Polishing Wabbajack

Things have been quiet on the news front lately, but that's not to say work isn't still continuing at a rapid pace on Wabbajack. At this point the app is feature complete, but we're spending the next few months in polishing and improving the rough edges of the application. During big bursts of development, most projects acquire what's known as "technical debt": those things the programmers intentionally left out or hacked around in order to get a working application out as quickly as possible. We have some time before we need to cut a 1.0 release so we're taking that time to polish the Wabbajack.

But let's run down a few of the cool things that have happened since our last update post:

* We have a website and domain at www.wabbajack.org where we can host links to curated modlists and provide tutorial on how to use the app.
* We've implemented a system for approving and testing curated modlists. Including an automated testing system to validate that curated lists are valid and don't bit-rot.
* We've increased our app's unit tests from almost non existent to over 50 tests that provide almost 50% code coverage. This is an on-going effort.
* As you can see by the attached photos, our UI devs have done amazing work on the installation and setup screens. I'm blind-as-a-bat when it comes to design, so it's been amazing having other developers work on the UI while I focus on the back-end.
* We're up to 7 curated modlists, with at least two more in development.

So I'm sure some are wondering, why delay, why not release now that we're mostly done? Well there's a few things that need to be done before we go live, these aren't huge bugs, but they do need some work so that we can focus on helping users at launch and not worry about breaking changes being introduced into the code by some massive overhaul:

* Several lesser-seen UI screens need the same polishing applied to the rest of the app
* Some of the backing logic to the screens is a tangled mess (my fault) and we need to improve that code
* Our code is a weird mix of async and non-async code, I'm in the process of cleaning that up
* Once the above are done I'll go through and update our video tutorials so that users can self-learn the app instead of going to discord as a first step

As it turns out, all those should be done mid-December. Which means we'll be pretty close to the launch of Legacy of the Dragonborn V5 which will probably be the biggest mod launch of the year. Once we get closer to the time of launch we'll figure out how to co-ordinate with updating modlists that rely on LotDv5 it doesn't make sense to launch only to find out most of our modlists are using a outdated version of one of the biggest Skyrim mods. If development of LotD slips into 2020, however, we'll release Wabbajack sooner.

So that's the status of everything, continuing on at a brisk pace, oh, and we hit 10,000 and a level 2 boost on Discord, so thanks to all our fantastic supporters, the rest of 2019 is going to be amazing.