[dogscoff]

As soon as you let people access the code, someone (or many someones) will devise ways to cheat.

Well there are ways around that... for example:

How about if you could build up a map from text files? You could have a folder containing a stack of such files: One per star system, defining exactly what is in the system, what abilities apply, what graphics to use, where the warp points go and everything. It would be really easy for enthusiastic programmers to create handy map editors if maps could be defined in this format.

Obviously though this format wouldn't be secure at all, and so it would be useless for actual game use. Therefore the clever bit would be for Malfador to give us a "map compiler" that sucks in all the text files and spits out a secure map file exactly like the ones the game currently uses.

We get our easy-to-edit format, Malfador gets to hang on to map security. Everyone's happy. (Even Fyron! )

Technically I can see no reason why this shouldn't work, except that Malfador has more important things to do than code us a map compiler