This may be a stupid question, but within the Warcraft Addon directory there are always multiple folders for essentially the same addon. For example, one folder for BigWigs, then 6 folders for BigWigs SSC/Eye/BT etc etc.

Is there a way to organise these extra addon files so that they are contained within the main addon folder, or is this simply not possible?

Cheers

It can be done yes, but it requires the addon author to structure his code in a way to work in that manner.

For most addons that work this way this should be possible.

If you press F8 to open WowAceUpdater's preferences and then remove the tick before "Unpack Addons" WowAceUpdater should no longer turn these mods into such a collection of separate folders.

The only thing I'm not sure of is if this will remove the now superfluous extra folders.

There's a few addons this doesn't work for, but it should work for all of them that are listed under Packages in WowAceUpdater.

At least in the view of the WoW client, it makes little difference if folders are in one main folder or spreadout.


So your idea of making addons in one folder will not increase performance, but it may be nicer to look at.

It does for LoD, in the case of BigWigs it looks like it was built so it can be used either way but you'll lose the benefit of the boss modules being LoD until needed.

In the case of BigWigs though aren't each of those registering as individual modules? The WoW client actually checks for addons inside other addon paths?

Cheers for the help. Has reduced the clutter of the folder. Half tempted to edit fubar's toc file and create a modules.xml myself to contain it all, but i imagine this would cause problems on updating.

Another quick question. I always update the mods with externals, which means certain libs are contained within countless addon folders. Is this effecting performance at all, and if so, whats the best way to store libs used in multiple mods?

Not that familiar with WAU, but as long as it uncomments the file that loads the libraries or deletes it then it shouldn't matter the game wont load a file if it's not referanced in the toc all it should be doing is adding it to a list so the game knows if it was present at the game being started.

I should just make clear that by having all the BigWigs instance folders load, you shouldn't actually loose any performance, since there no steady increasing memory growth since the modules are not active.

The only disadvantage is that you are wasting RAM, say you only raid Karazhan you are loading Black Temple and such you won't raid. Which isn't a problem if you have tons of memory really. I'm not really one to care about file neatness so I aim for saving any kind of system resource.

Sorry for the /derail, but i have one quick (slightly related) question...

I've seen reference to mods/settings that let you determine the memory utilization of each mod you have running- I'm trying to find it. Can someone point me in the right direction?

When you have multiple copies of a library in the folders for different addons, the game will load each copy and then Ace will decide which is the newest version and discard the rest. This means it will take longer and more memory during loading, but actual performance while playing will be the same.

The best way to do it is to update without externals but check the Automatic Dependency Download option. This will add any mandatory dependencies an addon has to a list and download them into their own folders. It used to be that you used the StandaloneLibraries, but that contained all of the libraries. Now you only get the ones you need.

When you update with externals in WAU, the libraries in the addon directory are referenced in the .toc through embeds.xml.

Edit: The majority of the addons are doing it that way now, at least.