Vortex Autosort Bug Report

[kittayman]

Using Vortex 1.3.22 on Win 10 x64 with 16gb ram, game in question is Oblivion with about 280 mods and about 130 plugins. So the bug happening is that if I disable the autosort feature, it will still continue to move plugins around seemingly at random without actually sorting them at all. I figured out that I was actually able to fix this issue by resetting my masterlist, upon which it began functioning as normal and no longer moving plugins around. I figured I'd report it here in case this is an issue that others may have had that can be possibly recreated, or even fixed without requiring the workaround of manually resetting the masterlist in future builds.

Edited February 8, 2021 by kittayman

[Pickysaurus]

Do you happen to still have the masterlist you deleted in your recycle bin?

 

What you're saying seems somewhat unlikely, but I'd probably need that file to try and replicate it.

[Tannin42]

When autosorting is disabled (and you don't press the sort button yourself) Vortex does not change the plugin order anymore. But with the older games it also doesn't *show* the correct load order any more.

 

The older games (Oblivion, Fallout 3 & Fallout NV) use the file time to determine which order to load plugins. Vortex saves its load order in the loadorder.txt file and then if you use Vortex to sort it will update the file times based on the loadorder.txt.

If you don't use Vortex for ordering, it will display the load order stored in loadorder.txt (which will be the order from the last time you sorted in Vortex) but that doesn't affect the actual order used by the game.

 

I don't see how the masterlist could have any impact on this, pretty sure this is a red herring.

[kittayman]

Do you happen to still have the masterlist you deleted in your recycle bin?

 

What you're saying seems somewhat unlikely, but I'd probably need that file to try and replicate it.

Sorry, perhaps I should've been more specific. All I did was click the button labelled "reset masterlist" under the plugins section. Wherever it sent that file after, it certainly isn't in my recycle bin as I already checked last night whilst making this post to try and make things easier for everyone. I can say for certain that the issue persisted for me up until I reset my masterlist. Do you know where that file is sent after resetting? Or is it just deleted? I'd be happy to post it if I could find it. I haven't cleaned my recycle bin in two days and I found that fix last night, there is nothing pertain to that masterlist in there.

 

When autosorting is disabled (and you don't press the sort button yourself) Vortex does not change the plugin order anymore. But with the older games it also doesn't *show* the correct load order any more.

 

The older games (Oblivion, Fallout 3 & Fallout NV) use the file time to determine which order to load plugins. Vortex saves its load order in the loadorder.txt file and then if you use Vortex to sort it will update the file times based on the loadorder.txt.

If you don't use Vortex for ordering, it will display the load order stored in loadorder.txt (which will be the order from the last time you sorted in Vortex) but that doesn't affect the actual order used by the game.

 

I don't see how the masterlist could have any impact on this, pretty sure this is a red herring.

Hmm, yeah I'm aware that's how it works, most of my timestamps were applied properly using boss, loot and some manual interaction which is why I wanted autosort disabled in the first place as it was changing those around and I planned on updating its rules later on to sort more consistently for me. Perhaps vortex is overwriting that file time data through its loadorder.txt file anyways for some very strange reason? Idk I'm no software dev. While the bug was occurring, if I opened Vortex at all it would reorder my plugins to a load order that makes entirely no sense however barring a few outliers it seemed to be pretty consistent in where it wanted to place those files, always putting certain ones at the bottom (completely past my bashed patch even when it requires those files, still making no sense in it load order). If it happens again I'll try and screenshot the file timestamps to show off the differences between the two's placement. As I said above, this issue persisted for me up until I reset my masterlist. Why that is, I have absolutely no clue, and the info and responses that you have provided me has left me even more stumped as to why it did it in the first place. I guess I should just be thankfully it's fixed now cuz having to redo my load order every time I needed to open Vortex was a massive time sink. There are no red herrings here, I came here having no reason to do so because my issue was already fixed, I was just trying to provide some info on what happened to try and help with future development, not to step on any toes or mislead anyone here in charge of Vortex development.. I have been a user here since like 2008, if I wanted to troll the staff and admins and also provide false info when bug reporting I would've gotten myself banned a long, long time ago. I have the utmost respect for what all of you do, Vortex is great and I wish I had something like it 13 years ago when I first started modding, would've saved me soooooo much time and troubleshooting with conflicting files, and nexusmods is one of the best mod sites on the web. The last thing I wanted to do is waste your time in any capacity.

[kittayman]

Apologies, that kinda came off as a bit more ragey/angry than I was intending, this is why I shouldn't post on the internet before I've had my coffee lol. My points still stand though. I honestly don't know why resetting my masterlist fixed it, especially with the info provided here implying that under no circumstance should it do that, but that is exactly what happened. I really don't get it.

[kittayman]

I tried all morning to recreate this bug but sadly to no avail. Though I do now have a theory as to how it happened, specifically in regards to putting plugins below my bashed patch. The loadorder.txt and masterlist are only updated with autosort enabled, correct? And the loadorder.txt will be in the order of the last time it was sorted? My guess, though I have no way of proving this, is that for some reason it was reading that info anyways and reverting files back to the last timestamp they had when they were deployed with autosort enabled. As to why this is, I haven't the slightest clue or any way of testing. The reason why they were being ordered below wrye bash and its bashed patch is most likely because it is not a deployed mod as I always forget to run it through vortex due to old habits, and I have deleted and rebuilt it several times due to installing/uninstalling mods as I reconfigure my best possible setup. So I'm thinking it always kept the same timestamp and position while others did not and were reverted back to the last time they were deployed with autosort enabled. My best guess as to why its not doing that now is that without a masterlist or loadorder.txt and being unable to generate new ones, it has no clue where to reorder them to so it is just leaving the plugins as is. That, or for whatever reason it was not detecting edits made to the plugins (I never got any message saying that the plugins had been altered during deployment and asking me which I would like to use, like with other manually altered or overwritten files). That's just my guess anyways, as I said I have been unable to recreate this issue now. Perhaps some of autosort's functionality didn't turn all the way off when being set to disabled? I have honestly no clue..

[Tannin42]

Few things:

- When I said "red herring" I wasn't suggesting that you were lying or anything, I just meant that you probably see a connection where there isn't one. Just because it stopped misbehaving after you pressed the "reset masterlist" button does not mean that it did so *because* you pressed that button. correlation != causation. It's a common mistake we all do and can lead us to wasting time investigating in the wrong direction.

- From your previous posts it wasn't clear to me how you determine the effective load order so I thought that maybe you were looking at the load order in Vortex and assumed that it reflected the effective load order as used by the game. This isn't true for the older games if you're not autosorting.

- Vortex uses LOOT and the masterlist for more than just sorting, LOOT provides information like the plugin author and whether a plugin can be turned into a esl, the masterlist contains suggestions for whether a plugin requires cleaning for example. If I'm not very mistaken Vortex still downloads and consults the masterlist even when autosort is disabled to provide this information, it just doesn't change the load order any more.

[kittayman]

Few things:

- When I said "red herring" I wasn't suggesting that you were lying or anything, I just meant that you probably see a connection where there isn't one. Just because it stopped misbehaving after you pressed the "reset masterlist" button does not mean that it did so *because* you pressed that button. correlation != causation. It's a common mistake we all do and can lead us to wasting time investigating in the wrong direction.

- From your previous posts it wasn't clear to me how you determine the effective load order so I thought that maybe you were looking at the load order in Vortex and assumed that it reflected the effective load order as used by the game. This isn't true for the older games if you're not autosorting.

- Vortex uses LOOT and the masterlist for more than just sorting, LOOT provides information like the plugin author and whether a plugin can be turned into a esl, the masterlist contains suggestions for whether a plugin requires cleaning for example. If I'm not very mistaken Vortex still downloads and consults the masterlist even when autosort is disabled to provide this information, it just doesn't change the load order any more.

Yeah that's why I apologized, I realized immediately I was misinterpreting you due to reading your post while I was still sleepy. Literary terms are not my strong suit, nor are mornings for that matter. As for the effective load order, I was looking at it in Wrye Bash, whilst making sure all other programs that could potentially alter timestamps were closed, and it was still listed in the wrong order. Also along with boss and LOOT both respectively recognizing them as being out of order and offering to sort when I ran it though their programs. This would happen every time I launched vortex for any reason, just reordered files and timestamps. Actually, weirdly enough, with vortex it was displaying the correct load order, with wrye bash at the bottom with only maskars oblivion overhaul being below it. Verifying in a different program would show that this however was not the case. If it's supposed to be continuously updating its masterlist even with autosort disabled, I really have no clue how it could have even managed to cause this bug as it should have been recognizing the files as in an accurate place and timestamp, because it's using LOOT which is already what I use to sort plugins unrecognized by boss so it is always the last program to be used after installing or uninstalling plugins. As I said before, sadly now I cannot seem to replicate it. I'm sure there are some circumstances required to trigger it, but I don't know what they were in the first place. I've tried retracing most of my steps I made in the past few days but still no bug. A cursory google search tells me that others have had the same problem dating back by at least a year, but also weren't able to reproduce it after fixing it, though most of theirs were fixed via update or never fixed at all and the forum thread is a ghost town.. This is seeming more and more like a rabbit hole by the minute lol.

Edited February 9, 2021 by kittayman

[Arexodius]

Hi! I'm glad I found this topic, because this scrambling phenomenon is exactly what I'm experiencing for Skyrim SE. Even with autosort off, Vortex is changing plugin order at least when I add mods.

The word "scramble" is a bit strong for this context, but I think the point gets through, so that's what I'll use.

 

I disabled autosort a few months ago (I think) because at some point every time I added a mod, the game would crash when loading my save.

Before disabling autosort I noticed that I could force newly added plugins into a "working" index by activating the "lock to index" feature to specify where I wanted it, and then simply switching back to "sorted automatically", and that will leave the plugin where I want it even if I manually sort the list. An obscurity I noticed before trying this method was that: Setting custom order rules for plugins did not affect how Vortex would sort them. A mod I had set to load after the other actually wasn't moved at all when sorting and was still placed above. Changing the category didn't affect the order either. The only thing I could do that actually affected the order was to lock to the desired index and then toggle it back to non-locked.

 

The reason I deactivated autosort is because I figured any newly added plugins would end up at the bottom of the list and I could just force them into a proper index using the method I explained. It was odd to me that Vortex still seems to sort newly added plugins even with autosort off, but I have still just left it turned off in case it helps. I have kinda given up on Vortex being able so sort plugins without breaking my game so I concluded I would sort manually through this weird method. But I can't even do that reliably because some sneaky algorithm still does something "automatically" and scrambles my load order.

 

Then I found this topic and it seems it's fixable. I haven't tried resetting my masterlist like kittayman suggested, and I noticed my plugins being "out of order" after adding a mod just now, so I'm definitely (still) having the issue. I thought maybe I could provide something towards a solution? Just tell me what I need to do in that case.

 

I have Wrye Bash but I barely touch it. I haven't really learned how to actually use it properly (that thing is so obscure...) so I don't think that it interferes with this (I hope). I basically only use it to see what load order my last save had so I can try to replicate that with Vortex. I launch tools from the Vortex Dashboard btw.

 

I also noticed before posting this, that right after deploying (adding a new mod with a new plugin), when I switched to the Plugins tab it presented me with one load order (that was scrambled), and after switching to the Dashboard tab to launch a tool that allows me to see the load order on my save, and then switching back to the Plugins tab again (in Vortex), the order was different (but still "wrong")... All this with autosort turned off.

I did launch SSEEdit before Wrye Bash (from the Dashboard) because I wasn't sure which tool did the thing I need it to do. Maybe that affects things? I only switched back to the Plugins tab after having started up Wrye Bash to finally see my save file load order (on the Saves tab in WB).

 

And here is another interesting thing about it: Without manually changing anything with the load order in Vortex, I alt+tab back to Wrye Bash to compare the load order again and I noticed that the load order list in WB (the actual visual element) refreshed... Which means the scroll bar resets to the top so it's easily noticable. That refreshing thingy in Wrye Bash only happens when something has changed with the load order files and then switch back to Wrye Bash (giving window focus to WB, which seems to trigger an event that checks for changes and refreshes if needed, which would then reset the scroll bar position). So something did change by just switching to the Plugins tab in Vortex... And Vortex also did show me a different load order than before so I think it's reasonable to conclude that something did change some file associated with the load order, just by switching to the Plugin tab in Vortex.

 

While I can't confirm kittayman's experience that the load order scrambles every time I start Vortex, it does seem to happen for reasons that seem random to me.

I also want to mention that I usually put my PC in sleep mode, and sometimes I keep Vortex on. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember Vortex working better if turned off before "sleep" or restarting it after waking, which most applications seem to do anyway. Probably Microsoft's fault... But I believe there are ways to make an application "sleep" friendly to get around MS's mistakes.

 

I hope I've brought some useful information to this issue, and maybe some manner of clarity in this obscure problem.

[Arexodius]

Hello again!

I'd like to sneakily bump this thread by adding some new info.

 

I've noticed that marking a plugin as "light" initiates an autosort procedure for all plugins from what it seems. Unmarking the "light" status will probably do the same. I don't think this is a desired behavior when the Autosort option is disabled. It may interest you to look into that by itself.

I also noticed after restarting Vortex (after having added a couple of mods), Vortex updated the loadorder.txt and plugins.txt files in the SSE AppData folder (judging by the timestamps). Is this something Vortex is supposed to do by just launching it, and especially with Autosort off?

Additionally, the timestamps are more recent for the loadorder/plugins files in the Skyrim AppData folder compared to the ones in my Profile folder in Vortex's AppData folder and the contents are also different. Does Vortex only update the files associated with the active profile when Vortex shuts down or when it starts or something?

And just to let you know, I haven't reset my masterlist yet (if that even solves my problem) in hopes of getting to the bottom of this, so all my problems remain.

I would love it if this could be permanently prevented for everyone in the future so please let me know if you have any intention whatsoever of looking into this. Because if you don't then there's no reason for me to intentionally keep the problem "alive".