Template talk:WkIncompatible

Idea for a module

This template actually brought me an idea to make a WormKit module. It does the version check for the modules that do not have their own version check. And when an incompatible module is found, it displays a error message and then terminates W:A. (rather than let W:A crash by itself)

This is off-topic but I just tell my idea. --Explorer09 10:34, 2 December 2010 (CET)

Hey, great idea! However, there's no real way of knowing what version a module was written for outside of: a WA version check included by the author, a module version check done by WormKit (explained in next paragraph), or a database of known module version compatibility.

WoW's addons are each required to have a version number in their .toc file (table of contents file) so WoW can check whether it's "up to date". Before logging into their character, the player can see a list of their installed addons with descriptions and an up-to-date flag, where the player can toggle their addons to load individually. They can toggle an option called "Load out of date addons" to load addons marked with old version numbers but still work. A similar method applied to WormKit and its modules would be great, but that would probably require changing WormKit itself. WormKit is open-source, but all this would need to be coordinated to be useful at all. Meaning, everyone would have to update WormKit. Since that probably won't happen on top of this taking a lot of effort to coordinate between module authors and whoever would code/build/host the modified WormKit, this method wouldn't make a very realistic project.

The database-of-known-module-compatibility could work. Someone would have to maintain that and everyone would have to download the module.

-Lex 05:54, 3 December 2010 (CET)

Thanks for reply. Yes, actually what I mean is to make a "database-of-known-module-compatibility". Just check the md5 hash of modules that are known to be not working, or do something like that.

By the way, the database you said could be downloaded and stored locally (as a text file or such), so that if collision occurs, the user could modify the list on his own and thus bypassing the check. --Explorer09 13:47, 3 December 2010 (CET)

The real solution is to integrate this functionality into W:A itself (alpha testers: Mantis link). It hasn't been realised because a complete implementation would require changing network protocols and replay file formats to indicate which add-ons are required to play. --Vladimir 15:26, 3 December 2010 (CET)