79 replies to this topic

[Thallassa]

Just a few UX things which will be useful to you testers but aren't totally obvious in this version.

- Double click on the mod to bring up this menu.

 

- View in File Manager - this opens the mod folder so you can make changes directly there. These changes will be detected the next time you deploy mods.

 

- Advanced mode lets you purge mods (delete all hardlinks, but not the mod files), as well as adds a search bar to the mod/plugins panels.

 

If you have any questions about how to use Vortex, feel free to ask here. I'm happy to answer as much as I'm able to. Gopher is already working on a video tutorial set which looks really good - I believe he is going to time its launch with the full release, so if you don't have Vortex yet and you're intimidated by learning new things, don't fear! He will hold your hand through it

[Ethreon]

Is manual load order not a thing or am I missing the easy way to move plugins around ?

[OldMansBeard]

Is manual load order not a thing or am I missing the easy way to move plugins around ?

I was wondering that. It's possible to create rules that each one has to follow the one above it, but that seems clumsy.

[Thallassa]

Manual load order isn't a thing: this is covered in Tannin's post in the feedback forum.

 

Plugin order only matters where plugins have dependencies, or conflicts. If you want one plugin to always load after another plugin, for whatever reason, set a dependency so that plugin will load after. Then when you click sort Vortex will always respect that order.

 

If you want to make it, so, like, all your house mods are sorted next to each other, you're being silly as the game doesn't care about that one bit That said the sort should put them pretty close to each other.

[Ethreon]

And you're being "silly" telling me that is silly. Well this kinda kills vortex for me.

[OldMansBeard]

If there is a conflict between two mods with loose files, can I specify which mod should 'win' on a file-by-file basis when I install them, like in NMM? Or is it determined purely by install order? I'm thinking of mesh and texture replacer mods that don't have plugins so 'load order' isn't relevant.

[NoShotz]

If there is a conflict between two mods with loose files, can I specify which mod should 'win' on a file-by-file basis when I install them, like in NMM? Or is it determined purely by install order? I'm thinking of mesh and texture replacer mods that don't have plugins so 'load order' isn't relevant.

There is a thing for resolving conflicts, click the red lighting bolt.

[OldMansBeard]

Manual load order isn't a thing: this is covered in Tannin's post in the feedback forum.

 

Plugin order only matters where plugins have dependencies, or conflicts. If you want one plugin to always load after another plugin, for whatever reason, set a dependency so that plugin will load after. Then when you click sort Vortex will always respect that order.

 

If you want to make it, so, like, all your house mods are sorted next to each other, you're being silly as the game doesn't care about that one bit That said the sort should put them pretty close to each other.

Sorry, but load order does matter if you are developing Skyrim/SSE mods and have bat files for testing that reference records explicitly by FormID. If I need a particular plugin to be at 12, say, because my bat files reference records with FormIds that start with 12, then I need to be able to put it there. In NMM I could do it easily with drag and drop.

 

If you are just playing the game, then I would agree that precise positioning doesn't matter. But mods don't grow on trees - they have authors who need to test them.

[OldMansBeard]

 

If there is a conflict between two mods with loose files, can I specify which mod should 'win' on a file-by-file basis when I install them, like in NMM? Or is it determined purely by install order? I'm thinking of mesh and texture replacer mods that don't have plugins so 'load order' isn't relevant.

There is a thing for resolving conflicts, click the red lighting bolt.

 

Yes, I found that, but that only affects load order, not static install order and only on a per-mod basis, it's not fine-grained at the file level.

 

Example: Mod A has plugin A and some loose files. Mod B has plugin B which depends on A, so B has to load after A. That's okay, we can do that with a rule. But mod B also has some loose files that are an older version than the same-named files in Mod A, so the loose files in Mod A have to overwrite the loose files in Mod B or, to put it another way, I need to install Mod B without overwriting the loose files from Mod A. NMM can do that. Can Vortex do that? Because if it can't, it's going to break a whole slew of existing mods.

Edited by OldMansBeard, 31 January 2018 - 05:30 PM.

[Thallassa]

OldMansBeard: It's not like NMM at all. Not really like MO either.

 

 

 

One thing that isn't so easy to do is for example choose "I want to overwrite this file, but not this one." In MO this is done by right clicking on the file you don't want to use > hide file. Here you have to open the mod in the file manager and then change the file extension or delete it.

 

These images will make more sense if you know how Vortex works:

 

Mods have three states, uninstalled, disabled, and enabled.

 

Uninstalled means that the archive is in Vortex's downloads folder, but vortex hasn't done anything with it yet.

 

Disabled means that Vortex has unzipped the mod to its Mods folder.

 

(You can configure exactly where you want these folders to be under settings > Mods).

 

Enabled means that Vortex will place hardlinks in the game's mod folder (for BGS games, /Data). These hardlinks behave exactly like the file was really there. Any change to either file will be detected by Vortex.

 

The process of placing hardlinks into the data folder is called "deployment". By default vortex deploys automatically whenever you enable a mod. You can set it to not deploy until you tell it to. Therefore, by default, you would enable the mod, make these overwrite changes, and Vortex would then re-deploy. Or you can tell it not to deploy, install a bunch of mods and configure overwrites, then deploy all at once. Deployment is when it detects if there has been any changes to the mod files either in the mod folder or in the data folder.

 

Load order: Ah, I see. You can set a global priority (much like LOOT) which should put your esp always in the same place.