BrowserAssist is a plugin that provides an alternative browser to VAM's built in Scene Browser. It has a range of features beyond those provided by the default VAM Scene Browser and aims to be more performant. Full details are on the hub here.
New Features:
BrowserAssist VAR Management. Improve VAM performance by offloading or disabling VARs that are not required. See details below.
Bug fixes:
Removed an error when loading presets with clothing SELF references
Folder browser options for Moving, deleting and renaming were not available for resources other than Scenes
Available to Patreons here.
Free version will be available on hub here (normally a week after Patreon release). Howeve, VARManagement will remain a Patreon only feature.
Please report any issues on Discord here: https://discord.gg/qrqt2SBzdW
VAR Management
This feature has been in Beta for many months but has now reached a stable enough state to be considered part of the plugin. This latest version improves on the last Beta by introducing a plugin UI screen to delete duplicate VARs and various bug fixes.
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 and slower startup times. BA VAR Management mitigates this performance impact by disabling (or offloading to another folder) VAR files which are not needed by the current scene. Once VAR files are disabled or offloaded, 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/offloaded 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/offloaded 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. These custom rules can also be used to determine whether VARs that are not enabled are either offloaded (i.e. moved to a folder outside of AddonPackages) or disabled.
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.