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Disabled Plugins, Staging Folders, and Excessive Sort Times


nt5raham

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Does Vortex/LOOT sort or process disabled plugins? When I have a lot of disabled plugins (232 at this point), it seems that the Sort process bogs down and takes forever. If I manually remove the disabled plugins from the \Data\ folder the sort time is significantly reduced.

  • If Vortex is sorting disabled plugins, is there a way to opt out of this process?

 

The reason for the disabled plugins is they are included in a merged plugin. The mods themselves need to remain Enabled and Deployed so the merge can utilize the assets. Manually removing the plugins from the \Data\ folder was a temporary fix just to test. But I can't leave them like that because they would be removed from the Staging Folder as well. They need to be in the Staging Folder the next time I rebuild the merge for maintenance, updates, add/remove plugins, etc. because zMerge uses the plugin within the Staging Folder to determine which assets go with which plugin.

  • Or, is there a way to remove the plugins from \Data\ without Vortex removing them from the Staging Folders?

 

I'm open to suggestions here.

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Any takers?

I can't answer your question (and I might want to know the answer myself), but "The Nexus Forums" outside of specific mod forums seem to have low or sporadic attendance at this point, and most of the attendance is people hoping to get help and not give it. Patience is a virtue in that situation. Once your post drops off the "front page" of the list, you likely won't ever get a reply.

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Do disabled plugins show up in standalone LOOT?

I don't believe they do, because LOOT only care about Activated Plugins.

Do an experiment, make a new profile, add a few mods, hit SORT, then take a screen shot of your plugin screen.

Then disable some plugins, then hit sort.

If anything, it will look like the disabled plugins have moved most likely because the Enabled plugins are moving to "fill the empty space" of the Disabled ones.

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@VulcanTourist Thanks for the info. That's why I refreshed it, because it had been off the front page for 2 days. :smile:

 

@HadToRegister I was hoping that someone like @Tannin42 who may already know the answer would chime in when time allows. In the mean time I tried your suggestions, and there was no change in load order once plugins were disabled. I saw no attempt to "fill the empty space" which leads me to think that the disabled plugins are being recognized and accounted for. Of course, that was expected because when I have my plugins sorted in Vortex by load order, Enabled and Disabled plugins are intermixed. Not until I disabled the mods and deployed (and the plugins were removed) did the "filling in" take place.

 

Mod Index is another matter. Only the Enabled plugins are counted for the Mod Index (which makes sense).

 

I went a step further and re-ran the test, but this time after initially sorting I disabled some plugins and then assigned the disabled plugins to a group that would dictate a different load order. To be clear, they were not assigned to the group until after they were disabled. When I sorted, the load order changed as if the disabled plugins were enabled.

 

I'm guessing that sorting based upon Group assignment is a function of Vortex, not LOOT, but I don't know. And this only explores one particular scenario with a known change. It doesn't cover how disabled plugins may be processed when I simply install one new mod, or other scenarios.

 

But what is doing the sorting isn't really the point (except to a dev). Either way, it does confirm that disabled plugins are processed in some fashion when one clicks Sort Now. That is the important factor when it comes to increased processing time due to a large number of plugins.

 

So, based on that finding, is there anything that can be done about Disabled plugins that are being processed needlessly (If it is needless) and thus adding to the wait time for a Sort?

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@VulcanTourist Thanks for the info. That's why I refreshed it, because it had been off the front page for 2 days. :smile:

 

@HadToRegister I was hoping that someone like @Tannin42 who may already know the answer would chime in when time allows. In the mean time I tried your suggestions, and there was no change in sort order once plugins were disabled. I saw no attempt to "fill the empty space" which leads me to think that the disabled plugins are being recognized and accounted for. Not until I disabled the mods and deployed (and the plugins were removed) did the filling in take place.

 

Of course, that was expected because when I have my plugins sorted in Vortex by load order, Enabled and Disabled plugins are intermixed.

 

I went a step further and re-ran the test, but this time after initially sorting I disabled the plugins and then assigned the disabled plugins to a group that would dictate a different load order. To be clear, they were not assigned to the group until after they were disabled. When I sorted, the load order changed as if the disabled plugins were enabled.

 

I'm guessing that sorting based upon Group assignment is a function of Vortex, not LOOT, but I don't know. And this only explores one particular scenario with a known change. It doesn't cover how disabled plugins may be processed when I simply install one new mod or other scenarios.

 

But what is doing the sorting isn't really the point (except to a dev). Either way, it does confirm that disabled plugins are processed in some fashion when one clicks Sort Now. That is the important factor when it comes to increased processing time due to a large number of plugins.

 

So, based on that finding, is there anything that can be done about Disabled plugins that are being processed needlessly (?) and thus adding to the wait time for a Sort?

 

 

Load them up in Standalone LOOT and tell me if the disabled Plugins show up in standalone loot or are completely ignored.

 

Why would a disabled plugins be included in the sorting?

If it's disabled, it's essentially turned off, just like when you disable a plugin, but use the Textures and messes of the mod.

The game has no idea the plugin is missing, so why should Vortex take the disabled plugin into consideration?

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Why would a disabled plugins be included in the sorting?

If it's disabled, it's essentially turned off, just like when you disable a plugin, but use the Textures and messes of the mod.

The game has no idea the plugin is missing, so why should Vortex take the disabled plugin into consideration?

 

 

 

My point exactly!

 

There's going to be a bit of a learning curve for me here. I'm a nOOb that "grew up" with Vortex. I've never used LOOT outside of Vortex before...

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OK, short answer is that LOOT lists all of the plugins. There is a filter to "Hide Inactive Plugins." This is standalone LOOT downloaded from Nexus, with Vortex closed.

 

When I sorted, it did the same as Vortex, in that the Disabled and Enabled plugins are intermixed after the sort.

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OK, short answer is that LOOT lists all of the plugins. There is a filter to "Hide Inactive Plugins." This is standalone LOOT downloaded from Nexus, with Vortex closed.

 

When I sorted, it did the same as Vortex, in that the Disabled and Enabled plugins are intermixed after the sort.

 

 

So it still must sort by the metadata and sort rules, whether the plugin will affect the game or not, because it's just going by the masterlist of Mod A loads here, and Mod B loads here etc.

 

Well, now I'm curious as well

 

 

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Unfortunately we have to sort all plugins, enabled or not.

 

Consider that rule chains may look like this: A after B after C.

If disabled plugins were ignored, A may be place before C if B is disabled - meaning the enabled/disabled state of B would affect the load order positions of A and C - and in extension everything with a rule referencing A and C.

 

For one thing I don't know if the masterlist doesn't rely on such transitive relations but also: any time you enable or disable a plugin we'd have to sort again and the entire load order might change radically.

 

Finally, to my knowledge at least with Oblivion there may be cases where plugins get loaded even if they are disabled, probably if they are referenced as a master by some other plugin (I wasn't actually very active modding Oblivion).

Since Oblivion stores the load order via file time, every plugin automatically has a load order position that doesn't go away when you disable it but may overlap with enabled plugins, meaning if we didn't sort every plugin you might get very weird bugs when a plugin gets loaded despite being enabled and then has a nonsensical load order position.

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