coa-vanillaguide/README-CoA.md

CoA VanillaGuide

This is the CoA Guild 'Exiles' fork of VanillaGuide by mrmr (rsheep@gmail.com), imported from the 1.04.2 release archive dated 2015-03-29. Upstream is unmaintained since 2015.

The original addon targets Vanilla 1.12.1 (Interface: 11200). This fork ports it to the Ascension 3.3.5 / Voljin client (Interface: 30300) so it can be loaded alongside the rest of the CoA addon set.

What we patched

1. Interface bump. VanillaGuide.toc now declares Interface: 30300 and adds a -coa1 suffix on the version line, matching the convention of the other coa-* forks (see e.g. coa-bartender).

2. Lua 5.0 → 5.1 vararg fix. WoW 1.12 ships Lua 5.0, which exposes varargs as an implicit arg table. WoW 3.3.5 ships Lua 5.1, where that table is gone — varargs are {...} or select(). The two debug print helpers in Core.lua (Di, Dv) used the 5.0 form and would have thrown attempt to index global 'arg' (a nil value) on every debug call. Local-shadow arg = {...} keeps the rest of each function unchanged.

3. Lua 5.0 getn → length operator. GuideTable.lua used the Lua 5.0 global getn(opentext) to size a colour-substitution table. That global is gone in Lua 5.1 (table.getn was deprecated and the bare getn removed entirely). Replaced with #opentext. Would have crashed on the very first guide load with attempt to call global 'getn' (a nil value).

What is still TODO

• In-game smoke test. The addon has not yet been loaded against the Ascension client. Expect further small breakage (frame APIs, GetAddOnInfo signature, possibly map-zone coords) once we drive it through /vguide.
• MetaMapBWP integration. MetaMap doesn't exist on 3.3.5. The hooks in Settings.lua and Frame_SettingsFrame.lua are gated behind IsAddOnLoaded("MetaMap") so they're effectively dead, but we'll want to retarget them at pfQuest (already in the CoA addon set) for waypoints and quest markers.
• Dynamic-level-scaling content. Ascension scales every starting zone to the player, so all six vanilla starting zones are viable end-to-end. Joana's faction-locked H/A split still applies (quest givers are still faction-restricted), but the early-game chain doesn't have to funnel through the "correct" 1-12 zone first. We keep the H/A split and lean into the picker to show all three per-faction starting zones up front.
• CoA-custom content slot. No CoA-specific zones or events are wired in yet. Once the port is verified, we add a separate GuideTables/CoA/ directory for guild content (Heroes of Ascension events, mutated-class side notes, etc.) so upstream patches can still merge cleanly into the Joana / Brian Kopps trees.

Files we touched

• VanillaGuide.toc — Interface bump, CoA metadata.
• Core.lua — local-shadow arg = {...} inside Di and Dv.
• GuideTable.lua — getn(opentext) → #opentext.
• README.md — upstream Donations / volunteer-pitch section removed.
• README-CoA.md — this file.

Everything else is the unmodified 1.04.2 import.