Status Update

[NathanVaughn]

Hey everyone, just wanted to give a quick update on the status of the project.

First off, the project is not dead despite 3 months since the last release. I've recently been rewriting the entire codebase from scratch. The majority of the code for this project came out of a single caffeine-fueled evening shortly after MSFS 2020 came out. Since then, additional features and updates have been built upon this codebase, and it's just not worthwhile maintaining at this point. To get a bit technical, a large source of the issues have stemmed around data internally is generally passed around as strings. For example, a mod is generally represented in memory as a name as a string, and whether it is enabled or not. With this information, the program can then find it on disk. This proves to be clunky, though. If the mod then needs to be disabled, then all this same information needs to get passed to that function, which has to do the same thing, check if the file path is a symlink, move things around, etc. Long story short, this hasn't scaled way, especially with symlinks. So, I've been rewriting the codebase to be far more focused on passing around object types rather than strings. Now, a mod is represented as a Mod object which has an abs_path attribute, and an enable and disable method (among others). I've also been using a lot of the more advanced Python concepts I've been learning recently like properties, decorators, etc. So what does this mean overall?

• Way less janky symlink support.
• Feature Request: Permit Editing of Title and Creator Fields #55 has already implemented. You'll be able to edit mod information right in the program
• Overall a far more stable experience.
• I'm also open to working on Feature request: version tracking and update management. #31 (auto-updating mods) now as well. The flight sim mod repository scene has now settled out, and basically everything is available via GitHub or flightsim.to at this point. This may not make it to the first v2 release, but I have started laying the groundwork for this
• Cleaner code. For example:

Before:

    def enable(self) -> None:
        """Enables selected mods."""
        selected = self.main_table.get_selected_rows()

        def core(progress: Callable) -> None:
            for i, _id in enumerate(selected):
                # first, get the mod name and enabled status
                (folder, enabled) = self.main_table.get_basic_info(_id)

                if enabled:
                    continue

                # setup enabler thread
                enabler = flight_sim.enable_mod_thread(self.flight_sim, folder)
                enabler.activity_update.connect(progress.set_activity)  # type: ignore

                def failed(err: Exception) -> None:
                    self.base_fail(err, {}, "Failed to enable mod")

                # start the thread
                with thread.thread_wait(
                    enabler.finished,
                    failed_signal=enabler.failed,
                    failed_func=failed,
                    update_signal=enabler.activity_update,
                ):
                    enabler.start()

                progress.set_percent(i, total=len(selected) - 1)

        self.base_action(
            core, button=self.enable_button, empty_check=True, empty_val=selected
        )

After:

    @disable_button("enable_button")
    @try_except()
    def enable(self):
        """
        Enable the selected Mod objects.
        """
        logger.debug("Enable button clicked")

        mods = self.main_table.get_selected_row_objects()
        if not mods:
            return

        if all(mod.enabled for mod in mods):
            # all mods selected already enabled
            return

        progress = ProgressDialog(self, self.appctxt)
        progress.set_mode(progress.PERCENT)

        enable_mods_thread = Thread(functools.partial(enable_mods, mods))
        enable_mods_thread.percent_update.connect(progress.set_percent)
        enable_mods_thread.activity_update.connect(progress.set_activity)

        wait_for_thread(enable_mods_thread)

        progress.close()
        self.refresh()

So yeah, that is what's going right now. You can follow along on my progress on the rewrite branch. Currently, I'd say about 70% of the v1 functionality is present, though a fair amount of work still needs to be done on the newer features and more thoroughly testing things, especially around check for mod updates.