At noon today, Kaelten of WowAce fame posted a thread on the WowAce forums discussing the future of their massively popular project. There's quite a bit of nitty gritty coder lingo that you don't really need to know unless you're involved in WowAce, but there's other important information for us normal folk, too.First, a few obvious things are pointed out. One, WowAce became big. Really, really big, and I imagine much bigger than they had ever imagined. The way WowAce is set up doesn't work so well with that much of a load and that many mods and packages being developed. Additionally, the amount of bandwidth they used monthly is absolutely enormous.
To quote: "As it currently stands files.wowace.com pushes out an incredible amount of addon updates. In an average month we're talking about more than thirty terabytes of data! In a busy month clearing sixty is no problem, and I don't even want to talk about what happens on major patch days."
As you can imagine, you sort of need a little funding to keep up with that. Their relationship with Curse has allowed some help with hosting, but the WowAceUpdater and the like still need a little financial backing. As we know from before, ad-based revenue did not really work out for them for various reasons, one of which is probably the shaky security concerns WoW has had combined with the old flash exploit targetting flash-based ads, I imagine. Because of this, Kaelten's primary note of his post is that WowAce will be using CurseForge's software and the WowAceUpdater will be no more, with Curse's client taking its place. For the fine details, head on over to Kaelten's thread. This is a little frightening for the people that rely on the WAU, but Kaelten is directly involved with the CurseForge project, so this will actually allow him to contribute more to WowAce, as he points out.
[ Thanks, Kompost! ]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
7-19-2008 @ 8:10PM
SkwidSpawn said...
this is actually pretty scary for mac users out there who use a lot of ace mods. Last I checked the curse downloader did not work on mac.
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7-19-2008 @ 8:33PM
G said...
Unless they leave the independent OS X WowAceUpdater alone, since Mac users obviously don't cost as much bandwidth. Fingers crossed. As much as I love Ace addons, the things which make the system great are equally automatic and faceless. A complete elbow for their Mac users wouldn't surprise, and Diablo 3 wouldn't get here fast enough.
7-19-2008 @ 9:36PM
Jamus said...
I too wonder how this will affect Mac players. I used the mac ace updater and was wondering if Curse will release a Mac version.
7-20-2008 @ 3:06AM
wolfy said...
I've never used an auto updater and always go over to the wowace beta download page once a week to go through checking for updates and download them manually!! oh and i use over 70 addons.
laziness ftl.
7-20-2008 @ 6:35AM
Makoto99 said...
There's a couple workarounds (sort of) on the Mac. I personally use WowMatrix since a couple weeks ago... updates ACE mods, plus many non-ACE ones too, so it's even more convenient.
You can also just use the built-in Subversion (if you have Leopard... I forget if Tiger had it) and check out your own working copies of the mods you want into your Addons directory, and then just do svn update's every so often to keep them up to date. This USED to work, they used to have anonymous read-only I believe... not sure if it does anymore though.
7-21-2008 @ 3:48AM
Hagu said...
Exactly! Curse has deliberately chosen to ignore Macs. Oh well, their choice, but it costs them users/business.
I will have to continue on my search for non-curse choices.
7-24-2008 @ 5:13PM
Kody said...
WAU will not be canceled until the new version of the Curse Client is officially released, which will support Mac OS X in addition to the current client's support of Windows.
You can find out more about Curse Client 2.0 here: http://www.curseforge.com/projects/curse-client-beta/
We realize many have come to love WAU, and we want to provide that same kind of support for the new Curse Client, so please feel free to leave any feedback you have on the beta project page.
7-24-2008 @ 7:22PM
SkwidSpawn said...
Thanks a ton for the response Kody. Good to know that the mac community will continue to be supported by you guys!
7-19-2008 @ 8:15PM
Kompost said...
Aww, no thanks for the tip?
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7-19-2008 @ 8:47PM
Alex Ziebart said...
Ack, sorry! Fixed!
7-19-2008 @ 8:17PM
Aigarius said...
WUU works on Mac and Linux (and Windows too). Time to switch.
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7-19-2008 @ 8:22PM
Ichigo said...
link?
7-19-2008 @ 8:26PM
Aigarius said...
http://wuu.vagabonds.info
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wuu
Free/Open Source software under zlib/libpng license, written in Python, so all the source code is right there for everyone to see and inspect, so that anyone can check that there are no keyloggers there.
7-19-2008 @ 8:28PM
Aigarius said...
Oh, and addon developers should just go to http://code.google.com/ and host their addons there.
7-19-2008 @ 9:06PM
Tekkub said...
Or github! Git >> svn
7-19-2008 @ 9:48PM
Aigarius said...
And another thing (and I especially am looking at you, Tekkub) - do not invent you own weird software licenses in which you sometimes forget to give your users permission to actually download and use your software. Use one of the OSI (www.opensource.org) Approved licences or a CreativeCommons Licence.
Unless, you are very, very sure you know what you are doing, just use GPLv3 for your addon projects.
7-19-2008 @ 9:55PM
Tekkub said...
I actually do not believe in software licenses at all, and I don't consider that thing I list on gcode to be a "license"... I don't even like that I forced into putting it up. But that's a whole different debate for a different time, really.
7-20-2008 @ 2:36AM
Chris Heald said...
Also not going to work once files.wowace.com is offline.
7-19-2008 @ 8:25PM
hinu said...
I use SVN to update my WowAce mods. No problems here.
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7-19-2008 @ 8:37PM
Begonia said...
Is WoWMatrix safe? I've noticed a lot of people using it.
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