2.6.0

Turning safe mode off now explains itself

It used to be one line of file names, and nobody read it. It is a proper window now: what the
app does today - drops its .vpk into a folder Dota already reads, touching nothing of the game -
and what it will do instead, with both files it edits named and what lands in each. Copies of
both are kept before the first write, so switching back puts them back byte for byte with
nothing left behind. Dota wipes that edit with every update and the app writes it back on its
own, which the window now says too. And the sentence that actually decides it: editing game
files counts as unsafe in Dota modding, no ban for it in 8+ years, no guarantees from us.

Switching tabs, and importing a pile of mods

Opening a tab rebuilt the whole screen from nothing. Coming back to Heroes meant 513 cards
built again and about 90ms of frozen window, every time. Screens are kept now: around 30ms, and
it no longer grows with the size of the category. Each screen also remembers where it was
scrolled to, instead of inheriting the last one's position.

Importing a batch never let go of the app while it worked, so Windows put "not responding" on
the title bar for the several minutes a big pack takes. It hands control back between mods now,
and the bar counts them: "Reading mods 31 / 60" instead of one width until it is over.

Removing mods

Deleting the file was never the slow part - it takes about two milliseconds. The wait was the
item table being rebuilt afterwards, and a selection paid for it once per mod. It is rebuilt
once for the whole batch now, and the rebuild itself went from 2.6 seconds to under half a
second. Twenty mods removed in about six tenths of a second, where the same twenty were close
to a minute.

Presets keep what you saved

A preset used to hold the mods it named only as long as they stayed installed: delete one and
it was cut out of every preset, and reinstalling did not bring it back. Presets now remember
what a mod is rather than which copy of it was on the machine, so deleting one leaves the build
alone and installing it again anywhere fills the gap on its own. The card says how many of its
mods are not installed right now.

Free cosmetics are no longer part of a preset. A pick is not a mod - it owns no file and only
exists while safe mode is off - and folding the two together is why applying a build used to
strip whatever courier or weather you had chosen.

Item pictures come from your own game

The cosmetics picker used to match items against a wiki: rate limited, wrong when two items are
named alike, and nothing at all offline. Almost every picture is already in the game in a form
that needs no decoding, so it now comes from there - correct for your build, instantly, with
nothing downloaded. The few that are stored compressed still fall back as before.

Alongside Minify

Minify loads mods the way this app does: by naming a
language folder, of which Dota mounts exactly one. So the app now reads Minify's own
configuration, works out which of the two the game is actually set to read, and says so -
including the case where its folder is not one the game reads at all, which is nothing to do
with us.

It also stays out of its way: the pak slots Minify writes are never used, the "disable all
mods" switch no longer renames its files, and its output is not offered in My mods as something
to adopt or delete. Its files are recognised by the marker it packs into what it builds, and
this app leaves a dota2modmanager.json naming its own, so either side can tell whose a file
is. Nothing of Minify is moved, renamed or deleted.

Where the two genuinely cannot both win, the app asks: Dota reads one map archive, so a terrain
and a Minify map mod are the same file. Installing one replaces the other, and you now hear
about it first.

A launch option that overrules everything

Older guides hand out -language something freely. While it is there Dota takes both language
settings from it and mounts the folder it names, whatever this app does. The Library says so
now, and where to remove it.