Carbonite, how to 'really' fix this wonderful addon

[littlewierdo]

First, download/redownload (if you deleted Carbonite) here:

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...Carbonite.html

Then, click this link to open a zip file:

http://rythal.com/carbonite-50501.zip

Copy the files inside the Carbonite folder in that zip over the top of the existing Carbonite files in your WoW directory.

It looks like this is the fella that will be taking over Carbonite.

Keep an eye on this website for future updates.

http://rythal.com

This doesnt colour in zones for areas to complete quests in MoP but at least it gives you a decent map to work with (and yes, the zones actually display).

[cabby]

That is great news if the Carbonite developers do actually release the source and make it GNU code.

[chaos5061]

And they aren't going to. It's a big thing if you go look at their forum on wow interface. They don't even play anymore and aren't testing in the game. To update they just took most of this guys work and added it to Carbonite and released it. They don't want anybody trying to do this they've said.

[cabby]

Chaos, if you go to Rythal's blog in the link there he claims that Faatal sent him an email a couple days ago suggesting that they will release Carbonite to the community. They have also removed all links and pages for donations on the carboniteaddon.com website. This would indicate that there is a good chance that Carbonite might go GPL.

[chaos5061]

Damn. Really? Wow that's good news. I lost interest in Carbonite when I saw that post from them about not letting fan updates happen. If they weren't playing the game they should have let fans update. Good to know they may have changed their mind. I may have to go get the new one to try it out.

[cabby]

Yeah, it appears that Rythal is still doing a fan update but only publishing it thru his blog.

[littlewierdo]

This would be the reason I posted the instructions in the OP. I dont really need Carbonite for the questing data (albeit, the quest data is nice to have for the multitude of times Zygor has incorrect coordinates or when everything I need for a specific quest has already been killed by someone else and Zygor only lists on location for completing a quest). Carbonite more than anything is a nice map and I like their quest tracker (its nice and small / compact). I could personally do without the reskinned quest log and the plethora of other 'junk' that Carbonite does.

[merlik]

I hope Carbonite does go GPL. It would be awesome if Zygor adopted some of the features that it had. Such as the find nearest trainer, etc...

[littlewierdo]

And, there it is, Carbonite is now open source using the GPL license.

Source code is here: http://www.carboniteaddon.com/download.shtml

[cabby]

Woohoo... happy dance!!

[chaos5061]

Awesome. Wonder what Zygor could do with something like this.

[cabby]

Probably not much. I'm not sure if the team would want to take on maintaining another addon, and a complex one at that. Rythal seems to be very interested in keeping it going and has some good ideas so it's probably best left in his hands.

[littlewierdo]

A couple of things to note here.

Zygor couldnt legally do anything with this addon unless they provided it free of charge and also provided source code for everything they did. This is a requirement of the GPL license terms. This however doesnt prevent Zygor from 'hooking' into Carbonite.

Rythal plans on making Carbonite plugin compatible. This means that Carbonite will consist of a 'core' which likely will be only the map. Additional functionality will have to be downloaded separately (for example, the npc tracker, the quest log, the pvp punks stuff. the enhanced friends list, etc. would all be separate addons) which is both good and bad.

The bad part is, it means users likely will have to search for and maintain (keeping them up to date) more addons. This also means more of a chance that certain functionality may be lost if a developer decides to discontinue his/her plugin.

The good part is that users can decide what they want / dont want in order to handle their memory and utilized processing power. It also means that Zygor could in theory 'hook' into Carbonite allowing additional functionality should a user have Carbonite installed.

I am looking through the source code now, it is amazingly complicated as addons go. I wouldnt expect anything major for the next few months, its going to likely take developers awhile just to figure out how everything works, then likely (if I were them), I would start on getting Carbonite fully functional again, then start to focus on stripping out code that is no longer necessary (by my current guess, 25% of the source code is currently obsolete or needs MAJOR reworking). I would also probably try to de-obfuscate (so to speak) the current code so that source code is no longer necessary and the lua code can be worked with directly without an interpreter.

This is by no means a small project or something we will see big results any time soon. But it does mean this addon will likely continue to exist for the duration of WoW's existence unless Blizzard decides to steal their idea and put it directly into the WoW client (and even if they did, it likely wouldnt be implemented all that well).

[Cartman]

The Carbonite map without all that extra stuff and compatible with Blizzard quest helper. I hope this dream will come true.

About the plugins, I don't think this would be a big problem. Because I play all classes I use Spellflash as a small help with rotations. And for that I have to look for 13 separate addons, the main addon, Bitten's library and all 11 class modules.
If you have a list of links to the pages it does not take much time to look for updates.

[cabby]

If we're lucky all of the Carbonite stuff will be available thru Curse to make it easier to keep it updated.