WowAceUpdater goes the way of the dodo
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! ]
Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Add-Ons, Expansions






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
SkwidSpawn Jul 19th 2008 8:10PM
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.
G Jul 19th 2008 8:33PM
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.
Jamus Jul 19th 2008 9:36PM
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.
wolfy Jul 20th 2008 3:06AM
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.
Makoto99 Jul 20th 2008 6:35AM
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.
Hagu Jul 21st 2008 3:48AM
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.
Kody Jul 24th 2008 5:13PM
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.
SkwidSpawn Jul 24th 2008 7:22PM
Thanks a ton for the response Kody. Good to know that the mac community will continue to be supported by you guys!
Kompost Jul 19th 2008 8:15PM
Aww, no thanks for the tip?
Alex Ziebart Jul 19th 2008 8:47PM
Ack, sorry! Fixed!
Aigarius Jul 19th 2008 8:17PM
WUU works on Mac and Linux (and Windows too). Time to switch.
Ichigo Jul 19th 2008 8:22PM
link?
Aigarius Jul 19th 2008 8:26PM
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.
Aigarius Jul 19th 2008 8:28PM
Oh, and addon developers should just go to http://code.google.com/ and host their addons there.
Tekkub Jul 19th 2008 9:06PM
Or github! Git >> svn
Aigarius Jul 19th 2008 9:48PM
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.
Tekkub Jul 19th 2008 9:55PM
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.
Chris Heald Jul 20th 2008 2:36AM
Also not going to work once files.wowace.com is offline.
hinu Jul 19th 2008 8:25PM
I use SVN to update my WowAce mods. No problems here.
THJ Jul 19th 2008 8:37PM
Use Wowmatrix.
http://www.wowmatrix.com/
Works with Mac/Linux/Windows.
Totally free, totally awesome