Akishari wrote:BleaS wrote:Akishari wrote:Addons in-game cannot access the internet in any way.
So to answer your question. No, it can't.
The alternative would be to have the addon do the same calculations on a player's gear that the website currently does, since all the info is available in-game.
I'm quite certain a few addons pull from online databases, but if you're certain...
Those addons require third-party programs that run in the background and constantly download updates to a cache which can be read by the in-game addon. This can be done using wowheroes but would be very resource intensive on their side. In addition, it would not be real-time. Your third-party app would have to know the names of everybody on your server, and maintain a local cache of these players in order for this to be half-way decent.
And these program files are mysteriously hidden from my site? Because I have looked through them and never seen anything other than the lua script files, xml files and other associated non-program files for the Addon.
In any case, the point is not to debate the specifics of how it is done. It
could be done. I think many people would find it useful, and there's no reason to believe that the resource demand on wow-heroes would be any different than having people go through the site as they can now and look up all of the information. So long as the Addon was not constantly updated and updated only when the user asked it to, then it would be doing little more than what the user could do themselves on the site.
The major issue then is that such an addon could draw traffic away from wow-heroes, which uses ads in order to keep the website running. Without the revenue from the ads, it would likely cost too much for the administrators to maintain. That's one of the big dilemmas right there.