Bugfixing and Stability (Patreon)

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 almost all desire I had to code, so development took a hit in that time. Thankfully Wabbajack's errors and rough edges are mostly well known at this point, so the mods and admins on the WJ server were able to keep things running smoothly.

After the two weeks I took as a break, I've been sitting down trying to deal with some of these rough edges in the app. In general, Wabbajack was written as a "batch script" of sorts. That is to say, the normal way of dealing with errors is to die, and have the user re-run the program once the error is fixed. This programming method is known as "Let it Crash" and is well known and used to great success in languages like Erlang. Only problem with this approach is that it's a really bad user experience. So over the past few weeks I've been trying to locate these issues and slowly weed them out.

Some of the more recent improvements include:

* Detecting when a archive file didn't extract because it is corrupted. If an archive doesn't extract we now re-hash the file and throw a different error telling the user the file is bad.
* Before starting to download files from the Nexus we now check to see if you have enough outstanding API calls. In past versions, if you hit your limit, WJ would continue to hammer the Nexus servers over and over asking for each new file only to be told "nope you still don't have enough API calls". We now also print a nice error telling users when their API calls will reset
* Thanks to a suggestion on GitHub by Crazielvan we now also display a "X of Y" of the step of the install, as well as what archives are being installed or downloaded.

There's a time in programming to move fast and break things, and there's also a time when you need to slow down and make the program stable. And that's where we're at in development right now, making it stable.

So thank you so much for your continued support. Our discord and app usage continues to grow at a linear rate, about 300 new members a week in discord. We're currently at 31,600 users. Which is crazy given we've only been around for about 15 months. And our completed installs continues to hover at about 1000 per day. Thanks for all the kind support, this community has been a fantastic uplifting experience for me in this rather strange year.