Overview

ItemNameLocalized was an addon for World of Warcraft that allowed you to see in the Item and Spell tooltips their name in a different language, always keeping the original name. This helped communicating with friends that played the game in english, or looking for help online in guides or forums.

Challenges

Blizzard API

The game didn't have a way to access the item names from other languages using the ingame LUA API, so I had to create my own database. My main source for this was the Blizzard Official API.

Using different endpoints from their API and a python script I myself created for this task, I downloaded all item names form all languages and stored them in Lua files in a shape of a big array.

The API suffered multiple changes through the time, making me to rewrite the script multiple times. Finally, due to errors in the API not returning all available Items and Spells causing a lot of missing items for my Addon, and my lack of free time to play World of Warcraft to test the addon, I decided to stop the development of it.

Memory consumption

The Addon started featuring only English, but with each new language I started supporting, the memory usage of having all items names in memory started to grow. Due to this, I separated each language in an individual addon in a form of a module.

With this approach I was able to handle better each language and have only loaded the selected language, "deleting" from the RAM all other languages, using only 30-40 MB of memory.

Description

Features

• Adds the Item name or Spell name to the tooltip title.
• Adds the Item name or Spell name on a single extra line on the tooltip.
• Generate Wowhead URLs of any item and spell with a command (/inl link [shift+click one or more items]).

Languages supoported

• enUS
• esES
• frFR
• deDE
• itIT
• ptBR
• ruRU
• esMX
• koKR
• zhTW
• zhCN