End-of-the-Year Coding Update (Patreon)

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 in my family a few weeks ago I lost almost all will to work on the project for the past month. UI work really isn't my forte and it's been a bit of a slog.

However, after taking a solid week break for the holidays I realized that one of my biggest problems with getting the Wabbajack UI ported over to the new 3.0 code has been scope creep. I wanted to make this a complete rework of the UI, in addition to switching to a cross-platform toolkit, in addition to moving to the new 3.0 codebase. And that just keeps turning into a development nightmare. Half the time I'm not sure if the code stopped working because of the new UI framework, or because of something I implemented wrong in the update process.

A few days ago I shelved my existing work and attacked it from a different angle: let's skip updating the framework, and skip a UI redesign, and instead just get the existing WPF code working with the 3.0 codebase. Once we get a solid release of the existing UI with the new 3.0 guts we can move forward with several improvements to the app, and not have to maintain both the old and new codebases at once. And what do you know, it's working like a charm.

In the past 3 days I've ported a solid 80% of the existing UI to the new codebase. I'm simply taking the old UI, then adapting it to call the new code points. This means that I don't have to rewrite thousands of lines of code, just change the interfaces of the existing code. It's a bit like making an electric car, not from scratch, but by replacing just the engine of a gas car.

A few weeks ago we moved the "build server" to Linux, which means that after this UI is ported, 100% of the Wabbajack project will be running off of 3.0 code. This new code has been designed from the ground up to remove a lot of the cruft and hacks that have built up over the past two years and provides a nice framework for making simple improvements in the future.

With this change the goal of "Wabbajack on Linux and OSX" is not dead, but it does mean that when I do release code for these platforms they may be command-line only, or have much simplified UI for awhile. But we'll figure that out when we see how much of a userbase for these features.

As always, thank you so much for the support of this project, and I'm excited to see where 2022 takes us.