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Things I miss from MO: data tab, manual "left pane" order, and hidden files


dcd111

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I've recently been playing around with Vortex on SkyrimSE. I used MO for Skyrim for a long time, and briefly used MO2 for SSE before trying Vortex. I used NMM for about five minutes four years ago and that was agonizing. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from.

 

Overall, so far I have a favorable impression. I had some difficulties with profile-specific save games, but I think profiles will probably be made more robust in future versions so I'm not too worried (and honestly I don't really use many different profiles anyway so I just made the saves non-profile-specific for now). But there are a few major features of MO that I miss.

 

Regarding the manual plugin order debate, I strongly disagree with Tannin's contention that in most cases, if LOOT doesn't care, you shouldn't care. This ignores the many situations where stability or mod functionality is not the critical factor. I find that most of the specific plugin relationships I need to define are a result of my arbitrary preference for what appears in-game, not to make the game stable or to make a mod work properly. This was particularly true for facegen mismatch issues that would lead to the grayface issue in Skyrim. For example, I had around a dozen NPC face mesh improvement mods, some covered all NPC's, some covered specific NPC's, and they had to be loaded in a very specific order to make sure the same mod wins both the plugin conflict and the facegen asset conflict in the left pane. That decision appears arbitrary to LOOT, which would just alphabetize those types of mods and it would result in a mess in-game.

 

But where I agree with Tannin is that manually ordering these plugins is far more tedious than using LOOT-style rules and priorities, so I actually agree with the Vortex approach (although I think it is unnecessarily stubborn to prohibit manual load order for those who want it). In my own experience, I used MO's manual plugin ordering capability to correct LOOT's incorrect assumptions maybe three times before I wanted to pull my hair out. Every time I added a plugin to my load order, I used LOOT, and every time I used LOOT I'd have to remember the manual fixes for dozens of plugins. So I started using LOOT's rules and priorities to make it match my own priorities, and then I knew that those manual requirements would automatically be applied every time I ran LOOT.

 

What I do miss from MO is the manual placement and visual feedback of the left-panel order, especially for texture and mesh replacers (I was using well over 300 visual "mods" that had no plugin in MO). The rules-based conflict-resolution system works okay, but it's not as visually intuitive as left pane order. And if I notice an incorrect texture in-game, it's not at all straightforward in Vortex to troubleshoot that. Combined with the lack of a data tab to track down which mod is contributing a specific file, and not having the ability to temporarily hide mod files from within the program, I expect texture and mesh replacers are going to cause a lot of frustration for me in Vortex as I ramp up my visual replacers.

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