Primary source for the WoW lua API?

Question

I was looking for first-hand information about the World of Warcraft add-ons API. There are a couple of wikis that are pretty good, but their links only refer to an internal point. Of course, there is information published by Blizzard on this topic.

Can all their information be gleaned from reverse engineering and forums? It would be hard for me to believe.

Answer 1

Not all of them are necessarily collected from verification or trial and error. Some of them are provided, but randomly, from the "heading" forum posts from the "source", like Blizzard employees. They are usually pretty good about it, although they are almost always provided in “just necessary to relieve you of pain”.

Here is an example: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/233590-mop-changes/

Watching blue messages goes a long way, and it has been so long. If you look at something like this (old patch 3.1.0 notes for end users) http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/patch-notes/3-1-0 , and then scanning closer to the bottom will be a note and a link to API changes, so it’s easy to understand, and they intend to provide some “unofficial” support for API changes there, while they don’t burden them.

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In general, I would say that, due to the very open nature of the materials, the source for the user interface is very little hidden, and most of them are quite self-evident, so it seems to be unlikely to qualify as reverse engineering. When you understand Lua's relationship to the overall design of the WoW interface and the supporting API, this is much simpler.

Regarding the implied question of “why,” it's “hard to believe.” In my opinion, they are doing what, in their opinion, is the best balance between full support without "official" approval and not wasting cycles trying to document the vast amount of opportunities that are ever changing. I think they believe that this makes the best product with the ability to customize, so its interest in them, however, is caused by problems and even legal problems from many points of view, to be clearly “official” about this or to try to maintain consistent documents .

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To the "git hub" question below, here is a "blue" post in the context that can be found by clicking the "blizz" link icon on the mmo-champion link provided earlier: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum / topic / 6413172918 # 1 I tried to give an example of a Blue post that included details, but I accidentally gave one for the web API, not the game API. However, the principle is the same, and provides more features for Blizzard community to support dev.

So basically this particular post was about changes to the web API, and the Git note has nothing to do with UI customization and macros. There is no hidden or official document source for customizing the user interface and macro. This is mainly because it simply does not exist for everyone. :)

Answer 2

Yes, all information is gleaned from a source.

Answer 3

Blizzard does not currently publish API information, AFAIK.

http://www.wowpedia.org/Portal:Interface_customization will probably be your best resource.

Answer 4

There are several ways to discover the names of C function calls that are exported to the Lua environment.

But yes. One is quite simple - list all the global variables in the source that are written, then list the global variables that are displayed during WoW operation - and make a difference, possibly limiting the result to global “function” types

Blizzard has been used to unofficially document its API for a while, but it has always been "unsupported"

There are other ways to open the API - but they include actions that may violate TOS.

Answer 5

Now there is a website that contains an API for wow add-ons. It really helped me.