Addon internet connection
 

Hi everyone

(sorry about my english as it's no my first language)

I was wondering if there's any way to make my addon connect to internet. It could be to check any database, mailing, etc... Make it able to consume webservices would be amazing!

Thx!

Not possible.

Sorry for the short reply but there's really not much else to say.
You can't pull info into the game from the outside world while the wow client is running.

That's what I thought too, but I've been looking around for a while and came with 2 facts:

- AtlasLootFu (addon) has a button with something like "click to connect to the server for the newest items"

- There's a book "Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More" which 3rd chapter is "Feed Reader: An ingame RSS reader for World of Warcraft". I don't have the book how I can't check how it does it.


So these two things made me thought i could be possible..

As previously stated not possible. The data comes from in-game.

Ok thanks! I can stop my research now :P

I guess that you could technically simulate a RSS feed by buying twice as many accounts as there are servers, and putting a character on each server that is logged in all the time and acts as a server by answering SendAddonMessage whisper requests... I'm not sure anyone has enough money to waste to do something like that :>

That's what I said about multi-boxers.

The only way to have an RSS feed or anything of the sort would be to write an application that writes the data into a .lua file prior to your loading the game and have an in-game addon that reads the contents of that .lua file (table or tables of information) and gives you some sort of pleasant interface for reading that information. You would not be able to pull updates directly from within the wow client and you could not update the information while in the wow client unless it was a .lua file in your addon directory and you did a "/console reloadui" which would result in the re-parsing of the .lua file. This would only work if the .lua file was already in the right folder and loaded by the game. A newly created .lua file while the game was running would not be loaded by the game and any changes to the "SavedVariables" .lua files would not be read by the client and would actually end-up replaced on your logging out/exiting.

I wonder your sig states, you're on Alliance, since this is simply - necrophilia.. ;)

And yes, I know my post can be considered spam, but hell, this was worth it!

What if I use test accounts for that? I could do a round-robin-logon operating mode where one accounts login on multiple servers in a row just to update stuff. There are 489 realms (US & EU). So let us say you'll have to do ~1k updates per 'cycle'. Let us further say you use one account to update ... 40 'targets'. Then you will need ~25 accounts.
Beside the possibliity to use test accounts for this, the real question is, how much computing power do I need to handle 25 wow instances simultaneously? (lowest possible graphics/sound/details settings of course)

[E]
Let's say you will need 15 seconds to do one 'update'. Then every single 'target' should be updated at least once every 10 minutes - which should be absolutely adequate for a lot of contents. (like feeds or something)

All I can say is LOL.
But to answer your question my pc will run 5 instances of wow at a time, it is far from pretty but anyway.

You would honestly be better off creating a out of game app.....

If I understand how WoW works correctly (I probably don't, but I figure this is worth a shot), once you input your information on the sign-in screen to log into your WoW account, and hit the button (or the "enter" key) and log onto the WoW game servers, that's it. That's the end of any communication with anything except Blizzard servers, for the game, from that point on until you log off of the Blizzard servers and quit the game. The entire game goes into a "sandbox" environment and communicates solely with the Blizzard servers. Apparently nothing, and I do mean nothing, gets into or out of that game environment unless it is going to or from Blizzard's World of Warcraft servers.

Now, what you could do if you really want to keep up-to-the-minute on your RSS feeds, is run the game in "Windowed (Fullscreen)" mode which looks the same as "Fullscreen" mode, but is windowed just without a ...... ummmmm ...... window, or visible frame. That way you can keep your favorite reader open in the background and "alt + tab" to it whenever there is time.

You are correct, the only time that there is a exception is when you reloadui it writes ands reads to the saved var file.

you could have the game reloadui whenever you go afk, and an external program edit the .lua files for your addon, and potentially read from the savedvars file if you wanted to communicate from inside the game to outside of the game.

If, say, every guild member had the same addon, the feed would always be as up to date as the most recent person to login or reload their UI.

EDIT:
also if you have defined a texture in your lua file, you can edit the texture and it updates on uireload: so you could also load the icons if you have a method of auto converting them to .tga

Well, I'm missing the right spirit within this statement. Your really shoud think more ... innovative. ;D

Mine is able to handle more than 10. Guess I'll carry out a test setup tonight. *g*

[E]
Although this is just a kind of funny 'thought experiment' I could imagine a real world use for it. I'm for example currently developing a ingame game, and I would really love to have a way to sync overall realm highscores.

You're thinking too much about control ;)
There are like 70k chars on a server ... so I guess that equals
10k accounts at least who login at different times of a day.
If there are enough ppl using your addon + updater.exe you can
have lots of feeds updated through addon-communication.
the wow-cloud-version ;)

Surely it would be easier just to have each addon update its data to an external website then it would to have a huge set of slave accounts needed to log in and receive the data from each addon.

But the point is, addons can't update data via a website. :)
I could constrict my highsorce updates to a few times a day. An automate login, send/recieve updated data to an addon channel, and logout with via a single account for every realm/fraction should be an easy to build and low cost job.

Why not? :/

There is no API that allows data to be downloaded or sent to a website, other than global variables you get to read/write from at logon and logout (+ reloading of the UI).

I know of a way you could actually make the game read from a site (but you would need a man-in-the-middle approach to make this work, it's in the gray zone but would be crushed instantly by Blizzard if a popular addon starts to use this method.