> 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.
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.