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&nbs...
2024-05-01 20:50:54 +0000 UTC View PostA 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 it comes to WPF UI, so we skipped that release and went right to the .NET 8 framework, released just last week. Updating the framework has allowed us to update all our dependenc...
2023-11-19 22:47:10 +0000 UTC View PostFirst 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 released 3.0.6.0, which should handle several issues dealing with texture conversion in the app. In addition 3.0 now shows slides during install again, and no longer continuou...
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 like a sudden change, it’s something that’s been in the works for several months. I’m...
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 on a few more. But since old versions of Wabbajack are still available, downgrading temporarily has been a fix for some.
Since launch I've shipped 8 versions, and fixed...
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 if I haven't heard of or seen major breaking bugs in this version in the next week, I'll release this version to everyone via the auto-update functionality.
So please, i...
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,...
2022-08-20 14:53:55 +0000 UTC View PostWell 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 that would result in a rather obtuse error: "can't find file required for BSA". In short Wabbajack was trying to figure out how to create a BSA archive during compilation ...
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 just sit down, crack open an energy drink, knock them out, and then feel better about it afterwards.
So this week I successfully finished off the installer error alert win...
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 everything else that's *not* the app users use, is already on the 3.0 code. The app itself is so very close to being done. You can load up the app, browse lists, download...
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-compile-install-verify". As the name suggests, this command will download a list, install it, recompile it, install it again, and compare the first and second installs to make sure...
2022-05-29 22:37:54 +0000 UTC View Post
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, the CDN, the wabbajack.org website, and the new discord bot. That's right, if you go to https://www.wabbajack.org 2022-05-21 13:26:55 +0000 UTC View Post
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 that BSAs and the compression they use are non deterministic. The table of contents in a BSA file must be in a very specific order (ordered by Bethesda's wonky hash valu...
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 of "incidental complexity"; additional tasks, requirements, and problems that arise not from the use of a product itself but from the meta issues attached...
2022-03-30 22:58:24 +0000 UTC View PostAs 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 edits to the code to remove some of the hardware requirements we have for these services.
Over the past few months I've taken the time to try and work through the few rem...
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 than expected. I wanted to be done months ago, but I've gotten massively bogged down in the UI work. This has lead to some rather serious burnout, and coupled with a death ...
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 from me now.
Later this month I had some personal issues to attend to, but now I'm back coding on WJ and making some significant progress.
As of today I've shut dow...
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 1.5.97 versions. Note, this utility works by binary patching the source data, and as such does not ship with any copyrighted game files, and requires a ...
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/pathfinderwrathoftherighteous/mods/169) that's been a fun diversion and I'...
2021-10-16 23:16:32 +0000 UTC View PostWell 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, requiring a few extra hotfix builds, but it all has stabilized now, and I'm loving the fact that whenever I need to update the validation code I just have to push the new code and...
2021-09-20 12:23:03 +0000 UTC View PostHello 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 2019 and began working on it. As some might have guessed if they looked that the Website or certain iterations of the Wabbajack UI itself: I'm not a UI person. In ...
2021-09-18 14:16:12 +0000 UTC View PostWell 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 update), but my mistake was thinking that the best approach would be to limit on a physical resource: Network bandwidth, Disk Bandwidth, CPU threads, etc. The problem with th...
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 for creating "scenes" or modes of the UI works, we can load up a browser window, login to several sites, and switch between UI screens. I'll come back to that code in a week or so...
2021-08-29 14:11:39 +0000 UTC View PostAs 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 Slice" of a program as a way to get an application rewrite up and running as quickly as possible. In such a development style you port or write one of each type of module...
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 perspective of some of the changes the code has been through over the past two years. I started Wabbajack at what could be considered one of the worst times to start an app i...
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 bit more stable. So why are Wabbajack lists constantly going up and down right now?
Well, these changes have been rather controversial, and so in order to play nice with th...
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 part of these changes the Nexus is making files immutable (they can't be deleted, only arc...
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 modlist author has optimized some textures. This means we can perform the same resizing/recompression during install instead of patching the files with our binary patching....
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 companies like Telekom (a well known EU ISP) may be mucking with the CloudFlare DNS records. Some people have found success by using a different DNS server, like Google's 8.8.8.8...
2021-05-18 04:34:19 +0000 UTC View PostWell 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 afternoon (US time) I'll be cutting over to the new build server. We tend to have the least amount of traffic during the weekdays so this seems like the best time to ma...
