As far as I am aware, Minion is closed source, proprietary software. The devs of mmoui/esoui retain copyright and control over the code. It is possible to modify the code without having the source, but it isn't recommended, and would not be a friendly or ethical way of working with the development team who built Minion.

In order for Minion to be well-maintained by others outside the original Minion dev team, its source code would need to be released under an open source license. This would help Minion to survive whether or not the developers continue to invest resources into the tool.

Of course, the backend for these websites is still maintained and kept online by a related development team, if not in fact the same team. They could decide to take their chips and go home at any time. Since Minion depends on downloading files hosted here, it sort of makes sense to link together the tool and the site. If the site dies, Minion the program is useless.

On the other hand, there is another modding community that provides a download service, but also makes their client open source. They are a larger operation that actively generates income from people paying to use the service, and they host mods for more games (and more mods in total). I don't think they really do anything for Elder Scrolls Online specifically, but their client is definitely in better hands because it is open source, even though it's connected to a proprietary service backend. That community's name is NexusMods.

The reason I don't use NexusMods personally is that Minion has a lot of addons that are only hosted here, and not on NexusMods. I am also an addon author, and I only host them here.

Oh, yeah: NexusMods' Vortex only works on Windows. So it wouldn't help us Mac users even if it had all the ESO addons. ;)

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IMO, the long term solution for mod hosting should come in the form of a cross-platform client that uses Bittorrent on the backend to download mods. This allows everyone to "crowd source" the bandwidth to distribute the mods. There could still be a centralized website and repository for the mods, but the website would not have to really serve very much content with the community hosting a lot of it. Alternatively, they could have an HTTP "mirror" system similar to apache.org where cooperative mirrors can host cryptographically verified versions of the mods.

Still, Minion is pretty good for right now. My main suggestion is that they update the JAR on the download site to be the latest version of the tool, to improve out of the box Java compatibility.

Great that you figured out a way to run Minion without Oracle's Java!

I went ahead and installed Liberica using Homebrew (as outlined here at Bellsoft) using the package "liberica-jre11-full" (as listed here on Github) und also removed Oracle's Java (see instructions here) and Minion is working. I see some errors in Terminal but that doesn't seem to prevent Minion from running or updating addons so far.

The download link is: https://cdn.mmoui.com/minion/v3/Minion3.0.11-java.zip (I just replaced the version number in the Java download link taken from Minion's download page) which ships the file with the sha256sum you posted.

One step closer to "In theory, someone could take the latest version of Minion's JAR, the latest version of the Liberica Java 11 runtime with JavaFX, bundle the two together into an app bundle, and provide a direct download that will just work." ? --- I am not sure if the devs would appreciate somebody else doing this and posting it on the forum with an external download link... """Someone""" could come up with a script that pulls together all required files though ;-)

Thanks for summarizing this Coorbin, very appreciated.

Beside the infos provided already many devs here decided NOT to release the addons on multile pages as updating them on 1 page is time consuming enough already, + supporting it via esoui.com & official ESO forums.

To all: Please keep in mind this is done in our free time without any rewards or financial compensation.
Some ppl donate ingame gold or buy us a coffee, some say thank you (which often is enough;)) but most just ask for "a fix" or "make it work"... Well, that said: Having 1 reliable source for the addons is enough, and this is and will be Esoui.com.

Nexus Mods can be used for many other games but do not expect any dev or staff here to support that, thanks for your understanding.

any update?
 

Any update on this topic? Still minion crashes on the first click.

The solution is here in the comments. You just need to read them.

Here is an attempt to distill the instructions:

1. Download this and unzip it to a directory: https://cdn.mmoui.com/minion/v3/Minion3.0.11-java.zip

2. Open a Terminal on your Mac

3. Run these commands:

curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash
source "$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh"
sdk install java 11.0.21.fx-librca

4. If prompted to make this your default Java, type "y" and hit enter

5. In the terminal, use the cd command to go to the folder where you extracted Minion

6. Run: java -jar Minion-jfx.jar

Alternatively, if you have no other Java runtime on your system, you can download Liberica as your system Java: go to https://bell-sw.com/pages/downloads/ and download the "Full JDK" for the appropriate Mac architecture (ARM64 for Apple Silicon; the other for Intel), install the software using the .dmg or .pkg like normal, then you might be able to double-click the Minion-jfx.jar in your Finder to run it.

Either way, there is no simple "download the Minion app bundle and double click it" way to successfully start Minion right now.

a million thanks!
 

Thank you SO SO much for that shortcut. Managed to install the Java thing but the console part was out of my league. Here I just press play on your shortcut and Minion is up and running and my add-ons are finally up to date! Thank you again!

Still stuck with no minion
 

I'm not proficient enough to set up the JAVA on terminal workaround on my M1 mini, has anyone been in contact wih emoji.com to ask if that dev team will update orig Minion for us?

Thanks! It worked!
 

Hi! I came here all the way to comment this worked for me! I didn't even have an account on the forum lol

Today is the 13th of March 2024. Minion was working last time. I probably updated my macOS in the meantime. After doing this method above, Minion did open. (It was not opening)

Thanks! :)

Edit: Minion devs, please update Minion to work with latest macOS. Thank you! <3

Out of curiosity, if someone would write a free crossplatform addon manager (based on, like, Electron instead of Java), that uses the esoui backend api (for getting the addon list/details/download URLs), giving proper credits, would you be against that?

Not my decision, it's esoui/mmoui staff that needs to answer this.
But I think it was answered in the past already that it's nothing that's actually working , nor planned to work (maybe wrong about that, so please ask Dolby and/or Cairenn).

MAC: Wait for Sonoma 14.4.1 or 14.5 (Ugh)
 

Apple let some debug code leak into Sonoma 14.4.

If you access memory that is not mapped, you should receive a "Segmentation Violation" or SIGSEGV exception. There is code in the JVM that expects this error, intercepts the SIGSEGV, and loada additional code as needed.

Someone at Apple was testing and changed the SIGSEGV to SIGKILL. SIGSEGV can be intercepted and handled. SIGKILL cannot and immediately stops the process. It was probably changed to test some particular issue.

Unfortunately the SIGKILL was left in place and now accessing unallocated memory kills the process. This breaks the Java JVM running Minion and a number of other java-powered applications.

There is no workaround. We need to wait for Apple to release 14.4.1 or 14.5.
Oh, and Elder Scrolls since Daggerfall.

Source: I've been working with Unix since 1984, java since 1996, Linux since 2001, and Apple since 2012.

14.4.1 didn't fix running directly on Mac version