halgari

Wabbajack 4.3.0.0 just went out the door and with it comes a feature I've been working on and planning for some time: The Preflight Check. This new feature is designed to increase the success rate of Wabbajack lists by allowing users to walk through all the prerequisites for a install before startin

Another year down and an other fantastic year for Wabbajack. It's crazy to think that the project is almost 6 years old, time certainly has flown. Once a year or so I like to reach out and ask users to spread the word about this Patreon, and ask for your financial support. Each time I write one of t

It's that time of the year, when I do a bit of campaigning for funds to keep Wabbajack moving forward. As it so happens we also saw a massive uptick in usage over the past few weeks. Thanks to a combination of the Fallout TV show, a IGN Article about Begin Again, and a sale on all Fallout games we s

A few things to cover today. First of all, 3.4.0.0 is finally released. This version of Wabbajack has to do mostly with removing a lot of technical debt we've accumulated over the past year. We've gone from .NET 6 to .NET 8 as the target framework. .NET 7 had some fairly critical internal bugs when

First of all I should apologize for not not sending an update recently. As you can like imagine, switching jobs and getting settled has bit a bit of an adjustment, but I feel like I'm slowly getting to the point where I can start to make more regular bugfixes to Wabbajack. A few minutes ago I releas

So, to kick off this rather insane news let me start with the formal overview of what's going on with Wabbajack. Three weeks ago I gave notice to my IRL employer that I’m leaving the company. On October 24th, I’ll start my new job as the Vortex Product Owner at Nexus Mods. Although this may seem lik

It's certainly been a busy and fun two weeks. As you probably already noticed, I decided to release 3.0 about two weeks ago. The launch went about as I expected, it worked for most people, crashed for a few (due to Microsoft Edge WebView not existing on some revisions of Windows), and flat out broke

First of all, I'd like to say thanks for all the people who have helped beta test Wabbajack 3.0 so far. Lots of bugs have been fixed, sometimes resulting in daily updates. The latest version 3.0.0.6 is still available for download and I'm deeming this version the "Release Candidate" that means that

We're finally there! I've been posting beta builds of Wabbajack 3.0 over on Discord and a special Github repo. If you feel so inclined, please stop by, download the latest release and give it a whirl. Just extract the .zip and run `Wabbajack.exe`. From what I can tell the build mostly works, and I'v

Well I'm back from vacation, and from being sick for about a week. Finally sat down to do some debugging. It's funny how sometimes some fresh perspective and a clear mind can end up with quick solutions to complicated debugging. For the past month I've been fighting a bug in the 3.0 compiler code th

In my last post I mentioned I planed to do a big push this way and get a lot of the UI issues with Wabbajack 3.0 done and out of the way. That plan went exceptionally well this week. I've found that when a large number of smaller "not fun to do" issues crop up in a project, sometimes it's best to ju

As I'm writing this, I realize that it's almost been a year since I started the rewrite of Wabbajack that is now known as 3.0. So let's get a bit of a status report and figure out what it's going to take to ship the UI based on the new code. First of all, the CLI, backend services, the website and e

Currently in Wabbajack 3.0's development I'm at the point of debugging the compiler. I've successfully installed several existing lists via 3.0, but now I'm on to making sure all the compilation functions are working correctly. This work is going well, I've made a new CLI command I call "install-com

Time for another update on the progress of the massive 3.0 update. In the past few weeks, the remaining backend systems have been completely moved over to the new 3.0 codebase. Thanks to the power of modern C# and WASM this means that we are now running the same codebase on all our backend servers,

A long standing issue with Wabbajack is that it always wants to recreate BSA archives when updating a list, even if the contents of those archives hasn't changed since the last modlist release, this has been fixed, keep reading for the nitty gritty details. The reason for this long standing issue is

Rationale Wabbajack has gone through a lot of growth over the past two years, and with that comes some growing pains. One of the big things that has been a pain point over the past year is the centralization of the management of the project. I like to think of centralization problems in the context

As I mentioned in previous posts, one of the nice things about rewriting all of Wabbajack in modern C# is that we are now able to run about 90% of the code on Linux, and since the code is modular it can be split up into multiple smaller services. Also, thanks to the modularity we can make surgical e

As we're only a few days away from the end of the year, I figured it'd be good to do a bit of an update on where we are with Wabbajack 3.0 and a few other things going on in the community. First of all, I should be a bit upfront on something: the final 20% of the 3.0 upgrade is taking way longer tha

Wow, what a couple weeks this has been. With the release of Skyrim AE I took some time off from WJ development to go and create a Skyrim downgrade patcher. That ended up taking a bit more time than I expected, but development is pretty much finished on that project. And it doesn't need much time fro

Due to the recent Skyrim Anniversary Edition update I took some time to create a patcher: This utility will back-patch the changes to your game made by the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim. It will take an up-to-date Skyrim SE install or a Skyrim AE install and patch the executables back to their 1.5.9

Wow, it's been way too long since I've done a development update on the state of Wabbajack 3.0. A few weeks back I went through a bit of a burnout period and so I took a week break and wrote another modding tool for Pathfinder, a portrait creator, exporter, and gallery (https://www.nexusmods.com/pat

Well it's been closer to a week and a half since the last update, but work is progressing well. Our list validation service is now moved off of our backend server and into a GitHub action running Wabbajack 3.0 code. This means we now have our first 3.0 code in use! The transition was a bit rocky, re

Hello users, my name is erri120 and I'm one of the developers of Wabbajack, creator of the Lotus Modlist, and the only person working on the Website. Before we go into the survey, here is a quick history of the website: I pitched the idea of a simple GitHub Pages website for Wabbajack in October 201

Well it's been a long week and a half. Turns out my research into how to best implement a rate limiter in Wabbajack resulted in me writing the same code about 4 different ways before finally finding an approach that works. Wabbajack needs limiters in several places (as mentioned in the previous upda

I finally sat down this past week and figured out CEF (Browser) integration with the new UI toolkit (Avalonia) in Wabbajack 3.0. UI development in general is always a pain and a bit of a time sink, so it's nice that some of he hardest parts of the UI setup are now coded and in pace. The framework fo

As I mentioned in the last Patreon post, work is well underway in the rather massive undertaking that is Wabbajack 3.0. I'm happy to say in this update that development has been going quite well and significant progress has been made. In software development there's an idea of building a "Vertical S

Well it's been a quiet few weeks in the Wabbajack world as we've been waiting for the dust to settle post-nexus-archive-changes. In the mean time I've been looking at our code base, and decided enough was enough it's time for a code cleanup. This makes a bit more sense if we look at it from the pers

As mentioned in my last update, the Nexus has made some nice changes in preparation for their implementation of Collections, namely they will no longer allow mod files to be deleted. This is a good change as it means lists and collections will go down less often an in general everything will be a bi

As you may or may not know, today the Nexus updated us on their progress on "Collections" (https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14538). This is pretty much like it sounds, an collection of mods that can be automatically installed via Vortex (or other mod managers). So what does this mean for Wabbajack? As

Over the past few weeks I've been developing some new features for Wabbajack that I'm happy to announce today. These features are coming in the next version of the app, 2.5.0.0, and we should see a release soon if our testing goes well. I've added a feature that allows Wabbajack to detect when a mod

For some time now we've seen strange issues with Wabbajack's interaction with our CDN on some ISPs. What's been so hard to diagnose about this is that it seems specific to some parts of the world, some ISPs and other weird situations. After a bit of digging I was able to find some information that c

Well the day is finally approaching, I've built the new build server, gotten all the services configured, and the bulk of data transferred over. Turns out it takes a long time to configure and setup 16 drives, and copy over 2TB+ of data we've accumulated over the past year and a half. This Wednesday

The Wabbajack server-side code consists of two main parts, the CDN (essentially a FTP+HTTP server, with a 1Gig pipe) and a backend server that does list validation, Nexus caching, list healing and a host of other small tasks (but doesn't require a fat upload pipe). In addition, this same server also

I just released version 2.4.3.2, it's a small release but fixes a rather big bug that was causing WJ to crash on startup if run from a Root drive. It ended up being related to a bug that's existed in the code for some time. We normalize paths in the Wabbajack libraries, so `c:\foo\` becomes `c:\foo`

It's time for a new update, and this time the post is also synchronized with a somewhat minor but foundational update. I spent most of the past 7 days doing research into the best way to update our UI to be a bit more consistent. As it stands, parts of Wabbajack were developed about 1.5 years ago wi

Little over a week, since the last update, but a lot's been going on. Almost right after my last post we had the fantastic experience of having our CDN go down. Out of the blue parts of the files we hosted on BunnyCDN decided to not sync across regions. I contacted support and while they eventually

Each week that goes by reminds me that I *still* haven't updated all our patreon supporters on the state of Wabbajack. I often sit down in the evening, think I should make a patreon post, then go do some coding and forget to actually write the article. At any rate, my plan now is to try an write a p

So another year with WJ is in the books! Statistics are always fun to look at, so let's start with those, in the past 12 months, 48,879 users have completed installs 191,690 times. Over that time the most popular lists have been: * Living Skyrim: with 22,550 installs * Ultimate Skyrim: with 11,722 i

It's been way too long since I've given an update on Wabbajack. TL:DR of this post will be "things are fine, I've been fixing bugs". Kicking off the past two months was the wonderful experience of contracting <human malware>. Wasn't a bad case, but it's pretty brutal none-the-less. That removed almo

Over the past week I've spent quite a few hours working through our rather messy file extraction code. There's quite a few problems with file extraction in general, and finding the correct combinations of features and limitations has been quite hard. As an example, here's a list of some of the chall

At the start of the month we bragged that on Aug 1st we had the most users of Wabbajack in a single day. At that time we would have never guessed that that record would be broken by 2-3x in the next week. Shortly after that post, PC Gamer ran an article about Wabbajack, and since then our user base

I couldn't resist the troll title on this one. A few weeks ago a developer in our Discord (thanks Unnoen!) pointed me at a new feature in recent versions of Windows 10. It seems they finally came up with a mostly decent version of disk compression that works quite well. Disk compression has been in

Yesterday I released Wabbajack 2.1.0.0 which includes several small, but fairly important improvements: First of all, Wabbajack now use game files as a "download source" both during compilation and installation. This seems strange at first, until you consider how something like cleaned game ESMs cou

This is just a quick update post to say thank you to all our patrons, and supporters in the modding community. This past weekend we surpassed 20,000 users on our discord! In addition I have a few more fun statistics: Since January 1st, 2020, We've seen 43,903 completed installs of modlists using Wab

It's been a busy past few weeks, and I haven't had time to update y'all on what's been going on, but I finally have some breathing room. 2.0 was released recently and we've already had several point releases after that fixing bugs and the like. More recently, a new developer has started providing UI

In the aftermath of the Wabbajack 1.0 launch I took some time off for a bit of a rest. Coming back to the project a week or so later, I realized there was a lot of cruft in the project I would like to fix. Issues that didn't impact the user experience, but resulted in confusing code. So I'm about tw

After 7 months of heavy development Wabbajack 1.0 is now live. Thank you so much to our moderators, mod list authors, mod authors, discord members and supporters for making this effort possible. Unlike many "1.0" releases, this one is considered feature complete. We've spent the last two months test

There's a saying in computer programming, that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the work. At this point it certainly feels like we've been "almost ready to release 1.0" for a few months. The good news is that the last few bits of major programming effort are completed, and I'm ready to spend t

That phrase could be seen as good or bad, and frankly it was a little of both this time around. About two weeks ago Total released the Total Skyrim Overhaul, a Requiem based SSE list focused on role-playing and a bit more "hard core" mechanics set than our more casual lists. We saw a huge influx of

Although the Nexus is the defacto-standard source for downloading mods, there are a surprising amount of mods that exist on other sites: Lovers Lab, ModDB, tesall.ru to name a few. Unfortunately many of these sites have custom login systems and captchas. Instead of attempting to circumvent these sys