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Vidsquish 2.0.0 with Multi-Processing Released - Celebrating 5 Years of Vidsquish!

It's hard to believe, but 2021 marks the 5th year since Vidsquish first appeared as NieRepack, the NieR: Automata mod that started it all! 🥳 A lot has changed since then, from the move to supporting multiple games, to a new GUI with external profile and skin support, and now… today.

As you've no doubt already seen in the title, Vidsquish is making the jump from 1.0.4 all the way to 2.0.0. And that number is no exaggeration, either! 2.0.0 was a near-total rewrite, finally shaking off its "weekend project" origins with clean, modern, organized code. This is thanks in large part to massive improvements to the IDE Vidsquish is written in, which opened up many new opportunities over the past year. I was also able to incorporate more code from my own commercial projects, like the proprietary archive format introduced in 1.0.4, and as a result I'm pleased to say that Vidsquish's code is finally something I can be proud of.

For anyone hoping Vidsquish might go open source, the addition of more proprietary code might come as a disappointment, but this time around it was my goal to make sure no one would feel the need to touch source code to have a good experience.

Here's why:

If there's one feature that's been begged for since the start, it's this one, so let's get it out of the way first: yes, Vidsquish now supports multi-processing on all profiles!

To be clear, this is not strictly-speaking multi-threading--Vidsquish already used multithreading wherever available. The problem is that multithreading must be supported by a video codec itself, and few game formats do. To circumvent this problem, previous versions of Vidsquish supported running multiple instances of Vidsquish simultaneously, but this required manually dividing game files into separate folders, and the community made it very clear they wanted a better solution.

With multi-processing in Vidsquish 2.0.0, multiple instances of a given profile are managed internally through just one instance of Vidsquish itself. Everything works seamlessly, complete with pause/resume support, and you can still run multiple instances of Vidsquish to modify multiple games at once, if you wish. Processes will simply complete multiple times faster provided your CPU can handle the load.

Multi-processing, er, processes can be set from the new Settings menu in the top-right corner of the Vidsquish GUI! While I would recommend no more processes than you have CPU cores, there's no limit imposed on multi-processing, so feel free to experiment and find the best balance of speed and system performance for your PC!

Previously, one weakness of external profiles is that they were limited to the libraries included with Vidsquish. But no more! Vidsquish 2.0.0 introduces the Libraries Manager, a simple interface for viewing, adding, and removing files from the library. This means new profiles can include new dependencies without requiring an update to Vidsquish itself! Simply distribute the new libraries with the new profile, and users can add them to their own installations.

As with multi-processing, the Libraries Manager can be found in the new Settings menu to the top-right.

While totally reformatted code, unlimited multi-processing, and unleashed profiles more than justify the jump to 2.0.0, unfortunately, it also comes with a cost. In particular, supporting internal multi-processing was not trivial, and some profiles simply would not work with more than one active process at once. In addition, skins have been reworked from the ground up as a proper UI engine known as VS Forms (likely less exciting, but critical for the many internal improvements that were made).

As a result, profiles and skins from 1.0.4 are incompatible with 2.0.0. All included profiles and skins have been updated to the new version, of course, but any custom ones will need to be updated to the new formats manually. However, Vidsquish will automatically detect and alert users if it finds obsolete data in its program directory.

That being said, now is the perfect time to talk about creating new profiles! In a sense, Vidsquish 2.0.0 is the "last" version of Vidquish. That is, updates to the application itself are no longer required to continue developing profiles for it. Creating profiles is now priority #1, and you can do it too!

To get everyone started, I've created the Vidsquish Profile Development Guide. Here you'll find a detailed outline of what makes profiles tick, what options are available to profile creators, and how to get started making your own. This is honestly way overdue, but I hope it will inspire some community members to get involved modding their favorite games!

To that end, as a final announcement, Group Chat is now in session! The Vidsquish community is currently 400 members strong, so drop by the chat room to say hello and discuss your latest profile or skin creations!

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🎉 Thanks for being part of the Vidsquish journey for 5 years! Happy modding!