from Hacker News

Building a WoW (World of Warcraft) Server in Elixir

by thibaut_barrere on 9/5/24, 8:36 AM with 43 comments

  • by zelo on 9/5/24, 8:15 PM

    That's awesome! It made me a bit nostalgic, thinking back to the first program I ever wrote. It was a WoW bot that walked between the mailbox and the auction house, manipulating auction prices. The bot would drive the glyph prices to the bottom by lowering the lowest price by just 1 bronze to always be the cheapest when sorted by price. Then, it would buy up the entire market stock and offer everything for 50 gold each, starting the cycle again. It was glue code between Lua extensions and xdotool, all written in Bash, running WoW under Wine on Linux. The bot was pulling in about 20K gold per day on a single account.

    The fun part is, I was 14 years old and had zero programming knowledge at the time—just a feeling that this process could be automated and access to Google. The bot was reading the game state by capturing specific parts of the screen and comparing MD5 checksums of where the buttons were supposed to appear. I used xdotool for mouse and keyboard input, along with in-game settings like Lua command execution inside the game console to target specific NPCs or mailboxes and click to move. It probably pushed me toward pursuing a career in this industry.

  • by hakanderyal on 9/5/24, 10:57 AM

    This was a good read. As a former WoW addict, I barely stopped myself from undertaking implementing one for myself.

    This is not an area I'm familiar with and I always assumed this kind of work would involve concepts that are foreign to me, but upon reading it seems it was not that magical.

  • by doublerabbit on 9/5/24, 11:45 AM

    As a s'kiddie who used to host gameservers (Q3, IRCd, RTCW) and which is now a dying art, I give many kudos to anyone developing home-brew projects to emulate any sort of game server.

    I loved Habbo Hotel as a teen, and the fact there are still folk developing a "retro hotels", self hosted, really sparks a little bit of joy.

    I just don't have the fanbase, time nor power of influence to get folk to join but I check around now and then.

    https://devbest.com/forums/habbo-releases.31/

    https://forum.ragezone.com/community/habbo-hotel.282/

  • by fouronnes3 on 9/5/24, 11:09 AM

    A pipe dream of mine is an open source WoW 1.12 client implementation. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted that. Bonus point if it compiles to javascript :)

  • by dindresto on 9/5/24, 1:12 PM

    I was active in the WoW server emulation scene somewhere around 2008 to 2012 and fondly look back on that time. Especially the German forum darkwow.de (and later mmonerds.de) is one of the reasons I got into computer science and I'm still in touch with some of the former members. Ten years later I got an MSc degree in computer science and programming is one of my most profound hobbies.

  • by Eumenes on 9/5/24, 11:32 AM

    I was drunk the other night asking genAI to make me an overengineered encrypted messaging system using extensive steganography involving WoW. Got me deep into WoW add-on development.

  • by h1fra on 9/5/24, 12:48 PM

    Impressive, feels crazy to be able to build something like this without really knowing what they actually did on the backend.

  • by seper8 on 9/5/24, 11:32 AM

    This is super cool and I really like the fact that you added the dates. Puts things in perspective!