Version History

0.14.1 - 2018-12-23

Fixed

  • Product version conditions read from executables’ VS_FIXEDFILEINFO structure, so the versions read did not match the versions displayed by Windows’ File Explorer. Product versions are now read from executables’ VS_VERSIONINFO structure, using the ProductVersion key.
  • The release date in the metadata syntax changelog for v0.14 was “Unreleased”.

0.14.0 - 2018-12-09

Added

  • GetHeaderVersion() to get the value of the version field in the HEDR subrecord of a plugin’s TES4 record.
  • IsValidAsLightMaster() to check if a light master is valid or if a non-light-master plugin would be valid with the light master flag or .esl extension. Validity is defined as having no new records with a FormID object index greater than 0xFFF.
  • GetGroupsPath() to return the path between two given groups that maximises the user metadata and minimises the masterlist metadata involved.
  • loot::Vertex to represent a plugin or group vertex in a sorting graph path.
  • loot::EdgeType to represent the type of the edge between two vertices in a sorting graph. Each edge type indicates the type of data it was sourced from.

Changed

  • Renamed the library from “the LOOT API” to “libloot” to avoid confusion between the name of the library and the API that it provides. The library filename is changed so that the loot_api part is now loot, e.g. loot.dll on Windows and libloot.so on Linux.
  • CyclicInteractionError() has had its constructor and methods completely replaced to provide a more detailed and flexible representation of the cyclic path that it reports.
  • UndefinedGroupError::getGroupName() has been renamed to UndefinedGroupError::GetGroupName() for consistency with other API method names.
  • LootVersion::string() has been renamed to LootVersion::GetVersionString() for consistency with other API method names.
  • GetPluginMetadata() and GetPluginUserMetadata() now return std::optional<PluginMetadata> to differentiate metadata being found or not. Note that the PluginMetadata value may still return true for HasNameOnly() if a metadata entry exists but has no content other than the plugin name.
  • GetGroup() now returns std::optional<std::string> to indicate when there is no group metadata explicitly set, to simplify distinguishing between explicit and implicit default group membership.
  • GetVersion() now returns std::optional<std::string> to differentiate between there being no version and the version being an empty string, though the latter should never occur.
  • GetCRC() now returns std::optional<uint32_t> to differentiate between there being no CRC calculated and the CRC somehow being zero (which should never occur).
  • Filesystem paths are now represented in the API by std::filesystem::path values instead of std::string values. This affects the following functions:
  • The metadata condition parsing, evaluation and caching code and the pseudosem dependency have been replaced by a dependency on loot-condition-interpreter, which provides more granular caching and more opportunity for future enhancements.
  • The API now supports v0.14 of the metadata syntax.
  • Updated C++ version required to C++17. This means that Windows builds now require the MSVC 2017 runtime redistributable to be installed.
  • Updated esplugin to v2.1.1.
  • Updated libloadorder to v12.0.0.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.27.7.
  • Updated spdlog to v1.2.1.

Removed

  • PluginInterface::GetLowercasedName(), as the case folding behaviour LOOT uses is not necessarily appropriate for all use cases, so it’s up to the client to lowercase according to their own needs.

Fixed

  • BSAs/BA2s loaded by non-ASCII plugins for Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 may not have been detected due to incorrect case-insensitivity handling.
  • Fixed incorrect case-insensitivity handling for non-ASCII plugin filenames and File metadata names.
  • FileVersion and ProductVersion properties were not set in the DLL since v0.11.0.
  • Path equivalence checks could be inaccurate as they were using case-insensitive string comparisons, which may not match filesystem behaviour. Filesystem equivalence checks are now used to improve correctness.
  • Errors due to filesystem permissions when cloning a new masterlist repository into an existing game directory. Deleting the temporary directory is now deferred until after its contents have been copied into the game directory, and if an error is encountered when deleting the temporary directory, it is logged but does not cause the masterlist update to fail.
  • An error creating a game handle for Skyrim if loadorder.txt is not encoded in UTF-8. In this case, libloadorder will now fall back to interpreting its contents as encoded in Windows-1252, to match the behaviour when reading the load order state.

0.13.8 - 2018-09-24

Fixed

  • Filesystem errors when trying to set permissions during a masterlist update that clones a new repository.

0.13.7 - 2018-09-10

Changed

  • Significantly improve plugin loading performance by scanning for BSAs/BA2s once instead of for each plugin.
  • Improve performance of metadata evaluation by caching CRCs with the same cache lifetime as condition results.
  • Improve performance of sorting when it involves long plugin interaction chains.
  • Updated esplugin to v2.0.1.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.27.4.
  • Updated libloadorder v11.4.1.
  • Updated spdlog to v1.1.0.
  • Updated yaml-cpp to 0.6.2+merge-key-support.2.

Fixed

  • Fallout 4’s DLCUltraHighResolution.esm is now handled as a hardcoded plugin (via libloadorder).

0.13.6 - 2018-06-29

Changed

  • Tweaked masterlist repository cloning to avoid undefined behaviour.
  • Updated Boost to v1.67.0.
  • Updated esplugin to v2.0.0.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.27.2.
  • Updated libloadorder to v11.4.0.

0.13.5 - 2018-06-02

Changed

  • Sorting now enforces hardcoded plugin positions, sourcing them through libloadorder. This avoids the need for often very verbose metadata entries, particularly for Creation Club plugins.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.27.1. This includes a security fix for CVE-2018-11235, but LOOT API’s usage is not susceptible. libgit2 is not susceptible to CVE-2018-11233, another Git vulnerability which was published on the same day.
  • Updated libloadorder to v11.3.0.
  • Updated spdlog to v0.17.0.
  • Updated esplugin to v1.0.10.

0.13.4 - 2018-06-02

Fixed

  • NewMetadata() now uses the passed plugin’s group if the calling plugin’s group is implicit, and sets the group to be implicit if the two plugins’ groups are equal.

0.13.3 - 2018-05-26

Changed

  • Improved cycle avoidance when resolving evaluating plugin groups during sorting. If enforcing the group difference between two plugins would cause a cycle and one of the plugins’ groups is the default group, that plugin’s group will be ignored for all plugins in groups between default and the other plugin’s group.
  • The masterlist repository cloning process no longer moves LOOT’s game folders, so if something goes wrong the process fails more safely.
  • The LOOT API is now built with debugging information on Windows, and its PDB is included in build archives.
  • Updated libloadorder to v11.2.2.

Fixed

  • Various filesystem-related issues that could be encountered when updating masterlists, including failure due to file handles being left open while attempting to remove.
  • Building the esplugin and libloadorder dependencies using Rust 1.26.0, which included a regression to workspace builds.

0.13.2 - 2018-04-29

Changed

  • Updated libloadorder to v11.2.1.

Fixed

  • Incorrect load order positions were given for light-master-flagged .esp plugins when getting the load order (via libloadorder).

0.13.1 - 2018-04-09

Added

  • Support for Skyrim VR using GameType::tes5vr.

Changed

  • Updated libloadorder to v11.2.0.

0.13.0 - 2018-04-02

Added

Changed

Removed

  • Support for local and global plugin priorities.
    • Removed the loot::Priority class.
    • Removed PluginMetadata::GetLocalPriority(), PluginMetadata::GetGlobalPriority(), PluginMetadata::SetLocalPriority() and PluginMetadata::SetGlobalPriority()
    • Priorities are no longer taken into account when sorting plugins.

Fixed

  • An error when applying a load order for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas when a plugin had a timestamp earlier than 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (via libloadorder).
  • An error when loading the current load order for Skyrim with a loadorder.txt incorrectly encoded in Windows-1252 (via libloadorder).

0.12.5 - 2018-02-17

Changed

  • Updated esplugin to v1.0.9.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.26.3. This enables TLS 1.2 support on Windows 7, so users shouldn’t need to manually enable it themselves.

0.12.4 - 2018-02-17

Fixed

  • Loading or saving a load order could be very slow because the plugins directory was scanned recursively, which is unnecessary. In the reported case, this fix caused saving a load order to go from 23 seconds to 43 milliseconds (via libloadorder).
  • Plugin parsing errors were being logged with trace severity, they are now logged as errors.
  • Saving a load order for Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas now updates plugin access times to the current time for correctness (via libloadorder).

Changed

  • GameInterface::SetLoadOrder() now errors if passed a load order that does not contain all installed plugins. The previous behaviour was to append any missing plugins, but this was undefined and could cause unexpected results (via libloadorder).
  • Performance improvements for load order operations, benchmarked at 2x to 150x faster (via libloadorder).
  • Updated mentions of libespm in error messages to mention esplugin instead.
  • Updated libloadorder to v11.0.1.
  • Updated spdlog to v0.16.3.

0.12.3 - 2018-02-04

Added

  • Support for Fallout 4 VR via the new loot::GameType::fo4vr game type.

Fixed

  • loot::CreateGameHandle() no longer accepts an empty game path string, and no longer has a default value for its game path parameter, as using an empty string as the game path is invalid and always causes an exception to be thrown.

Changed

  • Added an empty string as the default value of loot::InitialiseLocale()‘s string parameter.
  • Updated esplugin to v1.0.8.
  • Updated libloadorder to v10.1.0.

0.12.2 - 2017-12-24

Fixed

  • Plugins with a .esp file extension that have the light master flag set are no longer treated as masters when sorting, so they can have other .esp files as masters without causing cyclic interaction sorting errors.

Changed

  • Downgraded Boost to 1.63.0 to take advantage of pre-built binaries on AppVeyor.

0.12.1 - 2017-11-23

Added

  • Support for identifying Creation Club plugins using Skyrim.ccc and Fallout4.ccc (via libloadorder).

Changed

  • Update esplugin to v1.0.7.
  • Update libloadorder to v10.0.4.

0.12.0 - 2017-11-03

Added

Changed

  • LoadPlugins() now loads the current load order state before loading plugins.
  • Added a condition string field to SimpleMessage.
  • Replaced libespm dependency with esplugin v1.0.6. This significantly improves safety and sorting performance, especially for large load orders.
  • Updated libloadorder to v10.0.3. This significantly improves safety and the performance of load order operations, at the expense of exposing cache management to the client.
  • Replaced Boost.Log with spdlog v0.14.0, removing dependencies on several other Boost libraries in the process.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.26.0.
  • Update Boost to v1.65.1.

Removed

  • DatabaseInterface::EvalLists() as it was superseded in v0.11.0 by the ability to evaluate conditions when getting general messages and individual plugins’ metadata, which is more efficient.
  • SetLoggingVerbosity() and SetLogFile() as they have been superseded by the new loot::SetLoggingCallback() function.
  • The loot/yaml/* headers containing LOOT’s internal YAML conversion functions are no longer exposed alongside the API headers.
  • The loot/windows_encoding_converters.h header is no longer exposed alongside the API headers.

Fixed

  • Formatting in metadata documentation.
  • Saving metadata wrote entries in an inconsistent order.
  • Clang build errors.

0.11.1 - 2017-06-19

Fixed

  • A crash would occur when loading an plugin that had invalid data past its header. Such plugins are now just silently ignored.
  • loot::CreateGameHandle() would not resolve game or local data paths that are junction links correctly, which caused problems later when trying to perform actions such as loading plugins.
  • Performing a masterlist update on a branch where the remote and local histories had diverged would fail. The existing local branch is now discarded and the remote branch checked out anew, as intended.

0.11.0 - 2017-05-13

Added

Changed

  • Renamed loot::CreateDatabase() to loot::CreateGameHandle(), and changed its signature so that it returns a shared pointer to a loot::GameInterface instead of a shared pointer to a loot::DatabaseInterface.
  • Moved SortPlugins() into loot::GameInterface.
  • Some loot::DatabaseInterface methods are now const:
  • LOOT’s internal YAML conversion functions have been refactored into the include/loot/yaml directory, but they are not really part of the API. They’re only exposed so that they can be shared between the API and LOOT application without introducing another component.
  • LOOT’s internal string encoding conversion functions have been refactored into the include/loot/windows_encoding_converters.h header, but are not really part of the API. They’re only exposed so that they can be shared between the API and LOOT application without introducing another component.
  • Metadata is now cached more efficiently, reducing the API’s memory footprint.
  • Log timestamps now have microsecond precision.
  • Updated to libgit2 v0.25.1.
  • Refactored code only useful to the LOOT application out of the API internals and into the application source code.

Removed

  • DatabaseInterface::GetPluginTags(), DatabaseInterface::GetPluginMessages() and DatabaseInterface::GetPluginCleanliness() have been removed as they have been superseded by DatabaseInterface::GetPluginMetadata().
  • The GameDetectionError class, as it is no longer thrown by the API.
  • The PluginTags struct, as it is no longer used.
  • The LanguageCode enum, as the API now uses ISO language codes directly instead.
  • The PluginCleanliness enum. as it’s no longer used. Plugin cleanliness should now be checked by getting a plugin’s evaluated metadata and checking if any dirty info is present. If none is present, the cleanliness is unknown. If dirty info is present, check if any of the English info strings contain the text “Do not clean”: if not, the plugin is dirty.
  • The LOOT API no longer caches the load order, as this is already done more accurately by libloadorder (which is used internally).

Fixed

  • Libgit2 error details were not being logged.
  • A FileAccessError was thrown when the masterlist path was an empty string. The API now just skips trying to load the masterlist in this case.
  • Updating the masterlist did not update the cached metadata, requiring a call to LoadLists().
  • The reference documentation was broken due to an incompatibility between Sphinx 1.5.x and Breathe 4.4.

0.10.3 - 2017-01-08

Added

  • Automated 64-bit API builds.

Changed

  • Replaced std::invalid_argument exceptions thrown during condition evaluation with ConditionSyntaxError exceptions.
  • Improved robustness of error handling when calculating file CRCs.

Fixed

  • Documentation was not generated correctly for enums, exceptions and structs exposed by the API.
  • Added missing documentation for CyclicInteractionError methods.

0.10.2 - 2016-12-03

Changed

  • Updated libgit2 to 0.24.3.

Fixed

  • A crash could occur if some plugins that are hardcoded to always load were missing. Fixed by updating to libloadorder v9.5.4.
  • Plugin cleaning metadata with no info value generated a warning message with no text.

0.10.1 - 2016-11-12

No API changes.

0.10.0 - 2016-11-06

Added

  • Support for TES V: Skyrim Special Edition.

Changed

  • Completely rewrote the API as a C++ API. The C API has been reimplemented as a wrapper around the C++ API, and can be found in a separate repository.
  • Windows builds now have a runtime dependency on the MSVC 2015 runtime redistributable.
  • Rewrote the API documentation, which is now hosted online at Read The Docs.
  • The Windows release archive includes the .lib file for compile-time linking.
  • LOOT now supports v0.10 of the metadata syntax. This breaks compatibility with existing syntax. See the syntax version history for the details.
  • Updated libgit2 to 0.24.2.

Removed

  • The loot_get_tag_map() function has no equivalent in the new C++ API as it is obsolete.
  • The loot_apply_load_order() function has no equivalent in the new C++ API as it just passed through to libloadorder, which clients can use directly instead.

Fixed

  • Database creation was failing when passing paths to symlinks that point to the game and/or game local paths.
  • Cached plugin CRCs causing checksum conditions to always evaluate to false.
  • Updating the masterlist when the user’s TEMP and TMP environmental variables point to a different drive than the one LOOT is installed on.

0.9.2 - 2016-08-03

Changed

  • libespm (2.5.5) and Pseudosem (1.1.0) dependencies have been updated to the versions given in brackets.

Fixed

  • The packaging script used to create API archives was packaging the wrong binary, which caused the v0.9.0 and v0.9.1 API releases to actually be re-releases of a snapshot build made at some point between v0.8.1 and v0.9.0: the affected API releases were taken offline once this was discovered.
  • loot_get_plugin_tags() remembering results and including them in the results of subsequent calls.
  • An error occurred when the user’s temporary files directory didn’t exist and updating the masterlist tried to create a directory there.
  • Errors when reading some Oblivion plugins during sorting, including the official DLC.

0.9.1 - 2016-06-23

No API changes.

0.9.0 - 2016-05-21

Changed

  • Moved API header location to the more standard include/loot/api.h.
  • Documented LOOT’s masterlist versioning system.
  • Made all API outputs fully const to make it clear they should not be modified and to avoid internal const casting.
  • The loot_db type is now an opaque struct, and functions that used to take it as a value now take a pointer to it.

Removed

  • The loot_cleanup() function, as the one string it used to destroy is now stored on the stack and so destroyed when the API is unloaded.
  • The loot_lang_any constant. The loot_lang_english constant should be used instead.

0.8.1 - 2015-09-27

Changed

  • Safety checks are now performed on file paths when parsing conditions (paths must not reference a location outside the game folder).
  • Updated Boost (1.59.0), libgit2 (0.23.2) and CEF (branch 2454) dependencies.

Fixed

  • A crash when loading plugins due to lack of thread safety.
  • The masterlist updater and validator not checking for valid condition and regex syntax.
  • The masterlist updater not working correctly on Windows Vista.

0.8.0 - 2015-07-22

Added

  • Support for metadata syntax v0.8.

Changed

  • Improved plugin loading performance for computers with weaker multithreading capabilities (eg. non-hyperthreaded dual-core or single-core CPUs).
  • LOOT no longer outputs validity warnings for inactive plugins.
  • Updated libgit2 to v0.23.0.

Fixed

  • Many miscellaneous bugs, including initialisation crashes and incorrect metadata input/output handling.
  • LOOT silently discarding some non-unique metadata: an error will now occur when loading or attempting to apply such metadata.
  • LOOT’s version comparison behaviour for a wide variety of version string formats.

0.7.1 - 2015-06-22

Fixed

  • “No existing load order position” errors when sorting.
  • Output of Bash Tag removal suggestions in loot_write_minimal_list().

0.7.0 - 2015-05-20

Initial API release.