Originally Posted by elcius
There are actually a few ways you can read in data without a reload, load-on-demand addons get parsed at load time, so can be changed while the game is running but before the addon is loaded, however once loaded they can't be reloaded, obviously you can get around it by making & updating multiple separate addons and loading them when you want an update, but that is hardly an acceptable solution, because the reloads are finite and makes a mess of the addon folder.
A slightly cleaner but harder to implement solution is texture size scanning, texture files are purged from memory when they are no longer being used, and as such can be reloaded live, unfortunately the only information provided by the client about a texture are its dimensions.
But in theory you can have an external application feeding data into the client by constantly resizing the texture file, the bit-rate for communication will be quite restricted, as it depends on the maximum texture size that can be loaded in game, wow requires a power of 2 for texture resolution, assuming a limit of 65536x65536 (2^16, dunno real limit) it gives you 16 possible height values and 16 possible width values, for a payload of 1 byte.
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hahah, i like the idea but as you said, hardly a solution for 1 byte.
/pX