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First post! (and some info about Crowbar)
Hello, and welcome to my developer blog! I’m Smiley Barry, and the name I’ve picked as my “developer name” is Windy. Why? Because my applications are Windows apps, intended to speed up our daily tasks and make them easier. On this blog, I will post information about my applications, along with releases and release notes.
The first app is: Crowbar! Crowbar is a third-party Source modification management utility, that will install, remove, update, upgrade, backup and restore your mods. The difference between “update” and “upgrade” is that updating means installing the new version on top of the other, while upgrading means backing up the previous version, removing it and then installing the new version. It’s for those cases where the developer asks you to uninstall the previous version and start fresh.
When I planned Crowbar, I thought mods should be easier to manage than how they are now. Extracting archives and deleting folders is easy, yes, but it gets tedious when your mod collection grows. When Desura was first announced by Mod DB, I felt relieved that a big player in the modding community finally stepped in and introduced that well-needed standard. But, Desura will only work with a small database of mods, with no option to install mod archives with it. So, I resumed working on a mod management app and already thought of some features and how they will be programmed.
Crowbar doesn’t work with a small selection of mods, and does not require anything more than what Steam asks of mods: an information file and a working Source mod. Crowbar scans any archive you give it, and looks for that info file along with the mod’s directories and files. Once it finds them, you can install the mod in one click and enjoy it.
And that’s it. There’s no step 3. Just choose the archive, click “Install”, and you’re done. If you’d like, step 3 can be “Enjoy”. :-)
As of this moment, Crowbar’s logic and main code is almost done. Analysis and installation are done, and now all that remains is updating and restoring old versions and uninstalling mods. Since updating and upgrading make use of the installing and backing up modules, they’ll be easy to implement once those are done. (And so they don’t count. :-) ) I won’t give you a date, since school has been very busy lately and my schedules are tight as they are, but Crowbar should be done soon. Next up: interface screenshots!
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