BrowserAssist VAR Management BETA 10

14 Dec 2024: VAR Management is now out of Beta

I'm designating the next version of BrowserAssist as a Beta of the new VAR Management functionality. This is because some of the core functionality of BrowserAssist has been modified and there's a higher than normal chance of their being significant issues initially. I recommend that before upgrading you take a backup of your BrowserAssist meta data (from the BA PluginUI) as a minimum and preferably a backup of your full VAM folder including AddonPackages. The only new feature this release includes is VAR Management so the sole reason for trying this Beta version is if you have a large number of VAR files and are interested in this feature.

BrowserAssist VAR Management attempts to reduce the performance impacts of VAM users who have collected large quantities of VAR files in their AddonPackages folder. It is recognised by the VAM community that large quantities of VAR files can be correlated to a frame rate degradation in VAM. BA VAR Management mitigates this performance impact by disabling all VAR files when they are not needed. Once VAR files are disabled, BrowserAssist can still be used to browse the contents of these packages (although the contents of disabled VARs will not be available in the default VAM file browsers). When a resource (e.g. a scene or a preset) is activated from BrowserAssist, all dependent VAR packages will be dynamically established and enabled before loading the selected resource. This approach avoids the necessity of other VAR Management tools which require the user to pre-emptively decide which types of packages they want to be available. It should be noted there are some inherent disadvantages to this feature:

• Resources that are in disabled VARs cannot be accessed from VAM native file browsers.

• There may be some degradation in load times for resources that are within disabled VARs (as it takes time to enable the VARs) - although this is negligible compared to VAM Scene load times it is more noticeable for resources like clothing items and presets.

• To facilitate browsing of resources in disabled VARs, BA will cache a copy of each resource thumbnail image contained within disabled VARs - consuming extra disk storage

The first two of these issues can be mitigated to an extent (if required) by customisable rules that can be setup to keep certain VARs (or types of VARs) permanently enabled - but this should be kept to a minimum number of VARs to maximise the performance benefits.

How to use: Initially VAR Management is disabled and needs to be enabled. Open the Plugin UI and select the "VAR Management" tab and enable the feature. It may take a few minutes to setup on the first activation. Then you can use BrowserAssist as normal to load and open resources.

There is the capability to keep sets of VARs permanently enabled using customisable "Rulesets". This is fairly limited at the moment and I plan to add additional rules to allow more refined and granular control of permanently enabled VARs. Its generally advisable to keep the number of VARs permanently enabled as low as possible.

Please provide feedback and raise any issues on Discord here: https://discord.gg/kYMNRveuvQ