TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

RevDanCatt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:55:47 GMT

Nice app, been thinking about this for a while myself, but don't have the time along with everything else ... and it's a bit of a pain having to reload the UI, jarring for the user ... so here's a couple of thoughts I had, for getting tweets out...

1) If the tweet isn't *super* time critical you may want to look at writing to the players event calendar...

Pick a day in the far future and write a "twitter:my twitter here event". It takes about 5mins for the data to propagate to the users events calendar on the WoW website. Your tray app, if given the credentials can poll the WoW site for the user's Calendar in XML format for that month. It's a slow way to get info out, but it works.

Or ...

2) Or, convert the tweet to binary and write the binary out as pixels along the top and bottom couple of lines of pixels on the screen (add checksums if you need to). Then dump the screenshot, your app checks for the screenshot and reads the pixels from the top and bottom converting them back to text ... etc.

Both of these don't need the UI reload.

*But* sadly you do need the reload as you're doing to display tweets. For a one way getting info out though it should work, and I haven't seen the methods documented anywhere else :)

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

KFM — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:53:35 GMT

Isn't this a violation of Blizz's ToS/CoC for WoW?

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Fang Xianfu — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:45:02 GMT

Note: this sort of interaction with a third-party executable is exactly what Blizzard's Terms of Use (http://www.wow-europe.com/en/legal/termsofuse.html) explicitly forbid.

See heading I, section 3, sub-sections 1: "You agree that you will not modify or cause to be modified any files that are a part of a World of Warcraft installation"; 2: "You agree that you will not.. use.. any other third-party software designed to modify the World of Warcraft experience"; and 3: "You agree that you will not use any third-party software that... collects information from or through World of Warcraft"

Your account may be at risk if you use this software.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Fang Xianfu — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:50:26 GMT

Apologies, it's heading III, not I.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Klaus — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:41:26 GMT

Cool!I love twitter,I love this.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Rob — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:51:02 GMT

Hi, I don't really play WoW anymore, but I was really intrigued by this mod as I know communicating with external programs is very difficult from WoW LUA.

Do you think Blizzard will have a problem with this? I'm not very familiar with the WoW EULA/TOS but it seems like Blizzard does not like the thought of WoW addon's communicating with an external program( please correct me on this if i'm wrong) and this might be against their wishes.

Regardless this is a very cool piece of coding, thanks for releasing the source and I wish you all the best!

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Anthony — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:02:48 GMT

As I expected, as a fellow LUA programmer, this completely got blown out of proportion. You STILL have to do a UI reload if you want to get new data, so this has basically already been done before by the ***numerous*** addons such as thottbot's old 'armory' back before armory existed.

This doesn't do any meaningful communication at all. Great concept, but Blizzard really should open the API to outside app communication, for things such as IM clients, and this particular program.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Renmiri — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:11:59 GMT

Yay for this!

I had thought about writing some simple guild chat to tweeter bridge, to be able to keep up with guildies while I'm at work, but as you found out it turned out to not be so simple :p

Your addon is perfect for what I wanted! TY, TY, TY!!!

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

barbera del monferrato — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:41:49 GMT

That's great, I never thought about An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft like that before.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

vino del monferrato — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:43:57 GMT

I was just thinking about The TweetCraft Tray application and you've really helped out. Thanks!

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

vendita diretta vino — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:45:17 GMT

Wow, I never knew that An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft. That's pretty interesting...

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Ian Robinson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:42:37 GMT

Have you been in communication with Blizzard to make sure that Tweetcraft does not break any Terms of Service for the game?

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

danielfe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:15:28 GMT

Ian - I personally tried emailing Blizzard Entertainment twice (to wowui@blizzard-dotcom) and never received a response from them. We did work with Blizzard directly when we first launched AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft where we showed off the same techniques to build an in-game RSS Reader (circa 2007).

We don't think it violates the Terms of service and it does effectively what other clients like the Curse, Wowhead or WowWebStats clients do.

Someone has asked on the forums for a response from Blizzard as well, but they haven't heard back. I don't think this breaks the TOS as we are only synchronizing data into Lua variables, much like Wowhead's quest helper.

If we hear back, we'll let you know.

Thanks,

-Dan

Project Coordinator

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

danielfe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:25:37 GMT

I already responded to Fang Xianfu in the Frequently Asked Questions from TweetCraft. Link: http://tweetcraft.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Frequently%20Asked%20Questions

Comment

- "You agree that you will not modify or cause to be modified any files that are a part of a World of Warcraft installation"

- Tweetcraft modifies part of the WTF folder.

Response

- Incorrect: TweetCraft only reads/writes from the TweetCraft.lua file that it installs. TweetCraft is not part of the World of Warcraft installation

Comment

- "You agree that you will not create or use... any other third-party software designed to modify the World of Warcraft experience"

- TweetCraft is a third-party executable that "modifies the World of Warcraft experience". The fact that it doesn't edit the memory doesn't matter.

Response

- The TweetCraft executable saves data to a file, it doesn't alter the World of Warcraft experience alone. In fact, you could have the executable running all day and it would have no affect on the experience

- As others have pointed out, addons are designed to alter the 3rd party experience.

Comment

- "You agree that you will not use any third-party software that intercepts, "mines", or otherwise collects information from or through World of Warcraft"

- TweetCraft collects information (your outgoing tweets) from World of Warcraft.

Response

- The data mining clause was to prevent addons that would provide gold prices for auction house or population addons (Cosmo, which is still not banned)

- TweetCraft only collects information that you decide to share. If you load TweetCraft and you send no outgoing tweets, the TweetCraft addon has done nothing wrong. Would you ban the Notepad addon (http://wow.curse.com/msgs/default.aspx?MessageId=9? ) if a user "datamines" information by recording what's important to them while playing Warcraft?

Comment

- Claiming its open source and can't be stopped in a terrible argument. Blizzard can stop it and most likely will. I don't agree with the policy but its the policy. *Frustration*

Response

- The only reason I mention it's open source is for the security aspects of the application as some folks thought this was a keylogger

Not Just TweetCraft

The techniques we're doing are the same exact ones used by the wowhead, curse, or WowWebStats clients do for quite some time. We're not really doing anything new here and those have *not* been banned. This could absolutely change in the future though.

Contacting Blizzard

In terms of getting clarity from Blizzard, some folks have asked on the forums already, but a "blue" didn't respond. Additionally, before we ever shipped, I personally sent two emails to wowui@blizzard.com from my Microsoft.com email address:

First email: April 15, 2009, Subject: Clarifications on new AddOn rules

Second email: May 26, 2009, Subject: Re: Clarifications on new AddOn rules

In the second email, I said "Assuming we don’t hear back from you, we’re going to assume that what we’re doing is not a violation of the new UI AddOn development policy." I did receive their auto-responder saying they have received my email for the May 26th email. I NEVER received a response that this was in violation.

If we do receive a warning, we'll post the note, explain what's happening, and stop working on TweetCraft. We're not trying to get anyone banned.

Hope this helps,

-Dan

Project Coordinator

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

chaud — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:35:49 GMT

Assuming it is you, please stop using the #wow tag, it is polluting the search.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

Bruce Stockwell — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:47:00 GMT

I use TweetCraft with multiple windows logins and multiple Wow accounts. Each user has to make sure they shutdown TC before another user logs in to use it. "TweetCraft is already running" happens if you don't. Can I configure this app to live in each user space so that it can be left running for each user all the time? I wish I could leave feedback on your project page without having to have an account there.

re: TweetCraft - An in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft

fryy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:59:14 GMT

Dose TweetCraft support twitter api proxy?