Wabbajack 3.0 - Back to debugging (Patreon)

Well I'm back from vacation, and from being sick for about a week. Finally sat down to do some debugging. It's funny how sometimes some fresh perspective and a clear mind can end up with quick solutions to complicated debugging.

For the past month I've been fighting a bug in the 3.0 compiler code that would result in a rather obtuse error: "can't find file required for BSA". In short Wabbajack was trying to figure out how to create a BSA archive during compilation and erroring out because it couldn't figure out how to get one of the files. I've been debugging this for a *long* time, weeks. On several lists, always the same error. This time around I was working with Septimus.

Suddenly I got an idea...well where does the original .wabbajack get this file? Turns out the original copy of Septimus wasn't even trying to make the archive at all! It was inlining it into the .wabbajack (due to it being open permissions). Well then why wasn't Wabbajack inlining the BSA in the 3.0 code? Oh...I never properly setup the configuration for that feature in 3.0.

That error aside, and a few other strange issues with archive paths and Septimus can be recompiled with 3.0. From there I installed the recompiled list and it all matches up.

This is good news all around, it's another list that I have successfully recompiled and verified. This also means that several other lists I've been stuck recompiling over the past few weeks/months may "just work" now. So I'll be going back and trying Wildlander and other complex lists soon.

During this process I've also found a few UI bugs and missing features (progress bars in the compiler I haven't hooked up) so I'll probably spend tomorrow working on those.

I feel invigorated, and it's great to finally get that annoying bug out of the way.