An idea in light of the Services bot's connectivity troubles:

Make vendetta take some command line arguments to specify the username, passwd, and character. Providing these would enter that information automatically and the client would login without user intervention.

Example:
~ $ vendetta -u "Moofed" -p "xxxxxxxx" -c "Moofed"

The goal of all this is to allow Services (and similar) to have a cron job that checks if it is running, and if not, restarts vendetta automatically with the appropriate information.

if you wish to go this line, make VO listen to a socket for command input as well, making a clean interface to remote control it, rather than relying on ugly (but fully doable) hacks. as in, IRC is rock solid in the interface code but it feels a bit 1985 to do such things to talk to an application. :-)

quite a lot of MMORGs today have a defined interface for people to talk to it in different ways. it'd be interesting to see what the devs think, especially considering we're looking to get the power to fiddle with the user interface and all.

That's a mighty slippery slope, though. How long until people just set up aimbots and trader bots and etc? I like bzadmin as much as the next guy, but I don't think that sort of thing makes sense for a persistent universe MMORPG.

Great idea! I'd love to have a super-duper-mega easy way to brute-force someone's password! No need to muck about passing key presses to vendetta, just command line a new password every four ticks of the oscillator!

Rogue, there is nothing you can't do via the interface as it is today, it is only less convenient. please don't mistake the way the interface is designd for how easy it is to write anything dealing with VO.

also, if they so desire, the devs can lock / remove docking commands, activate and other stuff from a controlled interface. right now, we have total control available, it's just cludgy.

At least now there's some entry barrier. You need to know one of three "tricks", one of which requires a good knowledge of Windows or AppleScript, one of which requires a bit of odd thinking, and one of which requires brute force effort with X11. That sort of thing discourages at least most casual attempts. I think.

er, or X11. or be able to use a single perl module. I would much rather see a well-defined interface where commands are removed or slightly altered, than seeing what we have today. I also believe it'd be safer and sounder for VO as well.

Except that wouldn't stop the existing use, because it's quite fully impossible to block simulated keypresses through X11 unless you bypass X11 and use DirectFB or something. I don't know for sure about the Windows GDI interfacing code or the AppleScript (that is, I don't know if they're blockable), but, anyhow, a scripting interface would still allow the current level of control, plus make simpler control accessible to everyone, script kiddies included. :(

if you want control, you'll get it. the question is if you wish to offer a controled way of doing it or require the current state. I don't see a big difference between the two. you can't stop the current use, so the only thing you offer is a more sanitized way of doing things.