The Big Update Update

This is the biggest Reloaded update, *ever. At least in terms of new, fresh code. A lot of the launcher related code and back-end components have been rewritten, with a focus on bringing an entirely new update system to Reloaded.

As the scale of this update is so massive, the changelog below will be kept nice and sweet whenever possible; focusing on the more main elements.

New Automated Reloaded Installer

Reloaded now has a quick tiny 1MB installer, which can be found as Setup.exe on the download page.

• Installs all dependencies automatically.
• Installs Reloaded to the desktop.
• Fast. Usually done in under 30 seconds.

The installer handles everything with a simple click. No dialogs, no prompts, no nothing. Run Setup.exe and you have a working copy of Reloaded 30 seconds later.

New First Start Experience

Replacing the initial single window welcome screen comes a full first start experience.

The new first start experience guides users through adding an application, installing, configuring and enabling mods, with full real time simple video guides.

The initial tutorial can be repeated at any time from the starting page.

New App Addition Experience

Reloaded now contains a community ran database of commonly used games; where communities can add individual configurations for commonly used applications.

With this database, Reloaded is able to detect common configuration errors for games such as:

• Wrong Game Version
• Modified Game Executable
• Incompatible Mods

In addition, it's also possible to add Download Sources by using the community repository. For example, if you add Sonic Heroes, now you will see Sonic Heroes mods from GameBanana in Download Mods. No configuration required.

Mod Publishing

It is now possible to create updates and download files for mods from within the Reloaded launcher.

Pressing the Publish button automatically exports packages in format suitable for the new update library. In addition, it also helps prevent the user from making a few common mistakes:

• The user cannot accidentally ship user configurations.
• The user cannot ship mod files in a sub directory. (GameBanana 1-click links will always work).
• The user will always use optimal file compression method(s).

Delta Update Support

Mods also now have the ability to create delta compressed update packages. These are special kind of update packages that store only the data that has been changed between updates. This means that files are downloaded partially and not in their entirety.

This feature allows for small download sizes for big mods, so if an end user updates from 1.0.0 version of a big mod to 1.1.0, it is entirely possible for them to only need to download 5MB of data instead of 600MB.

New Mod Edit Menu

Creating a new mod and editing a mod now share a unified screen. This screen is now paginated, into four each distinct sections, making editing and/or creating the mod a step by step process that's easier to understand.

Mod updates can also be set up directly from within the Launcher now. Previously many people didn't know how to set up mod updates from Reloaded as it required reading the documentation, something the average human with a short attention span is unlikely to do.

In addition, some of the previously hidden special config flags are now available from the UI:

• Universal Mod: Mod automatically available in every game's individual page.
• Library: Mod cannot be explicitly enabled by user. Use in mod helpers, mods providing services to other mods etc.

New Configuration Experience

Editing mod configurations now use a newer, cleaner menu layout:

Most notable change is easier discoverability of nested settings.
Previously nested classes and structures required the end user to press an arrow 🡆 to expand additional settings. This wasn't obvious enough to some users; so nested settings are now replaced with separate settings panels below.

Tooltips for each setting show immediately as the user hovers over the setting, but it doesn't affect the whole row, just the controls. Might need some additional work on that one in the future.

User Configurations

Firstly, mods now have separate, dedicated folders for configurations, this means that:

• Their user data shouldn't mix with mod files anymore.
• It's easy to transfer configurations between friends.
• When the mod is deleted, the configs are automatically removed.

This behaviour is opt-in, but all of my 20+ mods should be updated for this soon.

Secondly, some of the configuration elements can be overwritten on the user side, in a way that persists across updates and overrides the default settings.

With the new update system, people can now opt in to beta versions, for the first time ever. No need for manual downloads when testing mods.

[Preview] Improved Download Mods Experience

The Download Mods menu is probably the most neglected menu in the launcher. Part of the reason for this is simply the lack of motivation. In a sense, this menu has always really been just a front-end for Reloaded's mod dependency resolver. In the future, this should hopefully change.

Some improvements are currently made to this menu, such as:

• The ability to choose the specific feed that you wish to search.
• The ability to search all feeds specific to a certain application. This screen also is now paginated, to be lighter on the server load on the other end.

This menu will get further improvements, including image previews for elements. Some features may take some time to implement, as I wait for e.g. GameBanana implementing filtering by mod manager integration.

Note:

There is one known issue at the moment; the inability to browse all GameBanana mods at the current time. Searching works, but by scrolling Next on the pages, the list of all available mods will end prematurely. This will be fixed in the future as it requires a way to filter search results by Mod Manager on the GameBanana server side. It's possible to work around this with a proxy API/server for caching, but the site dev. plans to implement this feature down the road, so it's more effficient in the long run to wait.

Improved Mod Template

The mod template for Reloaded II mods has been altered with a lot of miscellaneous improvements:

• Uses latest language preview by default; allowing for C#10+ features on the current framework.
• Default project output directory is now in the mods folder. If you create a new project and build, it will show up in the Reloaded launcher. No configuration needed.
• Unsafe code is enabled by default.
• Mod template now uses the User Config Folder instead of the mod folder to store configurations.

Reworked Wiki

• Updated legacy pages with new information.
• Updated mod publishing pages etc. to account for new Reloaded changes.
• Rewritten certain pages such as Inter Mod Communication to be more streamlined.

View & ViewModel Independence

All of the Launcher's core logic has been separated away from WPF; making it possible to port the launcher to other UI frameworks such as MAUI, or even make a full in-game Reloaded Launcher.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• [Fix] Copying Mods to Mods Folder while the Launcher is open now shows new mod in Application page.

• [Improvement] Improved performance of detecting newly added/deleted mods in real time as files are added and removed.

• [Improvement] Mod updates can now be downloaded and applied faster.

• [Changed] Reloaded will auto enable mods not incompatible with an application if the mod is already enabled for the application (instead of showing a dialog). Saves end user annoyance.

• [Fix] Icon in Manage Mods menu no longer flickers on changing active mod.

• [Changed] Loader no longer uses ReadyToRun optimisation. Will switch to Profile Guided Optimisation the day it's possible to safely run Reloaded with .NET 6+.

• [Fixed] Suppressed intended errors in Publish script.

• [Fixed] Application Search is now Case Insensitive [Fixes #106]

• [Changed] Whole project now uses File Scoped Namespaces from C#10 for improved readability.

• [Improved] Overall Unit Test Coverage. All new features are also fully unit tested.

• You can now upgrade to newer pre-releases from pre-releases.

• Fixed: Checkbox takes up entire row in Edit Mod Menu.

• Fixed: Download Updates and Dependencies no longer works incorrectly.

• Fixed: Dependency check shouldn't fail anymore.

• Fixed: Infinite loop of downloading dependencies.

• Added: Update from Pre-Release to Newer Pre-Releases