Authors CurseForge

I thougt I'd start a thread here in the hope that a few people might take a look at my new project and maybe provide some feedback.

I'm almost positive that there isn't anything like it out there yet, at least I haven't seen anything similar except for the automated external installers from Curse and WowAce.

In a nutshell: It is an addon that allows you to send and receive other addons via ingame chat channels without having to visit a website or run an external program. You don't even need to restart your client. Simply share addons ingame with your friends.

I've written some stuff on how it all works here: http://www.lenja.ch/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 (shamelessly posting link to my forums)

If some of you can spare 5 minutes and take a look at it... I'd be really grateful for any feedback you can give.

Well, I was hoping it would go beyond raiding.

I've implemented RSA and SHA in Lua just for the security aspect of this idea. Using digital signatures, I'm sure I could make it fairly save. So no screwing of users. It's basically up to module authors what they want to implement and the addon tries not to restrict them in any way.

You are right of course, storing addons in variables takes twice as much memory as normal addons do. Once because it's in a variable and again when it gets loaded.

But for many smaller addons with only a few kilobytes, this wouldn't be too great a problem, right? The memory requirement for each addon could be displayed to the user so they could decide for themselves which addon is too wasteful for their taste.

With the digital signatures in place, the community could even decide not to sign badly coded modules.

Thanks for the comment about RDX. I will definitely take a look at openrdx.

Thanks for the heads up. I've just tested it with a 1MB string and there seems to be no limit. I agree that keeping the memory footprint small would be a major design goal.

unfortuantely this idea is just that. an idea, it will never be practical or viable due to the fact that i could setup a addon stub that sends me 1c every time you visited the mail box, and hook and protect it to where YOU WOULD never know it was there... other than it would be listed as some random addon that's getting loadstring'ed and your raid leader said so.

@Astaldo: I don't know about starting a new trend. I think the current way of addon distribution via the web is very nice, just in some cases it doesn't work very well. There are some ideas for addons in my head that just won't work unless there's a faster way to install them.

E.g. a minigame like chess or nine men's morris. If you're waiting outside an instance and want to play a game or two, good luck trying to convince your party members that they need to download it from some website now and restart their client just for those 10 minutes.

Some addons just won't work unless everybody has them and the reason why they don't get them is because they're useless because nobody else has them. Chicken and egg problem...

I do have a first addon module in place that works. I don't know about its practical value since the normal version is only downloaded by 3-4 users from Curse each day. It is posted as Base64 block in my Modules forum.

I agree about the need to have a converter. It's not too much fun translating XML files from existing addons into Lua code. Maybe something like that already exists? I really don't feel like writing yet another XML parser.

@OrionShock: What's the difference with real addons? You'll probably say: "The difference is that publicly posted addons can be scrutinized by knowledgeable users so unsafe addons like your 1c hack can be identified and removed."

But the same holds true with signed addons. You can't just make a bad addon and send it to people because it'll lack a digital signature. You need to post your addon publicly where it can be checked to get it signed by me or some other party. Once it is signed you can send it to people ingame but cannot change even a single byte without invalidating the signature.

And that's why I hope my idea will work in the end. I would never even have started without my own Lua crypto libs in place.

I tried to sell a concept similar to this - its a losing battle.

http://svn.wowace.com/wowace/branches/Interview/

The main problem is getting people to install the base addon. Once that's on many players' computers, the system would start working. Yeah, it very much suffers from the same chicken and egg problem it tries to solve.

But I don't think it's a lost battle. Maybe the concept has to be changed a bit. I've identified two points I can work on:

1. Creating modules has to be extremely easy. Developers will stick to the old way of creating addons using XML and not just switch to another system that depends on a framework. A converter that reads a toc file and spits out a module would be extremely helpful.

2. An ingame browser that lets you download shared addons from other people. That way, even if only one person who is online has the base addon and a few cool modules it'll be a very impressive show effect if a user who is trying the base addon comes online and sees a whole list of other addons to get.

@Pusikas: I'd say Blizz has implemented a very solid addon system and that's as far as they'll go. Any further innovation beyond that has to come from players. I can see this work within the current bounds set by Blizzard if it's done right. And I'm willing to see this through no matter how much work is involved.

@tekkub: Winzip isn't all that complicated. But it's still one step less to take and a whole lot faster if you don't have to restart the client. I'll admit that many problems are yet to be solved once this system gets used more widely (e.g. giving users a good overview over all modules they have installed and keeping memory usage in check etc). But it's not really a complicated system. You pack an addon into a single string, append a well documented header and that's it. The base addon is responsible for managing them and making them visible to users. But apart from that, modules don't really differ from normal addons. They are in a special form but not changed or restricted in any other way (apart from not being able to include special graphics). A badly coded addon will be just as bad if inside a module but it won't mess anything up beyond that just because it's a module.

How about using it to share settings instead of addons?

Having trouble with Grid? No problem, I'll just send you my profile!