Is Anyone Else Dissatisfied with Vortex?

[Pickysaurus]

 

Dissatisfied, yes, but not for the same general reason.

When compared to Steam Workshop, it just does so little. I'm trying to run modded Stardew Valley on two different computers. The save files are synched via Steam Cloud, so I need the same mods to be on both of them.

 

It's not really fair to compare Vortex to Workshop, they do two different things, with different approaches to modding. Steam Workshop is also funded by Valve who are a multi-million dollar corporation with servers spanning the world and who make their money through sales of games and hardware. Nexus Mods is a fairly small fish in comparison. We're a hobby website created by the community, for the community. We rely on ad revenue and Premium membership to afford to keep the site online and develop free tools (like Vortex) to make modding easier.

 

Workshop also has deep integration with games sold on steam but zero support for games from other stores. Vortex supports the game from any source.

 

 

 

One would think there was a functionality in Vortex that kept track of which mods you had downloaded using your account, and a quick button to select them on a list for bulk download on another computer. Steam Workshop even does that automatically. But nope, no such list. The individual mod pages on the website tells you when you last downloaded a file from that mod (meaning that the information is stored somewhere), but I've yet to find anywhere that aggregates which mods you're using.

 

If this is what you want to do, you should look at creating a Collection of the mods you want to use in order to sync between your two PCs. The feature is in alpha but will allow you to do what you're asking with a bit of setup.

 

 

And then forget about the bulk download part. Every individual mod has to be downloaded manually through the website anyway, making me wonder what the point of Vortex even is. Is it just about putting the mods in the right directory? I can do that myself without being bombarded with notifications about games I'm not even playing.

 

This goes back to my point about scale. As you're not a Premium member, we direct you to the website so you see the adverts that pay for your free use of our services. Nobody likes ads but if we didn't show you ads we couldn't afford to keep the lights on. We're also not planning to put ads in Vortex as it would open a security problem in your PC to allow ad-code to run in that way. With Premium there is less need to visit the website, along with faster downloads.

 

Vortex does far more than just "putting mods in the right directory". It has profiles to allow you to quickly swap between mod setups. You can enable/disable mods without deleting them from your PC and check for and get updates for them from the app. I'd be curious to know what notifications you're being "bombarded" with. At most you'd see one or two every few days from my experience. Although it could be better.

[showler]

I'd also point out that it is probably way, way easier to copy your mods from the Vortex download directory to the other computer than to re-download them all. Also solves the problem of knowing which mods you downloaded.

 

Even if you make a Collection to sync them, having the download files already on the new computer will save a tonne of time.

[rmm200]

Another point: Humungous flash drive is a great place to store downloaded mods off your computer.

Vortex won't need them until you want to re-install a mod (rare), and it makes porting trivial.

[Tannin42]

When compared to Steam Workshop, it just does so little.

Arguable, I guess it depends on what game you're modding.

Vortex supports mod installer that let you make settings during installation, Workshop doesn't.

Vortex supports games that need mod files to be merged/postprocessed during installation, Workshop doesn't.

For many games Vortex allows controlling load and deploy order, Workshop doesn't.

For Bethesda games Vortex supports reviewing save games and which mods were used with those, Workshop doesn't.

Vortex supports installing enb or other mods that aren't strictly built against the game modding interface, Workshop doesn't.

...

 

Vortex has a long long list of functionality beyond what Workshop does but yeah, depending on which game you're playing, what kinds of mods you're using you may not make use of most of it.

 

One would think there was a functionality in Vortex that kept track of which mods you had downloaded using your account, and a quick button to select them on a list for bulk download on another computer. Steam Workshop even does that automatically.

 

You're somewhat conflating different things here. Vortex is only the application on your local system installing your mods. Vortex itself can't keep track of your mods, it's not a webservice.

The site, nexusmods.com, keeps track of the mods you download but it has no information on what you have installed/uninstalled.

For the functionality you're suggesting, Vortex and site would have to be much more tightly integrated and that, in turn, would require us to drop functionality from Vortex.

E.g. how is this system supposed to track mods and make them available on your other system if mods can be downloaded from a different site or downloaded manually and then installed from disk?

It would only work reliably if we only allow mods from our site because we can only track those.

 

Steam Workshop has a very focused scope, it limits what mods can do, what games are supported, it strictly dictates how mods are packaged, what site the mods can come from and yes, in turn the experience will be more straight forward. I don't think that Nexus Mods should be more like Workshop because Workshop already exists.