The Last Missing Downloaders (Patreon)

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 the next few weeks in bug-fixing mode.

Something that's bugged me in the past was how bad the user experience in Wabbajack was for non-Premium users. As you can see in the image above, that is now addressed. If you attempt to use Wabbajack with a non-Premium account, you will first be warned that you are about to click a few thousand buttons, and then you will be guided through the process of manually selecting the mods and starting the downloads. It is important to note, that we do not circumvent any of Nexus' user restrictions, so you will still be limited to their download speeds, and if you have a "Free" account, you will still have to watch ads. In addition we have no plans to bypass these measures or auto-click the "Manual Download" buttons. If you want a fully automated experience, please toss a coin to the nexus and pay for the better experience.

Also on display here is interaction with "Manual URLs" as they are called in modlists. If all else fails a modlist author can mark a mod as "manually downloaded" and Wabbajack will send you to a URL specified by the author and wait for you to start the download. We see that in action for SKSE in this gif.

And finally, what you don't see because the interaction is so seemless is that one of the mods in this example list ( https://bethesda.net/en/mods/skyrim/mod-detail/3000658 ) is begin downloaded from Bethesda.NET. We leverage the game itself in much the same sort of way as SKSE (DLL injection) to get the info required to automatically download mods. I don't expect this will be used often, but when someone needs it, the feature is available.

As mentioned we're in a bug-fixing mode now, as all the major coding features of Wabbajack are completed. Our new hosting service (mentioned in the previous post) is humming along quite well and as of today has served up 8TB of modlists. We've also seen 3910 unique finished installs of modlists since the start of January.

Thank you for making this project as awesome as it has been so far. The support I've received from mod authors, list maintainers, gamers, streamers and the like has been fantastic. In 3 days the project will be 7 months old, and I couldn't be happier with our progress in that time. 1.0 will be released "soon".