November Development Update (Patreon)

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 down the old build server that was running WJ 2.5 code, and replaced it with new code running on a new server that's hosted in an actual service site. Due to the way WJ developed over the years we used to need a lot of database storage for things like the Nexus cache. However, since the Nexus no longer deletes files (except in rare cases) we no longer need to make so many requests to their servers, and so caching isn't as critical. Or more correctly we can time the cache out on a regular basis instead of constantly trying to figure out when a file on the Nexus has been deleted.

All this means that our "build server" can now exist on a much smaller Linux based server, and we can shut down the more bulky Windows server. A few hours ago I turned off the 2.5 server code and replaced it with the 3.0 code on a Linux server.

One of the nice features of this change is that we now have custom code running on a box with a 1Gbps upload (instead of the upload we got from the server in my garage. This means we can now provide direct HTTP links to CDN files for browser based downloads, while still retaining the fast caching of our chunked-based approach.

Admittedly, I'm still dragging my feet a bit on the WJ 3.0 release. The GUI still needs some work, but it's nice to see that we can see some gains from this new code base before committing to releasing the full 3.0 client.

As always, thank you for your support and encouragement it really does keep this whole project moving.