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First some background: After the last patch downloaded my client failed to start, crashing with MPQ errors before the login screen. After some poking around i've noticed many of my MPQ files contain large chunks filled with zeroes, but the launcher was fully ignoring this and saying that everything is downloaded.
I've googled and experimented but found no way to make it recheck the files (and the repair tool wasn't working at all). I really hope it does check the hashes of chunks it downloads (otherwise that would be a massive security hole), but once it's on disk it just assumes the files are ok. There is some kind of signature appended to every MPQ file it downloads with a version and file size, but removing or corrupting it makes it simply be replaced when the launcher is restarted. It also seems that if you truncate even 1 byte off the end of the file the launcher redownloads the whole file.
Not really wanting to re-download the whole (20+ gb) client with my crappy internet connection i chose a different route: I've made a python script that verified every file using the torrent hashes and downloaded only the damaged areas. After downloading about 80mb of data all the checks passed and my client was starting properly.
Now I've seen quite a lot of complains about blizzard's launcher, even assuming 90% of the complainers are idiots or behind nazi firewalls there are probably quite a lot of people having problems with it... making this into a usable program would require some work (checking all edge cases, making a nice gui, etc.) and lots of testing (I'd prefer not to mess up someone's client even more ), it also doesn't currently support any form of p2p, downloading only directly off blizzard web servers.
So here are my questions:
1) Would people actually use it if i finish and release it? - Considering all the "omgwtfvirus!" paranoia...
2) Would it beak the TOS/EULA? - It DOES modify the game data, but does it according to blizzard-supplied hashes and with data downloaded from blizzard's web servers.
3) It is surprising that no one came up with the idea until now given the amount of complains... maybe there is already someone working on it and i just missed it?
Comments
I would not use it for this very reason. I am not going to let a third-party application much around with my WoW files and possibly hijack my account. It's the very same reason I never use an addon installer.
For both reasons one and two i would personally call it a dead end and that is not even taking into consideration other coders with other intent getting hold of your code and modifying it for their own ends and distributing it as 'The Original'
Blizzard set the rules about not modifying code and using their own applications for a reason and hacking/account theft are reasons 1-99 out of 100.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.