v1.6.8

Features and improvements:

• Added per-FM overrides for Post-processing (bloom) and Subtitles, in the Patch & Customize tab.
• Reduced memory allocations in FM find code.

Fixes:

• Statistics tab had some minor quirks with the text string values being slightly different when changing languages vs. when selection changes, and the text should have been set to a disabled state when no FM selected.
• Fixed crash that could occur if there was bad or invalid column data in the config file. This could happen if using a config file from a newer version with an older version that has fewer supported columns.

v1.6.7

Features and improvements:

• Added FM mission count detection (so you can see how many missions are in a campaign). This is shown on the Stats tab as "Single mission" or "x mission campaign", and also in the new Mission Count column. The first time you start this new version, there will be a one-time scan to detect mission counts for all FMs in the database. You can cancel the scan if you want. You can always scan for mission counts manually by selecting Main Menu -> Scan all FMs... -> Uncheck everything except the "Mission count" checkbox and click OK. Newly added FMs will also now have their mission counts detected as part of the standard new FM scan.
• Added folder icon to "Open FM folder" menu item, for easier visual locating.
• Improved/clarified the "AngelLoader is set as the loader for this game" message that pops up when starting a game exe outside of AngelLoader when AngelLoader has set itself as the selector and has not had a chance to reset to the old selector.
• The readme box now has a context menu with "Copy" and "Select all".
• In the Settings window -> Appearance section, the date format dropdowns will no longer respond to mousewheel scrolling. That way they won't constantly accidentally change value when you're trying to just scroll the window contents.

Performance:

• When "Include subfolders" is selected for FM archive paths, finding an FM's archive file requires a full directory tree search of each specified FM archive path (to get the subfolders), which can potentially be slow. With the advent of multiple FM selection, there were several places where this directory search was being done for each FM in a batch. Now, in these situations, the search is done only once and then cached.

Fixes:

• Sorting by rating now sorts in the order "unrated -> 0-10" rather than "0 -> unrated -> 1-10".
• For dropdown comboboxes in dark mode, if you moved the mouse quickly over the dropdown after opening it, the text of the item your mouse moved over would erroneously be displayed in the main combobox instead of the selected item's text.
• Fixed perf/memory-churn issue when drag-selecting a very large number of FMs, after the FM context menu had been opened at least once.
• Fixed when middle-clicking to center the FMs list on the selected FM, if scrolling was required, the vertical scroll bar might not visually update to the new scroll position the first time.

v1.6.6

Features and improvements:

• Added some options to control new mantling:
  • On the Patch & Customize tab, there is now a checkbox where you can force new mantling on, off, or default (leave it alone) per-FM.
  • Added a setting "Use old mantling for OldDark FMs", which does what it says. It can be overridden per-FM with the above-mentioned checkbox.
  • New mantling can also be overridden when playing without an FM, by opening the game settings (formerly game mods) dialog through the "Play without FM" area.
• A small handful of OldDark FMs use custom palettes to achieve certain effects such as monochrome or sepia tone visuals. By default, NewDark does not apply these FMs' custom palettes correctly, causing for example some objects to be full color in an FM where everything is supposed to be monochrome. AngelLoader will now fix this issue automatically for FMs that need it.
• Note that neither the mantle mode nor the palette fix are written into fm.cfg or stored permanently, they are simply passed as options to the game upon running. Adding these options manually to the FM's fm.cfg file is fine and will not break anything.
• 7-Zip scans (which can take a substantial amount of time) now respond much quicker to a cancel request. Previously, cancellation could only occur between FMs in the scan, but now it can occur in the middle of a single FM's scan as well.
• Date and rating filter windows now autosize horizontally to fit their title bar text and/or OK/Cancel button text (one less thing to worry about now for translators).

Fixes:

• Fixed: in a multi-monitor scenario, when AngelLoader was not on the primary monitor, ComboBox dropdowns would be displayed completely detached from their parent control and on the primary screen somewhere.
• Fixed regression: FMs list duplicate-culling code was not fully ignoring duplicate FMs, they might still end up being scanned (if they weren't before) and have their tags added to the global tags list. This scenario is unlikely and causes no serious problems, but there we go.
• Fixed if the Settings window came up on startup and dark mode was enabled, the Language group box was drawn incorrectly.
• The "Disable all" mods button now shows its tooltip on the original game settings windows as well.
• When uninstalling FMs, there was a brief period where the UI would still be interactable when it shouldn't have been.
• Scan All FMs window now says "Scan selected FMs" when only scanning selected, rather than "Scan all FMs".

v1.6.5

Features and improvements:

• Network paths (eg. "\networkpc\thief\FMs") are now supported. (thanks kek444)
• Improved performance of differential backups ("Back up all changed files") for FMs with a large number of files (eg. TROTB2).

Fixes:

• Readme control visibility still responded to mouse movements when mouse was over a context menu.
• Install/Uninstall was not being disabled when some selected FMs had unknown or unsupported game types.
• On startup, if the main window is placed offscreen such that its title bar would be inaccessible, it's now placed fully back on screen.
• If you clicked to select an item in the Tags dropdown, it wouldn't register until you moved the mouse.
• Ampersand characters were not being handled correctly for the Alternate Titles dropdown menu.
• Ampersand characters were not being rendered correctly for TreeView controls (Tags list).

v1.6.4

Features and improvements:

• FMs can now be deleted from the database. This is for when they don't exist anywhere on disk but they still have an entry in the list, and you want to clean them out.
• "Show unavailable" is now "Show only unavailable". Previously, you would have to hunt through the list for unavailable FMs, but now, they'll be the only thing in the list when this filter is enabled. This makes it much easier when you want to clear them out of the database.
• Improved performance when pinning a large number of FMs at once.
• More forgiving detection of game editor executables - as long as they have "DromEd" (T1/TG/T2) or "ShockEd" (SS2) somewhere in the name, they'll be found.
• We now detect if an FM has been installed with DarkLoader, and inform the user that they need to go install the original game(s) in DarkLoader first to avoid the wrong FM being played, or an FM being played when they wanted to play the original game.
• Aero snap behavior is now more like most other apps: Snapping, maximizing, then restoring will restore your latest un-snapped window location and size.

Fixes:

• Fixed a logic error that could result in an index out-of-range exception when resetting temp changes in SneakyOptions.ini if no loader specifier line existed in the file on startup.
• If you try to delete an FM that is installed but has no matching archive, a dialog box will pop up to tell you that if you uninstall the FM, it will be removed from the list. Previously, this dialog stated: "Saves and screenshots will be backed up, but any other data will not". It now states: "Saves and screenshots will be backed up if you have chosen to do so, but any other data will not". This describes the situation more accurately.

v1.6.3

• Fixed the mods checklist would never be re-enabled after being disabled (this happened if the FMs list was ever blank, or if you pressed home/end on the list)

v1.6.2

Features and improvements:

• Added "Disable all" button to the mods tab. This actually just disables all mods that are not marked "important", so it's safe, unlike the old "Disable all mods" checkbox from past versions.
• Added ability to enable/disable mods when playing games without FMs.

Fixes:

• Fixed Enter key was being blocked from registering in most places
• Fixed "Patch & Customize" tab wasn't changing its state when an FM was installed or uninstalled, until the FM was re-selected
• Fixed Thief 2 Multiplayer button could in certain cases be shown at the wrong position in the game buttons set
• Fixed crash when sorting by Archive when at least one FM's archive is blank

v1.6.1

• Fixed crash on startup on some systems.

v1.6.0

Features and improvements:

Multi-FM selection:

• Multiple FMs can now be selected. No more tediously right-clicking each FM one by one to say you finished it on Expert. Almost any operation can now be done in bulk: setting rating and finished difficulty, pinning and unpinning, installing and uninstalling, etc.
• You can now choose to be asked for confirmation before installing FMs. The options are: always ask; ask only if you're going to install multiple FMs; or never ask. The default is to ask only if you're installing multiple FMs.

General UI:

• The character encoding menu will now show a checkmark next to a category if the selected encoding is within that category. This makes it easier to see at a glance which encoding is selected.
• There is now an option to replace the "Play original game..." button with separate smaller buttons, one for each game.
• Smarter autosizing for dialogs.
• Install-related progress messages are now more specific.

Performance and memory:

• When scanning .7z FMs, readmes are now cached during the scan rather than after. This prevents having to process the .7z file twice, and can result in a large time savings during initial viewing for some 7z FMs.
• FM find-and-merge code (that runs every startup) is now... actually good. Why was it bad? It was doing its work in a horrendously inefficient way that would make it exponentially slower the more FMs you had. You won't have noticed because there aren't enough FMs released to hit the point where it would really bog down, but that's all fixed now and it's ready for an 8000-FM future. Get dromeding!
• Zooming the FMs list is now faster (it no longer redraws the entire window, but only the FMs list itself).
• Reduced memory usage when displaying RTF readme files in dark mode.
• Large reductions in memory allocations when doing operations on zip files in large batches.
• Reductions in memory allocations when reading plaintext data files.
• Fixed some extremely inefficient code in backup/restore section.
• Many more small improvements throughout.

Other:

• Continued improving error reporting.
• If any FM archive paths are not found, it's now considered an error and the settings dialog will pop up so you can fix it. Previously, missing archive paths were ignored with no notifications.
• FM archives (zip, 7z) can now be dragged onto the AngelLoader window. They will be copied to the archive directory and added to the list.
• AngelLoader.ico is now included in the distribution, in case you want/need to use it and your app won't let you get it from the .exe (one user had this scenario with Steam for Linux).

Fixes:

Dark mode:

• Fixed: In dark mode, when you would hide a tab, close the app, open the app, show the tab again, and switch to it, the tab's theme was not correctly applied (looked like buggy light-mode in dark mode).
• Fixed: In dark mode, after opening and closing a non-themed dialog box (open file etc.), tooltip text would be dark-on-dark instead of light-on-dark.
• Fixed: In dark mode, dialog boxes that contained long lines of text with no spaces could sometimes fail to word-wrap and get cut off.
• Fixed: In dark mode, drop-down comboboxes were rendering their text slightly differently than classic mode, occasionally causing text to be cut off by a couple pixels and ellipses to be added to the end of text that should have fit.

General UI:

• Fixed: Group boxes and labels would sometimes not display '&' (ampersand) characters.
• Fixed: If AngelLoader needed to scan or cache an FM immediately upon start, the splash screen would not close until the operation finished. The splash screen now closes as soon as the main window opens in all cases.
• When game organization is set to "one list", Pinned FMs now remain visible at the top even when their game filters are turned off. For "by tab", the pinned FMs list is still filtered by game.
• Fixed: When language was changed while a readme error message was displayed ("No readme found", "Unable to load readme"), that message wouldn't update with the new language until you re-selected the FM.

Scanner:

• Fixed: Scanner was no longer adding misc tag "campaign" for campaigns.
• Fixed: Scanner was supposed to add the "unknown author" tag when appropriate, but was often failing to do so.
• Better detection of strings in .rtf files that have tables in them (fixes author detection in Off To Milhorn Manor 2021).
• When scanning SS2 missions with multiple .mis files, the "campaign" tag will now be added.

Other:

• Fixed: Small logic error in author filtering.

• Fixed: The temp folder clearer was not ensuring that all temp files and directories had their readonly attributes unset before attempting to delete. In particular, if the scanner had extracted a .7z file to the temp folder and some of its files or directories were readonly, the delete would fail and junk would be left over, and also the failed delete attempt would cause a long delay.

• Fixed the following scenario:

  1. You've imported saves from DarkLoader.
  2. You install an FM for which you have DarkLoader saves. AngelLoader restores your DarkLoader saves into the installed FM folder.
  3. You uninstall the FM. When prompted whether to back up changed data, you choose "Don't back up". The dialog box informs you that although no new changed data since the install will be backed up, your old backups will still remain and not be changed, meaning they will be restored again if you install the FM later.
  4. You install the FM again. AngelLoader does not restore your DarkLoader saves, contrary to what the above dialog says.
     With this fix, your saves will now be restored in this case.

• Fixed: Double-clicking or pressing Enter on an unavailable FM would still try to play it.

• Fixed: Config custom date format was not set to the default on first start.

v1.5.4

Features and improvements:

• The old "Disabled mods" section has been overhauled into a new Mods tab. Mods are listed as checkboxes that can be switched on and off, rather than having to manually type out an esoteric "disabled mods" string. The "Disable all mods" checkbox has been removed, because it would also disable important mods that are vital to the correct functioning of many FMs (third-party scripts etc.)
• FMs can now be pinned to the top of the list, so you can keep favorites at your fingertips.
• Improved date detection accuracy in the scanner.

Fixes:

• Fixed: Email links in readmes would give an error when clicking them.