You can inject a whole collection of scripts into one or more processes hosting a Python interpreter, load/unload scripts at runtime, and communicate between host processes via an RPC mechanism.
The only interesting use for it I ever came up with was modding the EVE Online user interface. There are a bunch of scripts that use it at https://github.com/kevingadd/shootbluesscripts - some of them are kind of interesting, like a gateway that lets you interact with scripts via Jabber messages, and a HTML5 remote desktop that lets you play the game from a remote browser.
EVE Online was my first thought for this. Given the name of the script I'm assuming you're in the CF. Do you know if CCP have started actively looking for this type of thing? I know some/most bots use similar methods from what I've read but unfamiliarity with Python means I have no clue how easy it would be to detect.
They could trivially detect it but they don't seem to have made any effort. The confusing thing is that their EULA is worded in such a way that this kind of software is not actually in violation, so it's unclear whether they even intend to find people using these scripts. They tend to go after people who are visibly breaking the economy or cheating (and they do tend to use these techniques to do that). You can definitely play cat and mouse with a game developer when building this kind of software, but I consider it a waste of energy.
In our case the alliance ended up using it mostly for data mining and not for anything malicious or directly in violation of the EULA, since we had thousands of players to keep track of and doing stuff by hand was tedious.
At one point I was going to try and turn the HTML5 play-from-browser feature into a product and sell it for a buck, but CCP's community team (that supposedly approves for-sale addons/tools) doesn't respond to emails and WebKit has had an unfixed bug for years that causes it to crash your browser, so I shelved it.
Comments
If you're on Windows, an old project of mine has a more sophisticated take on this:
https://github.com/kevingadd/shootblues
You can inject a whole collection of scripts into one or more processes hosting a Python interpreter, load/unload scripts at runtime, and communicate between host processes via an RPC mechanism.
The only interesting use for it I ever came up with was modding the EVE Online user interface. There are a bunch of scripts that use it at https://github.com/kevingadd/shootbluesscripts - some of them are kind of interesting, like a gateway that lets you interact with scripts via Jabber messages, and a HTML5 remote desktop that lets you play the game from a remote browser.
EVE Online was my first thought for this. Given the name of the script I'm assuming you're in the CF. Do you know if CCP have started actively looking for this type of thing? I know some/most bots use similar methods from what I've read but unfamiliarity with Python means I have no clue how easy it would be to detect.
They could trivially detect it but they don't seem to have made any effort. The confusing thing is that their EULA is worded in such a way that this kind of software is not actually in violation, so it's unclear whether they even intend to find people using these scripts. They tend to go after people who are visibly breaking the economy or cheating (and they do tend to use these techniques to do that). You can definitely play cat and mouse with a game developer when building this kind of software, but I consider it a waste of energy.
In our case the alliance ended up using it mostly for data mining and not for anything malicious or directly in violation of the EULA, since we had thousands of players to keep track of and doing stuff by hand was tedious.
At one point I was going to try and turn the HTML5 play-from-browser feature into a product and sell it for a buck, but CCP's community team (that supposedly approves for-sale addons/tools) doesn't respond to emails and WebKit has had an unfixed bug for years that causes it to crash your browser, so I shelved it.