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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

> Today is also the day where Nostalrius will start being community-driven in the truest sense of the word, as we will be releasing the source code, and anonymized players data (encrypting personal account data)

This will be interesting. Apparently, there are open source reverse-engineerings of the old WoW code already, but having them release the source code may allow for some interesting applications.

I'd love to play around with that data dump as well.

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There are actually dozens of WoW private server implementations (called cores) on github, for every version of the game. Their patches will be immensely useful to the various vanilla cores to improve their out of the box support, but this is actually the second shutdown server this year that is dumping its full scripting as open source after a server called Sunwell did it for WoW 3.3, and those scripts produced a dramatic increase in quality among other servers at that version very quickly.

Is there a project that focuses on portability between these "cores", for example taking your AD&D Character sheet with you between all these different cores?

Series of the cores share common functionality amongst themselves, but the character data structures between them are radically different because of changes in character info between versions (ie, they added achievements in wotlk, and then made them account wide in Cata / MOP), and in MoP / WoD they removed several item slots on certain classes).

The problem with most private servers is not character portability, but scripting portability. A quest scripted for a vanilla core probably won't work on a Burning Crusade one because the API used is different.

The WoW private server scene is actually fascinating to read from a code study perspective, because its all entirely hobbyist and often novice software development. Common solutions to problems like delegation or templates are often unused because the people writing the code just didn't know they existed and never formally studied software best practices.

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