders) AND which percentage of the cost is due to the mineral of interest
- volume of the produced item

now you can combine these information and have the actual outputs you're looking for, such as:
- COMPRESSION RATE both of the item itself (total mineral volume/item volume) AND of the mineral of interest
- some numbers to play with, like how many you need to move a certain amount of the mineral of interest, the cargo required, or viceversa how many you can squeeze if you have a fixed amount of cargobay available, how many are required to build an X amount of Y item assuming you have all the minerals already but the one you're searching for.....
- eventually BPO cost and research time to bring a certain amount of them to the optimal ME/PE level

This should be the minimum to understand if an item is what you're looking for or not, filling just 2-3 fields with "easy" requests.

For instance looking at the Steve's link, I initially jumped on the chair when I saw the Ultraviolet XL crystals had a compression rate for pyerite of 940, so I opened another tool to check the complete building requirements and saw that pyerite was about 90% of the total volume. I thought that was freaking awesome and I was going to buy a gazillion BPOs of those crystals, then I checked the cost to build the amount I needed to move my sh!t and saw that while pyerite is 90% of the total volume unfortunately megacyte is about 90% of the cost.
TL;DR: to be able to continually move (say) 50M of pyerite I had to invest about 14 Billions isk in megacyte.

Scratched it from the list and kept on checking the next ones.....

As a side note if you figure out a way to mathematically solve this issue, and by that i mean you find a way to mathematically calculate the best items to make to carry the optimal ISK-worth of minerals in a certain volume then you've solved a great classical NP-complete problem :P

I have a hefty background in mathematics, and I can tell you that this sort of problem is solved all the time, just not for arbitrarily large sets . The specific discipline that tackles this is called Operations Research.

You could formulate the problem quite easily as a linear programming problem, and optimize by either minimizing the ISK cost or the transport size or some combination of the two - but you would have to weight them.

I've heard implementing things like the simplex algorithm can be quite a pain in the arse, but there are many libraries for many programming languages that already have implementations built in.

edit: if nobody else bothers in the next few weeks, maybe i'll whip up something crude.

I thought about this.

However, I don't think this problem lends itself well to being solved within a spreadsheet. It would have to be a monumentally large spreadsheet, containing all the candidate compression items in the game. In addition, it would have to be able to communicate with an LP solver.

The problem would best be solved within an existing framework like IPH or Fuzzworks....Or alternatively, standalone (this was going to be my approach given nobody else bothers with the problem.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason there is no super good tool like this within the existing frameworks is due to lack of time on the part of the people who maintain them - not because the problem is necessarily more difficult than the ones they have already solved.