Virt-A-Mate: Installing VAR packages
How to install VaM content?
The easiest way to installed VaM content is to use the "Hub Browse" window directly inside VaM. It will take care of all the things for you, including downloading all dependencies you might need. Obviously that only works for content that has actually been uploaded to the Hub and has the "Hub-Hosted VAR" label, it won't work with paid or early access content on Patreon or other sites.
However, this article is about manually installing content, as it is needed for stuff downloaded from Patreon or other sites. Installing VAR packages seems rather straight forward, you download the .var file and place inside your AddonPackages directory, wherever you installed VaM. Do not extract them, just put them into the folder.
Inside VaM open the Package Manager window, its the box icon in the main menu bar. If you had VaM running while you downloaded the VAR package, you need to press "Rescan Packages" at the top. Any packages that have missing dependencies (like missing clothing, morphs, plugins or other assets) will be highlighted in red. Using the "Scan Hub for Missing Packages" is an easy way to download anything missing that is available on the hub. If you still have missing stuff after that, you will have to find and install it manually, likely you are missing paid assets, etc.
That was easy, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, good that you ask. For, uh....just imagine some reason that totally makes sense here....if you have a VAR package that is simply attached at the end of a Patreon post like the following screenshot, if you try to download it, apparently it can happen with some configurations that a .VAR file is mistakenly renamed into .ZIP by the browser. For myself this consistently happens when using Firefox, while Chrome and Edge do just fine. However, others confirmed this can happen with Chrome as well, somehow. So you might get lucky and this does not affect you, or well, you are not lucky. This might explain some of the confusion around VAR packages, by the way. Great.
While technically VAR packages are just ZIP files, VaM does not recognize them, when you put them into the AddonPackages folder. Most obvious and easy solution is to just manually rename the file back to .var after downloading.
[Noob-Guide] Changing a file extension with Windows 10
With Windows 10 default settings known file extensions are hidden, which means you can't change them. Open Windows Explorer and in the upper left corner go to "File" -> "Change folder and search options". Then switch to the "View" tab and disable the checkbox for "Hide extensions for known file types". Then press "Ok". In my opinion having extensions hidden by default is way more confusing than just displaying them and I recommend to just leave file extensions visible all the time.
Now you can rename the file by selecting it and pressing F2. Filename needs to end in ".var" like all the other files you got in the AddonPackages folder.
How to make Firefox download correctly in the first place?
If you are not scared of messing with config files, it is possible to teach Firefox what needs to be done with VAR files:
- Open Firefox and type аbout:support into the address bar.
- Look for "Profile Folder" and click "Open Folder" (This will open your entire Firefox profile with all settings, bookmarks, etc...)
- Close all open Firefox windows.
- Go to the folder window that opened and make a backup copy of handlers.json in some other folder.
- Open handlers.json with Notepad++ or a similar text editor.
- Look for "application/zip" and replace that entry with the following. The important part is that "var" gets added to the extensions list.
"application/zip":{"action":0,"ask":true,"extensions":["zip","var"]}
- Save the file and restart Firefox. Try to download a VAR package from a Patreon site:
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How to make other browsers download correctly?
I'm using Chrome as my main browser, where it just works fine for me, which is way it took so long to notice the issue. However, others reported to have this issue with Chrome as well. If you have this issue and find a solution, send me a message with a guide and I will add it here.