Timothy Baldridge posts
Posts: 61
Files: 14
The Fallout of Success
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 TVshow, aIGN Articleabout Begin Again, and asale on all Fallout gameswe saw over a 5x increase...
3.4.0.0 Release, a project update, and some thanks
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 it comes to ...
A long overdue update
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 released 3.0.6.0, whic...
I've been hired by Nexus Mods
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 c...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Post Launch
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. ...
Wabbajack 3.0 - RC1 and Why it Rehashes your downloads
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...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Beta testing
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've been f...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Back to debugging
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 that would...
Wabbajack 3.0 - End of Week Report
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 s...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Can we ship it yet?
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 every...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Compiler Configuration
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...
Wabbajack 3.0 Development Update
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 wabbaja...
BSAs during modlist updates
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 th...
Decentralization - reorganizing the Wabbajack community
RationaleWabbajack 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 co...
Removing the Server Jank
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 edits to the code to ...
End-of-the-Year Coding Update
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. ...
November Development Update
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 ...
Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Downgrade Patcher
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, th...
Wabbajack 3.0 - development update
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/pathfinderwrath...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Weekly Update
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, requiring a few ex...
Website Survey Results (by Erri120)
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 2019 and began worki...
Wabbajack 3.0 Development Update - Rate Limiters
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 update), but my mista...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Development Update #3
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 "...
Wabbajack 3.0 - Development Update
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 Slice"...
The road to Wabbajack 3.0
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 perspecti...
Nexus Changes Round 2 - Please Pardon the Mess
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 wh...
Nexus Collections and what it means for Wabbajack
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 thes...
Perceptual Hashing and Wabbajack 2.5.0.0
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 aut...
Weekly Update - Fixing some network issues
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...
Weekly Update - Server Upgrade (part 2)
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 afternoon (...
