An Timeline of Dargon
It's fun for me to look back at what I've done.
RAF DUMP/PACK are born (April 28th, 2011)
In April of 2011, Riot Games had begun its transition to a new patcher. This patcher moved the game's resource files to Riot Archive Files, making it impossible for modders to make changes like previously.
That night, I wrote a program to dump (extract) files from these archives.
RAF Dump and Pack were slow; you had to dump a few gigs of data just to make a few megs of changes.
You can see RAF Dump and Pack in action here.
RAF Manager is released (May 6th, 2011)
After I released RAF Dump and Pack, I begun working on RAF Manager. Instead of purely dumping and packing files, RAF Manager inserted files to the archives. Modifications could be installed in seconds.
Image from Installing Custom Skins for League of Legends using the RAF Manager by Jumpinthepack
The Last RAF Manager Patch (~December?, 2011)
The last RAF Manager patch added multithreading (which was trivial to add, btw).
RAF Manager was pretty bad. I'm sure most people realized that, or at least, I did.
But there was no alternative. Heck, RAF Manager was...
- written in a short, rushed time frame = bad code quality, completely unmaintainable.
- Hacky
- If you were to delete RM's directory, modifications would be installed forever, which sucked.
- If the client patched, RAF Manager wouldn't be able to revert your modifications, which sucked.
- If you wanted to uninstall a mod, you'd have to wait a few minutes, which sucked.
- The list goes on. It's not a happy list. No, it's a sad list. RAF Manager either had to be rewritten, or it had to be replaced.
Dargon is Conceptualized (~July/August, 2011)
"Teh Dargon" was born. I wanted to hook the game's functionality, and feed it my own resources.
It was summertime, so I continued to maintain RAF Manager for its end-users. Dargon was pretty much in my head at this point.
I did work on it during my spare time, though.
Dargon Hooks Direct3D (~November, 2011)
From this picture, I assumed it would be possible to hook the minimap rendering and draw stuff on it. Unfortunately, it seems they've changed how they render some stuff, making things a bit more difficult.
At this point, Dargon had no graphical user interface; you just dropped compressed files into C:/Input/
April 14th, 2012 - Dargon's Front-end is created. (via Twitter)
Yep, it only took a day to lay the foundation for Dargon's UI.
The almost all of the back-end code wasn't written, though.
June 19th, 2012 - Resource Viewing, LoLMount works. (via Twitter)
RAFMount was actually distributed with RAF Manager, so this was pretty trivial to add on.
I should add that at this point, Dargon was very monolithic; everything was in one executable, which wasn't efficient memory-wise.
Corki's loadscreen being viewed, extracted from a RAF Archive that was mounted in a virtual hard drive.
June 27th, 2012 - Dargon gets its first logo. (via Twitter)
Thanks to lagas5 from Reddit for the logo!
July 5th, 2012 - Began development of Dargon's Installer. (via Twitter)
Goal: Be pretty, not RAF Manager.
July 7th, 2012 - First version of Dargon's website. (via Twitter)
Goal: Still to be pretty, not RAF Manager.
August 3rd, 2012 - Dargon's getting there. (via Twitter)
It wasn't perfect, but it was getting there. It had some crashing issues, it was slow, etc.
August 14th, 2012 - Dargon gets a new website. Alpha testing begins. (via Twitter)
The new website layout was intended to be cleaner.
August 14th, 2012 - Dargon is split into Dargon Daemon and Dargon Manager. (via Twitter)
Dargon Manager was sort of eating a lot of memory. I plan to make Dargon Daemon more lightweight in the future.
August 15th, 2012 - Dargon applies Nethermancer Ezreal. (via Twitter)
Not a huge milestone, but Dargon applied a modification that RAF Manager and Skin Installer Ultimate couldn't install.
August 18th, 2012 - Dargon Deployment fails.
I tried to release Dargon on this day, but sort of failed epicly at doing so. On the bright side, I now had more time to work on Dargon, to make it more awesome for the next week.
August 25th, 2012 - Dargon Release Candidate is ready. (via Twitter)
August 26th, 2012 - Dargon is released
Have fun =) I've spent my entire summer working on Dargon, so I haven't played much. School starts in a few days. I'll work more on Dargon in the future.