My 20 points of Vortex feedback and bug report

[nexususer01]

Ok, so I'm trying to recreate my Skyrim LE modded game using Vortex to see how it works in a real scenario and here are what issues I've encountered so far. Hope this will help with future development:

 

1.) The biggest issue I see now is that Vortex becomes super slow after installing a large amount of files. My Vortex mod directory currently contains about 230 directories which contains 50 thousand files. So now adding any new mod, even a small one is a big pain because the time it takes. I've already turned off automatic mod deployment to speed things up.

 

The strange thing is that even installing a 3 KB mod the unzipping phase takes between 15-20 secs.The installation phase of a 120 MB mod takes about 25-30 secs. So there is some kind of extra work going on there other than the extraction.

 

The enable phase takes addtional 10-15 seconds until the conflicts show up. At this amount of mods 90% of the new mods has some kind of conflicts. So after I fix the conflicts I have to wait this amount of time again for Vortex to notice that there are no more conflicts.

 

So that is about 1 minute / mod file. Which is terrible.

 

Anyway with this amount of mods the UI is very laggish, too. But I've read that this is a known issue.

 

2.) Dependency rules for mods (not plugins!). During the installation of the mods I've set up quite a few rules and I can see the system's pros (and contras, too).

 

So one thing I think would be an improvement if rules would be bi-directional. So if I have mod A and B and set up a rule that B should load after A then I would like to see at mod A that it loads before B. In the mod list I can see nothing at mod A (Shows "No Rules"). If I open mod A's rules I can see an info icon there that tells mod B already has a rule including mod A. I think it would be much better to see this at mod A as the dropdown list would show "Load before". And here is why: If I leave mod B to load after mod A and also set mod A to load after mod B it's an instant circular error with just two mods. Ok, it's a user error, but this error could be easily prevented with bi-directional rules. Also this would make easier to overview rules of a mod. And one last idea: I think that this system should allow to swap the order of two mods. So with the example above, if I would change at mod A from "Load before" to "Load after", then I would expect the rule change at mod B from "Load after" to "Load before". This would be a big help.

 

The next thing with the rule editor is that after a certain amount of mods, file conflicts will be very common. Sometimes when I add a new mod I have to fix conflicts with 30 other mods (some of these conflicts are because of point 3.). Naturally in this situation it will be very easy to create a circle error. I think this could be prevented by a validation check when I press "Save". Rules that would create a circle should be highlighted in red and I should be forced to change those before I close the panel.

 

Also there is a bug that after restarting Vortex some lightning bolts show up as red. But there is no conflict notification. I know I've resolved these conflicts. So I think the rules were not saved properly.

 

3.) Invalid conflicts: I'm getting many invalid mod conflicts because of files like thumbs.db and meta.ini. These should be added to the ignore list. I think it would be a good idea to let the user add new entries to the ignore list manually, too. I'm having a few invalid conflicts because of some less common files, too.

 

And a question: Does the conflict detection compare the hash of the file contents, too? This would certainly slow things down even more. But sometimes two mods contain the exact same files. So it would be great if there would be a way (even a manual way) to make this not to show up as conflict.

 

4.) I think that the click area of the dependency lighting bolt is way too small. However that one is the more usefull than the hiearchy icon next to it. Can't this be replaced with one icon? If I would hover the mouse over this icon it would show the existing rules (without the removal option naturally) and after clicking the button would bring up the modal.

 

5.) About the hiearchy icon from the previous point. I think it would be a nice addition to have such a way as the icon to visualize the rules. If install order list is a deprecated idea then showing the conflicts in trees would be the way for this system to show what comes after what.

 

6.) When installing a mod which has file conflicts a notification comes up telling me so. If I click "More" and then click "Show" then all lightning bolts get highlighted for a few seconds. By "all" I mean even those that are not conflicting. Also the highlights disappear too quick, making this function unuseful at the moment. I think the conflicting rows could get a permanent background color until the conflicts are fixed.

 

7.) I'm installing my mods manually with the "Install from File" button. In this situation the Reinstall function does not work. It shows an error that "path must be a string". Then it's better to restart Vortex.

 

8.) I'm not understanding the "Drop File" panel. It copies my files into the downloads folder and installs them from there. But why? Why doesn't it work like the "Install from File" button except for the file dialog? And why can't I install extracted folders with it? For now I can't use this function because it doesn't do what I wish it should do.

 

On the other hand, it takes up a serious amount of the window, which would be much better to show a longer list of mods. I think the drop function should be much smaller. It could go to the sidebar, too. Or even better: Why not just let the user drop a file (or folder) anywhere on the Vortex window?

 

9.) The notifications are a bit chaotic. Some of them have buttons, which I try to click, but when I finally click on one, another notification comes and takes the previous place. Changing the order of the notifications (olders first) should fix this.

 

10.) For me when a mod contains multiple files the "Enable all" notification button does not work. I always have to go to the Plugins tab and enable these manually. To tell the truth it would also be good to see what are the files before I click enable all.

 

11.) Command line arguments for tools does not work.

 

12.) Tools are very important for me. But I always have to navigate back to the Dashboard to run one. It would be very nice to drag them up to the title area of vortex, next to the run game icon. There is a big empty space there taking up big part of the screen.

 

13.) I've set up the Dashboard to only show the Tools panel because I don't need the rest. Now it shows the tools on the left and buy premium on the right. This is very bad because there is a small place for the tools and because of the buy premium panel I can't make the tools panel wider. I can't drag the buy premium panel to go under the tools panel. It always goes back.

 

To tell the truth, I understand the reasons why you made the "Buy premium" panel not closable. However I'm not going to sign in to Vortex because I don't need those functions and this panel is still in the way. If you want to show this info to the users, fine. But make it so that it won't impair the use of the application. I think however that this panel should not show up when the user is not signed in. It's meaningless to see that the users can get more bandwith in Vortex when they are using a normal browser to download mods (maybe all from another place). For functions for Vortex that requires a logged in user (the functions that use the Nexus API), yeah let's show this panel for those users that use functions that require Nexus.

 

14.) When installing a mod it automatically installs it into a folder with the same filename. Changing the name of the mod later does change the visual name, but the folder name does not change. The problem with this is that many mods comes with some meaningless name like "Main-version" or "High definition-version", etc. So it's difficult to find these mods later without the use of Vortex's "Open in File Manager" function (which is kinda useless for me, because I use Total Commander for everything). So I understand that folder names cannot be changed because rules can point to these folders. But what if changing the folder name of a mod would update the rules? Or just let the user choose a folder name before instaling a mod, similar to when you install a mod with conflicting folder name.

 

15.) You currently have two versions for Vortex. One that installs to the default place and one that let's the user install it anywhere. I think it would be much better to change the first to let the user choose between Express and Custom install and the second could be a fully portable zip release of Vortex. I would prefer to use this later option because I don't want little tools such as Vortex to show up in the Start Menu and the Add-Remove programs list and definiatley not for all other users of the computer.

 

16.) I had an issue with SKSE and SkyUI because SkyUI couldn't find the SKSE scripts.It turned out hours later that the problem was that I copied over Skyrim.ini from my MO profile. The problem was that it contained:

bInvalidateOlderFiles=0
SInvalidationFile=ArchiveInvalidation.txt

So maybe this is something the users should be warned about.

 

17.) There is this panel that comes up during mod deployment that shows what files were changed or got removed from either the data folder or the mod folder. First I totally misunderstood how this worked. I thought that I have to press the "Apply" button at each change I want to apply. But it looks like everything gets auto applied and by pressing the "Apply button" at the changes I'm undoing things. I realised this when FNIS files broke several times after applying changes. So maybe this panel should be changed a bit to make it easier to understand what's going on. Maybe either with better labels or maybe switch the "Apply" buttons to checkboxes. Also there are these "Apply" and "Undo" links. They seemingly do nothing.

 

18.) Couldn't it be that when deploying mods the emtpy folders with "__delete_if_empty" file would be deleted? Currently I have to purge mods to do that and redeploy everything. This however disables all the plugins so I have to manually re-enable them one-by-one.

 

19.) So because of the previous point as other have already said an "enable all" function for plugins and mods would be very welcomed.

 

20.) Because of the issues mentioned above (slowness, meaningless folder names, no way to install folders as mods) I've tried to manually create new folders in the mod folder in Vortex. Which by the way works! But I have to restart Vortex to make it notice the new folders. Maybe you could add a button for this.

[kamikatze13]

Ok, so I'm trying to recreate my Skyrim LE modded game using Vortex to see how it works in a real scenario and here are what issues I've encountered so far. Hope this will help with future development:

 

1.) The biggest issue I see now is that Vortex becomes super slow after installing a large amount of files. My Vortex mod directory currently contains about 230 directories which contains 50 thousand files. So now adding any new mod, even a small one is a big pain because the time it takes. I've already turned off automatic mod deployment to speed things up.

 

tried to port my 375 LE mods from MO to VO and encountered the same issue - even scrolling through the list is slow as moss. hell, even slower than the rueful axe.

 

And a question: Does the conflict detection compare the hash of the file contents, too? This would certainly slow things down even more. But sometimes two mods contain the exact same files. So it would be great if there would be a way (even a manual way) to make this not to show up as conflict.

 

that is an excellent suggestion, considering that hashes ARE compiled, at the very least at deploy-time (to detect manual modification), but judging by some errors i have gotten, even at mod-install-time.

 

13.) I've set up the Dashboard to only show the Tools panel because I don't need the rest. Now it shows the tools on the left and buy premium on the right. This is very bad because there is a small place for the tools and because of the buy premium panel I can't make the tools panel wider. I can't drag the buy premium panel to go under the tools panel. It always goes back.

 

this was my first experience with the ui and sums up your point pretty much

 

14.) When installing a mod it automatically installs it into a folder with the same filename.

 

that i consider a bug

 

19.) So because of the previous point as other have already said an "enable all" function for plugins and mods would be very welcomed.

 

CTRL+A should work

 

20.) Because of the issues mentioned above (slowness, meaningless folder names, no way to install folders as mods) I've tried to manually create new folders in the mod folder in Vortex. Which by the way works! But I have to restart Vortex to make it notice the new folders. Maybe you could add a button for this.

 

same here. i've sent this through the feedback thingy, make sure you do so too. ^{i wish we had an open bugzilla of some sorts for the feedback and bughunting - i don't think i'm supposed to do so on the github repos? /s}

Edited February 18, 2018 by kamikatze13

[HadToRegister]

12.) Tools are very important for me. But I always have to navigate back to the Dashboard to run one. It would be very nice to drag them up to the title area of vortex, next to the run game icon. There is a big empty space there taking up big part of the screen.

 

^ THIS!!!

That was something I really liked about MO, all the tools were at the top, available all the time.

With Vortex I find myself always 'getting lost" and forgetting what tab has what on it