World of Warcraft (WoW) patch/more address space layout stuff

[Tomas Carnecky]

Mike Hearn wrote:
> (yeah i'm bored :/)
> 
> Seems the WoW appdb page (apart from being a great example of what an
> appdb entry should be like!) recommends users patch their Wine to run WoW
> properly.
> 
> The patch is this one, which I am SURE we discussed before but I can't
> find the thread! So my questions are:
> 
>  * Is this working around a bug in WoW? (my guess - almost certainly yes)
> 

Speaking from my own experience with WoW bugs and Blizzard: Unless the
bug affects Windows or MacOS users and you can prove and show the exact
location of the bug (which functions are called, which arguments passed
etc.) Blizzard has no interest in fixing the bug whatsoever.

To prove the 'targeting circle' bug was easy, WoW passed a negative
value to an OpenGL function and the bug affected the game on all
platforms when running in OpenGL mode (and thus all MacOS users). And
yet Blizzard postponed the fix to the next major patch release (with at
least two minor releases in between!), even though the patch probably
was a one-liner.

I think Blizzard should test WoW under wine or cedega because I believe
there are many bugs that are hard to track down and it would be easier
to find them when running under another memory layout. I don't think
they'll ever to that.

Hell, the guy at Blizzard didn't even want to give credit to the
OpenSource community for finding that bug. And frankly, playing without
the targeting circles was a major pain and I think many people were
happy to see that bug fixed.


tom