> When I played EVE, I always thought that a programmable ship would be fun. Although there is a risk that programmers will get an unfair advantage.
If programming is part of the gameplay, then being good at programming means you are good at the game. It would then be best considered an entirely fair advantage.
True, but I imagine their target market is not just programmers.
Perhaps there will become a market in the game for selling programs to run on the CPUs.
Some players specialize in programming, others in logistics , battle command etc.
Of course it will be an interesting microcosm of the software industry in such a case.
Will people care about piracy of their code? Will anybody start releasing under GPL etc?
As I have said elsewhere , most likely all the best code will end up on a wiki somewhere and everyone will use that.
Of course it depends upon the dynamic of the game. Whether it is like Eve where you just get one ship. Or whether people will build full automated fleets, space stations etc.
In the latter case they better be prepared to buy some serious hardware to run the server end of this on.
There is some precedent for all of this. Trade Wars 2002 developed into a game of automation, some scripts became highly complex and were nearly able to play a game fully autonomously, including cooperation between players running the same set of scripts.
Early on, the best scripts were closely-guarded secrets, but as time went by, the quality of publicly-available scripts, as well as the scripting engines to run them, increased significantly. At this point the ecosystem resembles the rest of the programming world -- a combination of custom "in house" code, "proprietary" code, and open source code.
Will players have to maintain multiple accounts just to remain competitive, as in EVE? Someone will have to make and sell a 16-bit "minesweeper" to play while mining.
What will the first computer virus do?
Will there be "actual" viruses? Can we convince Notch to let our characters get Space Flu?
Well if there is some way to make the ships communicate data between each other's computers then I think exploits and viruses become a feature of the game whether the developers like it or not.
It really depends on how the admins choose to handle this, whether spreading viruses is fair play or whether it will get your account banned.
I can imagine a newbie would find it highly annoying if 5 minutes into the game they end up with some Space Virus that causes their ship to spontaneously auto destruct all the time.
Regards mining: Generally this is the most boring part of any MMO, just mindlessly grinding resources. Hopefully the programming aspect will let you do this while you are offline and have some scripts to decide what to do when you are attacked etc.
The other problem with the programming aspect is this. I imagine Notch put it into the game thinking that it would be something fun for all players to mess about with. What could happen in reality is that a few of the better programmers release a bunch of scripts to do anything and these scripts become to best scripts out there.
In such a case anybody writing their own code would probably be at a disadvantage compared to the other 99% running UberScript v3 so you end up with all players running essentially the same software.
I hope that this game can be designed in a minecraft sort of way where it is not directly competitive and more can be gained by players working together rather than everyone out to "gank" each other. Although epic space battles are always fun.
The immediate design of the game itself ensures that there is griefing - Even if the game didn't have weapons which could be fired on other people.
Take average griefer X - has nothing better to do, he goes around finding 'care bear' miners - your typical farmer, running macro script 1.
He now proceeds to bump your craft constantly using a macro into the sun.
Farmer ship blows up - and since this must have progression paths - an expensive leveled up ship goes bust, while the griefer goes of laughing all the way back to 4chan or SA.
I don't completely understand the 'unfair advantage.' If the aim of the game was to make one where everyone is completely equal, sure, but who would want that? It's boring, it's anti-progression, unrealistic (Not everyone is equal), etc.
I forever want to be in a situation where if I have more experience I will do better. This doesn't mean in every sense as I always expect to learn more in general and also from those who have less experience or whom I'm helping. Also, I hope the reverse is always true when I'm with those who have much more experience than I do like professors and tutors at university.
When I played EVE, I always thought that a programmable ship would be fun. Although there is a risk that programmers will get an unfair advantage.
On the other hand it may get more people interested in programming.
I wonder if this will ship with an interpreter/compiler for any language or whether you will have to write ASM?
Surely won't be long before there is a LISP for it.
I can also imagine a lot of people getting pissed of because they keep getting killed accidentally by someone else's buggy software.