Injecting Arbitrary Python Into EVE Online | Hacker News Reader

Injecting Arbitrary Python Into EVE Online

daeken.com

57 pointsdaeken18 comments

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Major points for hacking the game before playing it.

Well, this post would've been up about 24 hours ago, but something was distracting me.

Link (and even the domain) is redirecting me to http://daeken.comrequest.url/?c=1 - which obviously will not resolve.

You can decompile the Eve source code. Python is not in fact the best language for obfuscating what you do.

IIRC the EVE people do what every game developer does, and stupidly assumes that the client follows the rules.

Furthermore, all of this is against the TOS, so if you agree to that, you can't do any of this. If you don't agree to the TOS, it's fine.

Yes, I pointed out that decompilation is one of the steps that needs to happen to make this into something useful. However, without a simple, hard to detect mechanism of getting your code into the process (which this sort of injection is), its usefulness is limited. By injecting into the client rather than putting code into their archives, you make it considerably simpler and harder to detect.

IIRC the EVE people do what every game developer does, and stupidly assumes that the client follows the rules.

No they don't; everything the client does is validated server-side. The purpose of this is automation of client-side tasks, not doing tasks which would be impossible by game rules.

And as usual, computers are great at automating tasks, even if somebody else thinks of it as cheating.

Indeed. Personally, I see automation of tasks in EVE as cheating, but it honestly surprises me that that's the case. In such an advanced world, you'd expect to see corporations automating defense, mining, etc. I'm surprised that CCP hasn't done something along the lines of letting people automate these things and leave it up to the market as to whether or not players want to do it.

It's a fairly arbitrary restriction in an otherwise very open game.

It probably has to do with fun and game balance. Like the real world where you might as well go home if you're not front-running and flash trading, if EVE allowed macros and automated trading then it could devolve into a competition between programmers to write the best bots. Regular human players might be all but shut out.

That raises an intriguing question--what if an MMO was developed that was explicitly designed to be a competition between programmers to write the best bots? Even if a bot exploited a bug, you could write bug-fixes, and the programmer would have to evolve the bot to the new environment.

Sounds like an untapped market. I wonder how much depth to the story would be required. Would it be a puzzle game or a true MMORPG?

You could argue that existing MMO's already have everything in place for you to play them that way. These games already have tons of different objectives and ways to play, what's one more?

The best programmers write bots that can automate lots of characters to farm gold/money/valuable items/powerlevel characters which can used, sold to other players, etc. Whoever makes the most money "wins".

One game like that was published in 1985, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots "Crobots is a programming game released for the first time by Tom Poindexter in December, 1985. The robots are controlled by a program written in a stripped-down version of C. The robot's mission is to seek out and destroy other robots, each running different programs."

I played it as a kid, was quite fun, though my bots largely sucked .. perhaps should try again now that have more programming experience :)

EDIT: seems that it's a clone of a thing that was originally made in 1970s already, "RobotWar was a programming game written by Silas Warner. This game, along with the companion program RobotWrite, was originally developed in the TUTOR programming language language on the PLATO system in the 1970s" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar

For everything that's more efficient to automate, that's one less thing that's fun for players to do. There are more people who want to play EVE than who want to play write-software-to-play-EVE.

There wouldn't be any downsides to automating it, which I think is the main issue. If there's no difference between the automated goods and the handmade goods...

I'm sorry, I had to stop there. My comment was freaking me out with parallels to reality. Anyway, I think a move like that would give way more credence to the "EVE is a spreadsheet" idea, which I'd assume CCP is sorta trying to avoid.

If they actually put a fun combat game in there, nobody would care if the manufacturing game was all number crunching.

Honestly, if it could be automated, I'd find the number crunching game more interesting.

Well, it makes a large portion of their game content useless. It also puts anyone who DOESN'T automate (maybe because they want to actually enjoy the game content) at a major disadvantage. Finally, if you don't have to spend lots of time collecting shit, then you have less incentive to pay the monthly fee for quite as long as you otherwise might.

The main problem with automation isn't fun, gameplay, balance, etc. It is "gold", item, and other sorts of farming by non-players for the sole purpose of selling for RL money.

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