The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here! HotSpot, our community-built replacement for Torchleech is finally in the open beta stage! In case you haven't been following the site news, let me explain.
Torchleech, while a wonderful application that has gained a huge amount of popularity in the community for its ability to automatically install mods and detect conflicts, has been a bit lacking in updates for a variety of reasons, one of the main being that it requires manual updates to any and all mods within its system. At the beginning of this year community member ugmojoe approached me hoping to create a new, open-sourced mod manager that could be updated automatically. This being one of my original hopes for hosting Torchleech, I immediately drafted him into the staff and handcuffed him to a computer.
One day, this is where you will choose which game you want to manage mods for.
Several real months later, ugmojoe, with some help from Dusho and Arkam, and myself of course, have created HotSpot. HotSpot is fully integrated into RGF's mod database, and is automatically updated once an hour for any new mods uploaded to the site. But that's not all, let me give you a list of current and planned features for the program:
Current Features
- A one-time install with auto-updating software, meaning you'll never need to keep track of HotSpot's version number and update it.
- Directly integrated in RGF's Mods Database, and automatically updated every hour for new files or updates to current files.
- A preview pane that features an extremely cut down version of the site, displaying Mod Descriptions and previews exactly as the author posts them.
- ugmojoe's classic Class Creator and Item Fixer tools already installed.
- A Splash screen which provides you links to the latest Torchlight and Runic Games-related news
- The ability to search for mods via a searchbox (for Name and Author), by categories, and/or by Name, Download Count, and Rating.
- Conflict checking, to know if your mods are going to break each other.
- Every mod that was in Torchleech (even some that no longer existed anywhere else) are also now included within RGF's database to make sure you can always find your favorite mods!
- During mod installation HotSpot cleans out the .adm files for you, to prevent problems between Mac and PC based mods.
As great as these features are, they are nothing compared to the planned (possible) features for future updates, including...
- Support for Torchlight 1 AND Torchlight 2 mods, selectable via the Splash Screen.
- Advanced Conflict Checking, including pre-installation file conflicts, Unit name conflicts, and Menu conflicts
- The ability to use HotSpot to package mods of your own creation to be easily compatible and optimized to add to our mod database.
- A number of useful modding tools, including a Class and Pet combination tool (No more class conflicts again!)
- Warnings for when you are hitting the limits of Torchlight's mod loading capabilities
- Mod Profiles for easy storage and separation of mods between characters.
- Account Integrated features, using your RGF Username and Password to access new parts of the program.
You can download the HotSpot installer from this link to our mods database, although we will be creating a custom homepage for it in the future as well. Keep in mind that it IS in beta form right now, which means it is very likely that you will encounter problems that we haven't yet. If you do find problems, or have suggestions or other feedback, you can post them within the various new HotSpot Forums.
Yes, these are the same images I used before. Teehee!
Side Note: Because supporting three file formats would make development harder, and because it was such a problem for our Mac users, we're no longer allowing new .7z files to be added to the database. .zip and .rar will always be available, and you will eventually be able to create them within HotSpot as well.
No more waiting for updates again! Download HotSpot today!
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