Wabbajack 3.0 - Can we ship it yet? (Patreon)

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 everything else that's *not* the app users use, is already on the 3.0 code. The app itself is so very close to being done. You can load up the app, browse lists, download them, and install them, list authors can even compile lists using the 3.0 codebase. The tricky part is, there are still some bugs in the compiler code. Over the past month or so I've spent a fair amount of time downloading, installing and recompiling lists, and every list installs just fine, it's the compiling that is the kicker. I've recompiled, SMEFT, The Phoenix Flavor and a few other less complicated lists. But the major, 250GB total overhaul lists are giving me troubles.

With these sorts of complex, long debugging sessions it's honestly a bit easy to get discouraged, burnt out, and tired. But the fact is, the code is so very close to being done. So my plan is this: I'm going to dive back in this week and try to get as much of the remaining work done. After this next week I'm on a short break with my family as we do a bit of a vacation, and then I'm at it for the rest of the month. My goal is to push through and get the major remaining UI issues done this week, take a break, and plan on shipping 3.0 at the end of this month.

So why the rush? Well one of the issues with doing a rewrite is that it's hard to want to ship features in the old code base. Any new feature has to be added in 2.5's codebase and 3.0's codebase. Half the time I don't even want to bother with 2.5's code, but that's the code everyone is using, so I can either say "sorry you don't get that feature yet" or I can solve every problem twice, in two code bases. This has been the state of things for a good half a year now. Did you know the 3.0 codebase can download Creation Club content as part of a WJ install? That'd be cool to have with the release of AE, but that code is so complicated the last thing I want to do right now is take time to backport it to 2.5.

At any rate, I'm writing this post today to let everyone know that work is still progressing on the project. I've made several server-side changes to our code so that we now use a legit database (CouchDB) instead of storing data in flat files on disk (even though that work I did mostly because I was so burnt out on the UI debugging). Once we shift to shipping the 3.0 UI the duplication of work will stop, freeing up more time to work on actual features and quality-of-life fixes.

So here's a short list of what I know needs to be done yet to ship 3.0:

* Add UI warnings/errors to the compilation/installation UI (warning users of bad input)
* Recompile a rather complicated full-overall list
* Recompile a Fallout4 list
* Recompile a non-Bethesda list
* Implement the auto-upload feature from 2.5 in 3.0, I think this is already mostly done, I'll have to check

I'll write another post later this week when I've worked through some of these issues. Thanks everyone for the support, and here's hoping we can get a 3.0 release out by the end of the month.