It would be really nice to have a command-line VO client that essentially just gives access to the Lua console. The most obvious use case for this would be bots (and considering the fact that there are about 15 player-run bots online at any given time, this is a biggie) and people who are stuck on a machine not capable of running the full client, but would like to come in game to get some mining done or just chat up guild members and the like. This shouldn't be very hard to implement, anyway, as essentially all of the code needed for such a client is already in place.

fuck bots

I'd like to have some sort of API in the future, but it probably won't take quite that form. Bots are actually a problem for us, lately. Some of the architectural issues we've been shoring up have been due to player-bots that keep sectors live for very lengthy periods of time. We've never really had a stated policy on bots, and we've just kind of let things slide, and that will probably continue for awhile.. but it's not likely to be further enabled like this.

When we do open something up, it may be in the form of a lightweight communication system to a bot that, essentially, we control, and has restrictions of various kinds. Something to let us manage the resources a little more easily, and allow persistent stuff to dovetail better with maintenance and the like. Possibly XMPP, as we built in a jabber thing awhile ago.

Ah, cool. That would definitely work too, inc.

If we get a new limited bot-type thing, could we get one free one per guild or something? I think that would be kinda nice.

Does that mean you would limit my soon to be introduced irc spambot? It's just like the IRC, with lots of different folks talking shit from the irc, except at random and sourced from the actual IRC bot...

So actually, it's exactly like the IRC, but like, a day late.

Heh. Maybe we could get a minimal client that would run on the eePC, but just with vector-line graphics.

I like this idea. Remove the player bots, but keep the functionality, supervised by the devs.