First Addon - Rules on Reading Data Files Externally

[PopeGreogry_IX]

Hi all!

Recent ESO player here who has some programming experience and has created the occasional mod for other games (Eliteangerous particularly).

Just asking about the rule stated in your wiki; specifically "ZOS does not want addons to communicate with any source outside the game in real time for a plethora of reasons."

This seems fairly cut-and-dry "don't do it...", and would prevent me from developing the addon I'm thinking of creating. The idea would be to have an addon saving a data file and then having an external app reading from that data file.

However, I look at big addons that are allowed, such as uespLog, and that appears to do exactly what I'm intending, but it is allowed on ESOUI and presumably is not considered to violate that rule.

Like I said - the wiki statement would normally stop me in my tracks, but if other valid developers read real-time data and upload it externally, it makes me think there must be a way of doing this while keeping ZOS happy? Is saving a file and then reading that file back with an external application not considered "real-time" enough that it's an issue - perhaps ZOS are purely trying to prevent external network communication from within the Lua script?

Cheers,
Adam